Day 5 - Sep 4, 2000 Last updated: 9/4/00 9:00pm AKDT
Happy Anniversary to us! What a great day it turned out to be. We discovered late last night that Denali is one of those places where you are disconnected from the world. (or at least disconnected from the Internet). I’m writing this page on 9/4, but it won’t be posted until at least tomorrow when we get to Anchorage.
Another early wake up. Had to try to get down to the little cafe to get a pre-packaged sandwich to take on our bus ride. The Princess shuttle bus left at 7:00am for the Denali Park visitor’s center to catch the Denali Park school bus that travels in to the heart of the park. This is about an 8 hour round trip tour. Did I mention it was on a school bus? 🙂
On the way in to the park it was cold and snowy. The drive hits heights of 4000 ft. Here we are probably in the 2500-3000 ft. range.
Along the way we stopped to see wildlife. So far this morning, things didn’t look too promising. Below, the first picture is of two ptarmigans, the state bird of Alaska. The picture may be fuzzy, the windows kept steaming up and it was hard to keep them clear. The second picture is of a grizzly bear. The black dot in the very center of the picture is it. It was very far away, climbing up a mountain. On the video, when you can see motion, you can tell it is a bear. Yeah, I know, you’re not impressed. Us neither. We saw two more bears climbing up a different mountain a little later. I have pictures, but it looks exactly the same as this picture.
When we reached the Eielson Visitor’s Center (4 hours into the trip, the turn around point for us), we got zero view of Mt. McKinley.
Our our way back, the weather went from cold and snowy to cold and sunny. The clouds started to break and we got some pictures of Mt. McKinley. The two peaks in the background are the north and south peaks of McKinley. The south peak is actually the taller of the two (it’s the one on the left). The south peak is still a little cloud covered in this picture.
Here’s some other mountain. We also saw about 5 caribou on the way out, but they were as far away as the bears climbing the mountains, so no pictures.
Don’t worry, the day got much better. One of the things we saw on the way back was…