Day 6 – Denali National Park

Grizzly Bear

Once again an early start as we were assigned the 6:15 am Tundra Wilderness tour.  From what they tell me, these times are assigned on the day you arrive and done at random so we drew the second tour bus of the day. 

The only way you can tour Denali National Park today is by bus as private cars are not permitted.  The bus trips are either 8-hours or 12-hours, depending on how far you want to go into the park. They are trying to keep the park more pristine than other parks such as Yellowstone by strictly controlling the environment.  In fact, almost all of the roads in the park are gravel as they felt that paved roads impeded animal movement. That effort to keep things natural also included hairpin turns in the mountains without guard rails and since the lanes are about 1½ lanes wide, it made it pretty interesting at times.  The effort to stay pristine seems to be working as they claim to be the only National Park where the original wildlife is still there and didn’t have to be reintroduced.

Alaskan Husky Puppies

The weather again wasn’t cooperating and once again we started the trip in a light mist which continued for half of the trip but that cleared up on the return trip.  Our bus driver, John, was very good at spotting animals and we saw four of the big five on the trip.  We saw herds of caribou, several moose including a bull moose near the end of the trip and herds of Dall sheep high up on the surrounding mountains.  The high-light of the trip was spotting bears.  We saw a very big Grizzly not far from the road and a mama Grizzly with two cubs a little further away.  The cubs ran and played while the mama kept watch.  The only animal missing was the wolf, but they are nocturnal animals and very difficult to see.  We also saw a golden eagle and porcupine along the trail.  What we didn’t see was Denali.  Too much fog and haze.  Only 30% of people who come to the park actually see Denali (aka Mt. McKinley).

After our tour of Denali NP, we took a tour of Jeff King’s Husky Homestead.  Jeff King is a 4-time winner of the Iditarod race, which is a 1049-mile dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome held on the first Saturday of March.  Jeff demonstrated how they train the dogs and talked about the actual race.  The teams starts with 16 dogs and they race six hours and then rest the dogs six hours, but Jeff only gets 90 minutes of sleep as he has to take care of the dogs the rest of the time.  He repeats this cycle until they reach Nome 10 days later.  Of course, the best part of the demonstration is where you get to hold Husky puppies!