Day 14, 7/4/2002, Sunrise 3:49am - Sunset 12:12am (still CRAZY); rain with low clouds in the morning
Wildlife
in Denali National Park
I fell right in with the hub-bub of this Lodge after we arrived last evening. While Mom took a nap, I ventured out in the rain to find out what we needed to know before our early departure in the morning and made a quick trip via shuttle bus to the Park Visitors center. We had been in the Denali neighborhood for 3 days already and there had not been a hint we might see the mountain so I wanted to buy some National Park slides to at least have a photo to include in my show.
We were up before 5am for our long Independence Day in Alaska. My first view outside revealed no change from the night before as a light rain fell from a low overcast. Little did we know we would experience rain, sleet, snow and sunshine on the forth of July! The one, no additional charge, land excursion Princess gave us was a 3-4 hour "Morning Natural History Tour" but we received notice of an upgrade to the 6-8 hour "Tundra Wilderness Tour" which is also billed as a tundra wildlife search. We started our tour at the Lodge where we boarded a converted Bluebird school bus operated by Aramark as a National Park Concession. The Lodge is just below the 3000 ft. tree line in this part of the world so the first part of our tour/search was through the Taiga forest. We received an extremely nice companion booklet to our tour from the Alaska Natural History Association which says, "This is a forest of oddities and adaptations, where struggle is a fact of life and quirkiness a badge of honor." I don't know about adaptation and struggle but that 'quirkiness [as] a badge of honor' is appealing to my sensibilities! Here full grown, mature white spruce grow to no more than 50 ft. while their 'cousins' we passed further south were up to 200 ft. high. Black spruce grow to just 6 or 7 feet and their annual growth can only be read through a microscope! As we rolled along and up we came to a treeless tundra 'colored' by a fresh dusting of last night's snow. Here is where we saw our first wildlife, Dall sheep grazing along the steep slopes of a canyon.
We soon passed the point at which the morning tour would have ended. The guy behind me who was reading the paper and the one across the isle sleeping probably would have preferred the other tour but I was very glad for the upgrade! As we climbed higher the snow on the ground was occasionally accompanied by more falling from the sky. We soon saw our second wild species, Caribou grazing on a nearby ridge above the snowline. After our second rest stop we saw our third animal species, an Arctic Ground Squirrel who had come out to see if we had left anything behind during our stop. In the area of the rest stop, Polychrome Pass we witnessed braided rivers (East Fork of the Toklat River) and glacial erratics, large boulders left behind by retreating glaciers. In this case the erratics were left behind by the Polychrome Glacier. The early morning low overcast was rising with us keeping the area around us clear but continuing to obscure the loftier regions of the park including this glacier.
All too soon we came to the turn around point of our tour. There are no 'loops' as in many National Parks. In fact this is the only road in the entire 6 million acre park! The "Alaska Cruise Companion" reminds us, "Travelers expecting the wide range of visitors services available in many 'lower 48' national parks might be disappointed here. For the park's grandeur lies in its being, as much as is possible with the limited visitor access, an intact sub artic ecosystem" Park pioneer Adolph Murie is quoted as saying, "One need not see a wolf to benefit from his presence...It is enough to know that the wolf still makes his home in this beautiful wilderness...an emblem of unspoiled country." We had come 53 miles along the 89 mile park road in the past 3 or so hours. I did not realize it at the time but even though we had not seen, let alone climbed Denali the turn around on the shore of the Toklat River was the pinnacle of this entire trip. While there were still adventures and sights ahead of us most of the remainder of our trip would be 'downhill', a retracing like this 53 mile return along the park road. In 48 hours we would be back home.
Created on ... July 19, 2002