After Anchorage, our next stop was Denali National Park. The drive to Denali from Anchorage requires about five hours if you don’t take a break, but who doesn’t stop when they are winding through the interior of Alaska? Hence, it took us longer.
We were expecting most of this drive to be through sparse forest, or boreal forest if you want to get technical. Instead, until the last hour or so, the landscape was dense with trees and shrubs. Those plants obscured the vast bulk in front of us for who knows how long. A few hours into our journey, we suddenly caught a glimpse of a white-clad mass of a mountain climbing before us. It was a big bugger. We laughed when we later discovered we had just encountered Denali, the tallest peak in North America.
We stopped to view Denali officially at Denali Viewpoint South and completely lucked out. The sky was entirely clear and the outlook perfect. Apparently, 80% of the time Denali isn’t visible due to the storms it creates on its flanks not only because of its 20,310 feet but also because it towers three and a half miles vertically from its base. It is a mile longer from base to summit than Mt. Everest. I wish I could create a storm system to hide from the world on occasion.
We stayed in a cabin on a secluded lake just minutes from Denali National Park. It offered a refreshing change from the urban spread of Anchorage. When I say “refreshing” I mean both revitalizing and chilling. During the day, we each wore two jackets and beanies. At night, the temperatures dropped down to around freezing. This was in the middle of Alaska’s hottest months mind you.
Our first day in the park, we experienced Denali via bus. Tourists flow through Denali National Park in unusual ways. Private vehicles can only travel the first fifteen miles beyond the entrance. Past that point, the only vehicles permitted are transit buses and narrated tour buses operated by the National Park Service. Now, this isn’t Zion where you can get all the way to the end of the line in half an hour. At Denali, driving the entire length of the road and back takes about 12 hours. People do this in one long day… yeah, crazy people. The transit bus we took went as far as the Eielson Visitor Center, an eight-hour journey. That was long enough.
The bus experience felt like cultural soup. You are stuck for eight hours in a packed vehicle with 40 strangers from all over the world. Add in everyone’s eagerness to gawk at and snap pictures of the same caribou and moose, and you’ve got a recipe for a full-blown cultural clash. I felt like scientists in lab coats were taking notes behind the windows as riders dashed to get their share of each animal encounter. Though the people on the bus tested my politeness on occasion, I would do this ride all over again. (But seriously Italian guy, did you really need to push your knees into the back of my seat continually?)
Denali has few hiking trails. It’s kind of a choose-your-own-adventure park. Yup, you can pick your own means of bumping into bears. During the eight hours aboard our bus, we came across over 10 grizzlies doing bear things like foraging for berries and digging for roots. That brings me to the coolest thing about Denali. Denali felt wild and untouched in a way that even most national parks do not. Its bears aren’t like Yellowstone’s, ready to have a sip of your Diet Coke. These are creatures unaccustomed to humans and skittish around them. To maintain this skittishness, bus riders are asked to remain silent anytime a bear is spotted.
Rarer than any wildlife, we were treated to another unhindered view of Denali that day. It is the most elusive sight on the bus tours. Denali two days in a row? Luckkyyyy!
The next day, we explored Denali without a bus. First, we opted to browse the collection of shops at Denali Village, AKA “Glitter Gulch.” Though unrepentantly touristy, I’m not ashamed (mostly) to say I found numerous gifts at these stores. Maybe you got one. Afterward, we headed into the park again for a hike to the Mount Healy Overlook. This trail to the ridgeline of Mount Healy gains 1,700 feet in a little over two miles, most of that right at the end. It is so steep in a couple sections that a number of its switchbacks are only about 20 feet long. Did you know going uphill exercises your calves while going downhill exercises your quads? I never noticed that until this endeavor.
Once on Mount Healy’s ridge, you can continue on an unmaintained trail to its summit, which is another couple miles. We didn’t know where this path was leading at the time, but we were keen on following. It was spectacular and deserted on Mount Healy’s backbone. We felt like we had climbed into another world with the alpine tundra glowing around us and the frigid wind breathing the only sound. We’d reach the top of one hill and see the trail ascending the next. Curiosity would propel us up “just one more” incline until hours had passed and the sun was floating near the horizon, a position it held for hours each evening before finally surrendering to the pale sapphire of a perpetual twilight. Our time atop Mount Healy was one of the highlights of our trip. It resulted in us eating dinner in a crowded restaurant at 11:00 PM though. Packed restaurant at 11 PM? Only in Vegas and Alaska.
The next day was tiring. We drove from Denali to Seward. This trip was supposed to take less than seven hours. Instead, it took us 13. In my next post, I will uncover how our drive became a bit of a burn.