Exploring Denali National Park

We got up and jumped on the bus early this morning. It was an old school bus with a driver who thought we were all second graders. This guy tried to make it seem like we were heading in to the unknown and could die any moment and that he was our only hope of make it through safely, kind of your typical park ranger ego, however this guy was not even that, only a want-to-be ranger. He felt that we even needed his help in drinking hot chocolate in telling us the correct mixing method. In order to try and sound more important he learned a few big words which he used over and over again.


We headed in to the park making various stops along the way, and let me tell you, this park is big and beautiful. You can’t privately drive in to the park, however you can take a shuttle in and they have an inner-park shuttle service that allows you to get around more efficiently when camping place to place.












We did see a few grizzly bears, caribou, wolf, eagles, campers, hawks, and of course doll sheep. I was never able to catch any great still shots of these but if you watch the video I captured some nice video of them. This was mostly because what we saw was way off in the distance and my video camera had a better zoom then my still camera. It also became apparent that a large portion of the people on the bus were suffering from a mild case of mental retardation, as anytime we saw something like a duck in a pond they jumped up and ran over people to get to the window to see and then proceeded to wet themselves in excitement. We stopped at the Kantishna Roadhouse for lunch, this is the one hotel that is actually inside the park.




This was a cool place and really gave you the feeling of being out in the park, including the endless swarm of mosquitoes that attacked.




Before getting back on the bus we had a chance to pan for gold and Riley found some, but not enough to buy uncle Chris a beer for lunch. Here is a shot of Riley before he fell in the river.


After drying Riley off with a hairdryer we climbed back on the bus to work our way out again.








At one of the stops we climbed up to the top peak and it boy it was windy.


It was a very long day, we saw lots of cool stuff and were all pretty tired at this point.


We ate in town at a pizza place, which was the perfect food for the day, and then headed off to bed.


VIDEO: The Road to and through Denali National Park