We got to the bakery a few minutes after it opened at 7 and bought muffins to have for a later breakfast. We found a nice scenic place about an hour away from Talkeetna and each had half a muffin (they were big) and iced tea. As we rose in elevation, we noticed the vegetation change from fairly dense woods to tundra with low growing plants and an occasional tree. The temperature also dropped from 55 degrees at 7AM to 50 degrees at 11.
We arrived at Denali National Park Visitors’ Center about 9:30 AM. Peter returned the phone message we left for him wishing him a happy birthday. Minneapolis had a heat index of 107 F yesterday and today was heating up quickly. As soon as we went into the visitors’ center, we headed into the orientation film. About 5 minutes into the film, there was a power surge and they had to cancel the showing to reset the equipment. We visited the displays for a short time, then returned to the auditorium for a ranger lecture.
The ranger, Alyson, started her talk saying that it is rare to see Mt. McKinley (aka Denali); there are usually glimpses about once every 3 days. She then talked about the “big 5” animals: bears, moose, Dahl’s sheep, caribou and wolves. She gave warnings about some and told us these were also rare to see.
She then said that her main topic for the talk was the animals she found most exciting: squirrels. There are 4 kinds of squirrels in the park and they are very different from each other. The red squirrel is extremely territorial and will even attempt to warn bear away. Its main diet is the seeds from spruce cones, but it takes a lot of cones to make a meal. They have trash piles of used cones. For about 2 weeks, they turn into carnivores. When the babies of snowshoe hares are born, their mothers abandon them very quickly. From then until they are as big as a squirrel, they are the prime food for the red squirrel. In terms of total percentage of mortality, squirrels are the biggest predators of snowshoe hares.
The flying squirrel (that actually just glides) especially likes truffles, fungus that is beneficial to tree roots and spreads the fungus from tree to tree. The arctic ground squirrel is the favorite food of the golden eagle. They live underground in huge colonies and have sentries that warn of various dangers approaching. Marmots are actually squirrels and hibernate 8 months of the year. They like to sun themselves on rocks at the higher elevations of the park.
She also mentioned some of the smaller animals in the park, including the fact that there are 25 species of mosquito here!
The talk was extremely amusing as well as very informative. It may be the best ranger talk we’ve ever heard. We did get to see the well produced video about the park.
We then checked in to the bus we will be taking to Camp Denali, dropping off our bags and promising to return in an hour.
We took a short drive in the car looking for a nice spot to eat. The gates came down by the railroad tracks so we sat in our car and finished the rest of the cheese we had bought earlier along with the other muffin and the last of our bottle iced tea. Jim really liked watching the train arriving at the Denali station. It had 7 Alaska Railroad passenger cars, 8 cars from Holland American and 2 from Princess lines plus a baggage car and engines in front and back.
Our bus driver / guide is Simon. He is married to the owner’s daughter, Jenna. The family has owned the place for 35years. Simon and his wife have now taken over the running of Camp Denali. He proved to be a very skillful driver, very knowledgeable about the plants, animals, history and geology of the park. Our elevation will range from 1700’ at the visitors’ center to 4,000’ at the passes to 2,100 at Camp Denali.
The park does absolutely no species management, so everything is in its natural balance. The exception to this is the reason the park exists. Just a bit less than a hundred years ago, a famous naturalist, Charles Sheldon, came here to study Dahl’s sheep. He came back a year later and realized that more than half the population had disappeared. He then started a campaign to preserve the area, resulting in Mt. McKinley National Park in 1917. In the 1980s, the park was expanded and renamed Denali, the native name for the mountain.
Skillful driving is critical in the park. There is only one road into the park. After 14 miles, the road becomes unpaved and most private automobiles are banned. Early into the park’s life it was realized that the roads were becoming too crowded and a bus system was initiated - the first in any national park. Camp Denali and a few other properties within the park have their own buses, the rest are run by contractors for the National Park Service. After 55 miles, the road narrows to one lane, with small turnouts from time-to-time. Camp Denali is at mile 95. Three miles farther, the road ends. That is the westernmost point of the contiguous North American road system.
We had a lot of sharp eyed people in our bus. There were sightings of all the “big 5”, but some were so fleeting that only a few people saw them. All were at fairly long distances. My camera got so-so images of some of them. We also got to see some ground squirrels close up.
The south face of the Alaska Range of mountains (the side we saw from Talkeetna) is largely snow covered, this side only has patches of snow. Most of the weather comes from the Gulf of Alaska which is to the south. The moist air hits the mountains, generating lots of snow at higher elevations and rain at lower. Little moisture is left for the north side.
We saw a place where a decent percentage of the spruce trees were dead. Jim thought this was due to the spruce bark beetle, but that wasn’t so. In the 1920s and 30s, there was a huge spike in the porcupine population in one area. They ate the bark off the bottom of the trees and that eventually killed them. The amazing thing is that the dead trees are still standing over 70 years later. Decomposition is very slow.We passed several very broad river beds that were carved out by glaciers. There is never enough water to fill them and the path of the streams change regularly whenever a log of other object blocks the water’s path.
Dinner was served at 4PM at a picnic spot along the way – lots of mosquitoes. They provided a wonderful spread including: fresh baked rye bread, salami, cheese, fish, fruit, orzo salad, carrots, salmon and dried fruits. We do need to remember that mosquitoes are important food sources for birds and are a primary pollinator of several important plants.
Every time we stopped along our 7 hour ride, Simon cleaned the windows. The rest of the bus became totally filthy as we moved along the gravel road, but visibility was always good! When we arrived at Camp Denali at 8pm we were served dessert in the dining room that is constructed of logs and has huge windows facing the mountains. Our host, John, provided a general orientation to the facilities.
We were escorted to our cabin by Bob, a member of the maintenance staff from Vermont. We are in the cabin closest to the main hall and one of 2 without an outhouse. Ardith is grateful that we don’t have to hike up the hill to get to the dining hall and the showers. Jim had joked to her on the drive up that our meals would be in Nothface Lodge, about a half mile down the steep hill. She said she would be able to survive 3 days without food.
Jim laid a fire in the woodstove and Ardith lit it later when she went to bed.
Jim went to the small lodge which was the first building on site and typed the blog and organized the day’s pictures. It has electricity; cabins don’t have that or running water. There is no internet.
He got to watch the beautiful sunset at 12:30 AM.
Saturday, July 2
When Jim got back to the cabin last night, it was nice and toasty warm, but the fire was nearly out so he added more wood, but cut it all the way back. 2 hours later, the cabin was actually hot and felt like a sauna.The staff of Camp Denali assigns seats by putting clothespins with our names written on them on cloth napkins that we use at every meal. This gives us a chance to get to know different people at every meal. We had delicious French toast and fruit for breakfast. Jim topped his with blueberry syrup made from fruit picked here last season – it was a nice mix of sweet and tangy. They also have a buffet where the guests can get hot or cold cereal with a variety of toppings. Jim had a small amount of oatmeal with dried fruit and yogurt. Before each meal, the chef for the day introduces the menu for the meal as well as the staff who will be serving the meal. It’s a nice way to learn about the staff.
About a half hour after we finished breakfast, we reassembled in the dining room to pack lunches in great cloth sack for our hikes.
The guests chose among easy, moderate and strenuous hikes. Ardith went on what the camp calls “Naturalist Foray” and Ardith called “Wimpy”. Jim chose the moderate hike.
The first part of Ardith’s hike wasn’t wimpy. They had a fairly decent climb to ridge behind the camp where they could see all the camp property and further into the park.
Unfortunately, further didn’t mean you could see the peaks of any of the mountains. They had lunch along Moose Creek not far from where they saw very fresh wolf tracks.
They hiked to Wonder Lake where they heard a loon. Their guide, Tim, initially thought it was a red-throated loon, but on closer examination decided it was a common loon. They also got to see a lot of wildflowers.
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| Wonder Lake |
Jim’s hiking group was led by Katy and went up the hill in a different direction than Ardith’s. One of the first things she showed us was a white spruce tree that was about 40 years old. It didn’t even come up to her shoulders.
The harsh climate really challenges plants here. They only get about 14 inches of snow a year, but it doesn’t go away until May. The same trees are grown as Christmas trees in more moderate places and are often ready for harvest after 7 years. The ones here don’t even get branches until they are 10! In the lower part of our hike, these trees were fairly abundant. There are also black spruce here. They grow in scattered clumps and never get more than about 4 feet tall. We saw forests of these that were extremely tall in British Columbia and even as far as north as the Seward area.
We got to see a lot of interesting plants. Wildflowers were abundant, but we will show lots of those in tomorrow’s section of the blog. There was a gall at the tip of a young spruce branch. Galls are formed when an insect lays eggs inside a plant and the plant responds.
The horsetail is a favorite food of some of the local animals. It is a very ancient plant species.
Some of us tasted the leaves of the Labrador tea that supposedly has some medicinal properties.
A really fun thing was walking on sphagnum moss, which forms the basis for much of the soil here. It is bouncy in some places and in others your feet can sink in several inches.
Lichens are abundant and varied on the ground here. They are combinations of fungi and algae that work together as a single organism, feeding each other. They are very often the first thing to grow on bare rocks.
The red bearberry is eaten by bears (duh), but humans don’t like them. The crowberry can be eaten by humans and we eventually found enough for whoever wanted one to have a taste. Jim liked the flavor. He also enjoyed mountain cranberry left on the plant from last season, but ate the evidence before he could get a picture.
There is a type of mushroom that we found in several places called dead man’s fingers because that is what they resemble.
We went by a cabin owned by a lawyer who inherited it from his naturalist father. He had serious bear damage to his door one winter so he drove nails through from the inside to discourage further abuse. It looked really intimidating. There had been some damage to the logs by bears over this past winter.
Before Denali was expanded from 2 million acres to 6 million acres in the 1980s, there had been an Alaska homesteading act that allowed people to gain ownership to 5 acres land and use it for whatever purposes they wished. When the park was expanded, these claims were allowed to remain, but no new roads could be built. All of the buildings at Camp Denali, its sister place Northface Lodge (just down the hill) and a two other lodges a bit down the road were among those claims.
Mosquitoes are abundant today. Some people wore face nets, but neither of us could tolerate them.
Dinner featured salmon, balsamic rice, a local mushroom and greens from their greenhouse. Jim failed to get a picture of the main course or take notes and this is our memory from 5 days later. He did manage to catch one of dessert. Ardith, who doesn’t usually eat fish, ate a decent portion of her salmon.
They have speakers most evenings in the beautiful lodge building that was originally the dining room. It is available for general guest use 24 hours a day. Shelton Johnson was the speaker for today and tomorrow. He is an African American ranger at Yosemite National Park and a writer. He was on the Oprah show when she visited Yosemite, much to his surprise. He also got to meet President Obama in his role of encouraging people of color to come to the National Parks and was featured in the Ken Burns series on National Parks on PBS a few years ago. His topic tonight was how he as a kid from Detroit ended up in the National Parks and his efforts to encourage other minorities to come visit these sublime segments of wilderness. He was extremely funny and engaging. Nobody was the least bit bored. Jim ended up talking with him for over an hour afterward, Ardith made it through the first half of that conversation before she retired at 11PM. Jim worked on the pictures for our blog until about 1:50.
Sunday, July 3
The weather was damp and rainy but we were enthusiastic about Camp Denali. The staff is wonderful and the scenery is breathtaking.
We had poached eggs over apple and potato hash served with croissants for breakfast. All of the cooking and baking is done right here, and the food looks and tastes like we are in a 5 star restaurant. At each meal, the cook in charge of the meal introduced him or herself to us and explained what we would be eating.
After breakfast Jim joined 8 others on a moderate hike. Ardith and 8 others went with one of the naturalists in the van to go and see the Eielson Visitors’ Center. There they saw an amazing quilt done by a friend of Ardith’s guide, Ann. It was called Seasons of Denali and was hand dyed. It included some of the unique plants and wildlife in the area.
The center also housed art works that have been produced through the center’s Artist-in-residence program. Artists in a variety of media are allowed to stay in a cabin for 3 months to produce whatever they want. In return, they donate a work that has something to do with their stay to the park.
Ardith was amazed by the pair of antlers on display outside the centers. Two moose had battled and locked antlers and died because neither could get free.
Her group made stops along the way to see wild flowers and animals. In their van travels, they got to see a number of water birds as well as a moose and an alpha wolf identified by his tracking collar.
The temperature was in the low to mid 40s all day with lots of drizzle and a few heavier showers, but for Jim, this was his favorite day thus far in the trip. Jim’s group saw the same young bull moose from their bus. The moose is well adapted to this environment. His long snout and closable nostrils allow him to scour the bottom of shallow ponds while still being able to watch for potential enemies.
They also got to see 2 female caribou and 4 calves from the bus. They were a bit far away and there was a haze in the air, so the pictures weren’t as good as he would have liked.
His group also got to see a red-throated loon from the bus, which is fairly rare in the area.
When they got off the bus, they eyed their destination, a knob 1500 feet above where they started.
Very soon after they started their trek, they saw some fairly recent bear scat on the ground. When they looked back up, they saw a caribou coming toward them. It is illegal to approach them at closer than 300 yards, but we weren’t approaching him, he was approaching us. We walked at 90 degrees to his line of motion and he passed by where we had been. We were probably less than a hundred feet away. As he passed by us, several buses stopped to watch.
We started our ascent at just about the tree line (trees don’t grow at higher elevations). The few trees were tiny, with the exception of some alders growing along a stream bed.
Lunch was just a few feet below our summit. It had been breezy on our way up, but the ridge sheltered us from the wind for a few minutes. All of a sudden, the wind picked up to perhaps 25 miles per hour. The rain increased from a gentle mist to a decent shower. The temperature dropped and we all were a bit chilly. Fortunately, that only lasted about 10 minutes.
A little while after lunch, we saw 3 caribou running quickly. Seconds later we saw they were being chased by a wolf. After a few minutes, the wolf abandoned the chase. Our guide, Hannah, knew her by her collar. All the alpha males and alpha females are collared and that is what she was wearing. Hannah said she was about 6 miles from her den. Only alphas mate within a pack. There are only a bit over 70 wolves in Denali, a park the size of Massachusetts. They are in 6 packs.Some of the plants in the park are small versions of what we see at home. The azaleas ranged from 2 to 6 inches in height.
The wildflowers were abundant in number, variety and beauty. Most were small, with some blooms as tiny as a tenth of an inch across. The best way to describe them is to just show several.
They also encountered birds that were new to Jim (who has no aspirations to birding) and ones that were rare to the park, including the wandering tuttle, and the red-throated loon.
Toward the end of our trek, our group came upon the site of a recent caribou kill. There were several clumps of fur scattered about, some small bones and some scuffled ground. All the big bones had been carried away, probably by a combination of animals.
The level of difficulty was just right for Jim. He had a few places with minor struggles, but was easily able to keep up with the rest of the group. Oh, let’s qualify that. When he saw interesting pictures, especially of wildflowers, he usually lagged 30 to 50 yards behind the rest. When he didn’t see anything that he didn’t already have in a photo, he was usually at the head of the pack.
While we were returning, we saw a bear from the bus. Not bad for a single day!
Dinner tonight started with a nice soup topped with fresh pesto. We had another wonderful bread that was baked on the premises a short time ago. The main course was pork roast wrapped around spinach and onions, wonderfully cooked potatoes, and roasted cauliflower. Cauliflower is toward the bottom of Jim’s vegetable list, but he really enjoyed these. Dessert was a dense chocolate pudding topped with freshly made whipped cream.
Between dinner and dessert each night, the camp asks each group from the day’s activities to choose a spokesperson to tell everyone else the highlights of the day. Jim’s group didn’t have anyone volunteer to tell the story, so they decided to do a narrated pantomime skit. We have become friendly with a family from Connecticut with 2 teenagers. The son did the narration. The rest of us acted the parts of animals. Here you see the dad portraying a grizzly bear. His nickname in college had been Griz.
After dinner, most of us went to the lodge where Shelton Johnson continued his spellbinding talk. Tonight he focused on the history of the Buffalo Soldiers. This was the name informally given to African American units in the US Army between 1866 and 1942. The name was considered positive by most of the soldiers. Many of them were sent to displace Indians from their traditional lands and were more effective than white units at getting the job done with minimal violence. They were the first “park rangers” in the national parks, being sent there to enforce laws prohibiting hunting and logging. Shelton illustrated that by having one of the guests play the role of a settler who had used the land to provide for his family before the park existed and Shelton assumed the role of a Buffalo Soldier. He wove empathy and humor throughout his talk. Before his work on this topic, there were no general accounts about the role of the soldiers in the National Parks. All his work had to be done from primary sources – old correspondence, photos, and military records. We bought a copy of the novel he wrote based on this, Gloryland, and look forward to reading it. Jim checked later and saw that the Anne Arundel County library system has 3 copies of the book.
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