Denali National Park

July 25, 2010

Auntie Amy, Matt, and I took the 12-hour Kantishna Experience tour while Julie and her parents took the 8 hour Eielson Visitor Center tour. The trip was long but worth it. Along the way, we saw 18 grizzly bears (6 groups of bears, each group had one mom bear with 2 cubs, some cubs were pretty big), caribou, moose, wolves, Dall sheep, and gold eagles. Mt. McKinley was magnificent. According to our bus driver, this was the first sunny day in about 3 weeks. Most of the places we stopped were windy and cold (50’s) except at Wonder Lake where it was warm with lots of bugs and mosquitoes.

We took this green bus for our tour. It was the same as the yellow school bus our kids take to school. Our bus driver was from Ohio. She has been coming to Denali to drive bus every summer for the last 10 year. The summer job for bus drivers ends in mid-September every year.

The picture doesn't show the mountain (people referred Mt. McKinley as "the mountain" in the park) in the background, but it showed clearly when zoomed in... We didn't fully appreciate seeing the mountain until later in our trip. We talked to at least 4 - 5 groups of tourists who had been to Denali NP (one couple had spent 5 days in the park), none of them saw the mountain because of the bad weather!

Visiting Denali National Park once was enough for me. The extra 4 hours of bus ride from Eielson to Kantishna was really a waste of time - the Wonder Lake was just a lake with lots of bugs and mosquitos; nothing interesting in Kantishna - it had a few privately owned cabins.