The Great One

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

DENALI PARK, ALASKA — In the seven plus weeks that we have been on the road, there are some days that stand out as especially memorable. Today is one of those days. Even now, as we sit with our tea after dinner in the quiet of our trailer, images of our visit to Denali National Park and Preserve flow through my mind again and again and I review them with awe and wonder.
We traveled 7,000 miles to get here. We made our reservations for the bus tour into the park yesterday and rose from our sleep at 4:15 this morning to be ready for pick-up at the Chalets Hotel across the highway at 5:30. All this was within our control, but we had no control over the type of day we would be granted for this special visit. In these parts, July is known for its rainy weather, and the last two rain-drenched, cloudy days have brought that home to us.
Today, the skies were clear. The sun was shining. It was perfect.
Val and I were probably the only couple who weren’t part of the group of travelers on the land portion of a Holland America cruise, which started in Fairbanks, continues through Denali to Anchorage and on to Seward, and then sails to Vancouver. I think we were the only Canadians as well. Our bus driver, Allen Irwin, is a science teacher from North Carolina who has a Masters in biology and has driven buses since he was 16. No wonder the park management snatched him up to take tour groups into the park for the last 12 years! He provided an informative narrative throughout our more than eight-hour tour with humour and a strong North Carolina twang.
Our bus covered 64 of a possible 90 miles of road into the park. The first portion of the roadway was two lanes of paved thoroughfare, but then it narrowed to hard earth and eventually to dusty gravel road with some twists and turns at high altitudes that even made me blanch once or twice, sitting on the right side window seat looking down a sheer drop of, as Allen put it, eight to 10 rolls of the bus — without specifying if they were side to side or end to end!
If we had seen nothing but landscape, it would have been a totally rewarding visit. There were huge valleys of tundra, dotted with delicate flowers, sweeping high up to green velvet-covered foothills, craggy sepia-coloured mountains, and iron-grey peaks, between which the perpetual snows of the highest summits gleamed white in the sun against the pure blue of the sky. Braided streams cut across the valleys, and streaks of rust-coloured moss or grey-green lichens blended with shrub-like willows or spiky pine trees in a glorious tapestry.
Added to this amazing vista was the excitement of animal sightings throughout the day. Allen had given no guarantees of what we would see, except for snowshoe hares, which darted from the warm roadbed ahead of us numerous times, and ground squirrels, that always seem to be in a state of nervous tension as they jerk to attention, look about, and scamper off. The first creatures of any size that we saw were actually tiny white dots against the steep brown heights — Dall sheep grazing peacefully, far above the threat of wolves or other predators. Allen had a video camera that he used to focus on the animals, and the images were simultaneously screened on small video monitors inside the bus to assure everyone of a good look, in case they weren’t well positioned to see out the window.
At one of the rest stops, some people wandered quite some distance from the bus and actually made us wait when it was time to leave. They came back in great excitement, because they had seen four grizzly bears! The rest of us were hoping this wouldn’t be the only sighting.
Early on in the tour, Allen stopped to let us out and have a good look at Mount McKinley, or Denali as it is also known — an Athabascan term that means "the great one". He said even though it was quite far off, it might be our only chance to see it without a cloud cover, because the majority of the time it is not fully visible. As it turned out, on every other occasion as we got nearer to it, and as we left the park and glanced backward at it, this majestic jewel was fully visible. Allen said this was the only day all summer that this had been the case!
One of the passengers caught sight of a caribou grazing on a hillside. It was quite far off, so we were glad we had brought our binoculars.
We were coming along a section looking down on a braided riverbed when I spotted the blond curved back of a grizzly bear wandering along the stream. Again, out came the cameras and binoculars as we all ogled out the windows and his lumbering form. I was so glad we hadn’t missed seeing at least one grizzly! Later on, at another rest stop, we saw two across the valley on a flat portion of the mountain side. I turned my gaze to the left up the stream bed and caught sight of a beautiful pair of brown caribou with large, velvety antlers, but when I went to point them out, they had already wandered off.
The tour included a boxed lunch for everyone, which we munched on as we headed through the park. "Lunch" was a bit of a misnomer, however, since it was only around 10:30 or so, but we’d been on the road since so early it seemed like midday. Park regulations were strictly followed to control as much as possible the impact of humans on the wilderness areas, so we had a trash bag in the bus to collect all our waste, and we were asked to recycle our boxes and water bottles as well. Bringing in the thousands of visitors that do see the park is also limited to mass transit buses, with very few exceptions, to protect the wildlife from human contact as much as possible.
Before our visit was over, we sighted one more grizzly bear about 60 yards away, a male caribou who ambled along the roadway for several minutes, and, finally, a cow moose and her twin calves right next to the bus in the ditch, only a few minutes before we left the park. We also caught glimpses of the willow ptarmigan and a merlin, a member of the hawk family, as well as magpies and other small birds.
In all, it was a thrilling day which we will remember for a long time.