Mt. McKinley at Sunset-Denali National Park
We left Cooper Landing at 6 am in clouds and drizzle for the seven hour drive to Denali National Park in central Alaska. About forty-five miles from our destination the rain stopped and we caught our first view of Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North American at 20,000 ft. McKinley is located in the heart of the park.
We checked into the modest but serviceable Denali Bluffs Lodge just outside the park entrance, with its beautiful view of the Alaska Range Mountains within the park. We had arranged for a guided park bus tour, and after a short time to unpack and wolf down a fish & chips lunch (made with fresh Alaskan halibut), we boarded our very full bus to sunshine and blue skies overhead.
The park is HUGE at over six million acres, larger than the state of New Hampshire. The only road goes straight into the heart of the park; the road is eighty miles in length and only goes a small distance into the park. Most of Denali is inaccessible wilderness.
Visitors are impressed by the vastness and diversity of the landscape and its geology. Our fifty mile tour took us alternatively through dense pine forests, rolling green hills, along the edge of high mountains and through massive, open valleys, treeless and stretching for many tens of miles in every direction. Many clear, babbling streams and large, blue-white glacial rivers crisscross the park.
There is quite a diversity of animal life in the park, but the animals are intermittent and difficult to spot. Throughout our eight hour, one hundred mile round trip bus tour, we saw several moose, groups of caribou including some magnificent bulls, four grizzly bears including two well under a hundred yards from the bus, and groups of mountain sheep grazing on impossibly near-vertical slopes. We also saw a beautiful red fox as we were leaving the park.
The mountains were striking, including our view of Mt. McKinley in the last light of day. If we had not seen a single animal, the park and its scenery would have been well worth the trip.
Exhausted after our seven hour drive and eight hour tour, we collapsed into bed about 11 pm, with a little light still in the sky. Wednesday, it’s back to the Kenai Peninsula at Alyeska Hotel and a tour of Portage Glacier.
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