The 12 Hour Bus Ride

After seeing Denali from the air, it was time for us to give it a shot from the ground. We arrived in Denali last night at around 8p.m. after all of the National Parks info centers and ticketing booths were closed down. We realized that we would have to arrive early in the morning in search of availability on the tours if we wanted to make it out into the park the next day. We went a place called the Salmon Bake, coincidentally the second such named restaurant that we had visited so far. We enjoyed some food and drinks while we plotted out the next few days of our stay here. In Russ' planning of the trip he gauged that we would need 2 days to make it from Homer to Talkeetna but it only took us one. Therefore, we had some time to play with while we were in Denali because we had a cabin booked for 3 days in the area. After dinner we

bedded down in a motel in the town of Healy since our cabin wasn't booked for one more day. We woke up early in the morning in order to be at the ticketing booth by 7 a.m. in hopes of booking an early tour. Denali National Park has only 1 road that goes through its 6 million acres of land and only 15 miles of that 92 mile road is accessible to the public. If you want to travel the rest of the road you have to be on one of several bus services that the park offers you to take. Since only the first 15 miles of the road are paved and because of the likelihood of encountering wild life, maximum speed through the park is 35 mph, but the busses rarely go that fast. All this,

combined with stops for animal viewing or restroom breaks, means that the 92 mile road from the entrance to its end at Kantishna, an old gold mining town, will take on average 12 hours to complete. This is the tour that we wanted to take in order to get the full Denali experience. Luckily, we got onto a tour pretty easily once we got there, only having to wait about 45 minutes before leaving. Our tour guide, Tim, was a wealth of knowledge who loved to talk. He probably talked for 8 of the 12 hours that we were on the road and this accounts for about 2 hours that we were off of the bus. We first drove down the paved part of the road which Tim told us was

moose country. Within 5 minutes, someone spotted one on a hill in the distance, we watched for a minute, but Tim wasn't satisfied and urged us to move on hoping for a better view. He was quickly

vindicated as numerous shouts of "MOOSE" brought the bus to a halt. There was a small bull moose right next to the side of the road! Tim shut down the van and we watched on as he came closer to us, crossed the road in front of the bus, and then moved over to a tree and began scraping his antlers on it. We were in Denali right before moose mating season started so all of the bull moose were congregating in the rutting area and preparing to do battle with one another. We didn't see any of this but it did offer us some up close views of

moose. After the excitement we moved onward only to stop a few miles later when I spotted a wolf in a clearing! He was bounding around and apparently hunting ground squirrels or snow shoe hares. We didn't see him catch anything but he put on a good show as we looked on. One of the people on our bus noticed that he had a radio collar on and Tim informed us that this meant that he or she was the Alpha male or female of the pack. Apparently the park service collars the Alpha's of each pack at the beginning of the year in order to track each packs movements. Again we moved on down the road and made our next stop for group of grizzlies and caribou. There was a momma bear and 2 cubs pretty close to the road and some caribou grazing on the hillside pretty far in the distance. I'm sure that you can gather from this how the rest of the day went. It was comprised of our tour guide telling us information about wildlife and park history coupled with sporadic stops to view wildlife. In the end, we saw all of the parks "big 5" as Tim referred to them as: moose, bear, wolves, caribou, and Dall sheep. We saw 11 bears, 4 moose, about 10 caribou, and a number of Dall sheep off in the distance. We only saw the one wolf though and I felt that it would have been neat to see more. Another thing we got to view that was just as

impressive as the wildlife was the fall colors. The berry bushes had turned making the ground fiery red, the aspen trees produced a bright yellow, while the spruce trees gave the landscape a speckle of green. None of us knew this was going to be happening during our visit, and no where else in Alaska had we seen the

changes set in yet. Simply put, it was beautiful. We even got a full view of Mt. McKinley and officially entered the 30% club. Though most of the day was overcast, providing a good day for wildlife viewing, we sneaked a peak at the mountain just as we passed by Wonder Lake. All in all, it was an amazing day and an experience I would recommend to anyone. The 12 hour bus ride was a piece of cake

and you would never guess that you were on it for so long. We had plenty of stops at visitor centers where we could learn about the park, read exhibits, and walk around for a

while. Not to mention play with caribou and moose antlers and Dall sheep horns. The last hour of our trip it began to rain which meant that dirt and mud sprayed up onto are windows and made wildlife viewing impossible. Luckily it was the last hour and everyone on the bus had had their fill of wildlife for the day. When got back to the entrance at 8p.m. and headed over to the Crows Nest where we had a cabin booked for the next 3 nights. We also ate dinner at The Overlook Cafe as recommended by Tim the tour guide. We were all exhausted after being out on the road all day and went to bed with plans of sleeping in the next day.