Life is Grand: Denali National Park

The Denali National Park area is a bit more touristy that the other areas of Alaska. AJ’s BFF Don suggested a restaurant called The Denali Park Salmon Bake and it was amazing. I don’t know if it was quite that delicious or not, I think we just hadn’t had really good food all week and this place was like heaven to us. In fact, we loved it so much; we ate there both nights we were at Denali! They had so many menu items that we wanted to try, we both ordered different things and switched half way through so we could eat more things. I think my favorite was the king crabby grilled cheese!

On our way to the park we had to back out of our parking space at the hotel and encountered someones rogue suitcase. Neither AJ, nor I saw the suitcase behind our car, but it was there and we ran it over! We didn't see anyone in sight and have no idea who would set a suitcase there, but we hoped no one saw us do it and continued on our merry way! We hit up a Subway for our lunches (there is no food available inside the park), needless to say, there are no $5 footlongs here, more like $10 footlongs. The Subway was run by an interesting group of Russians, who laughed at my $5 footlong joke, which I am sure they hear daily!

To make a trip into Denali Park, you have to purchase a bus pass. There is only one road into Denali National Park. It is 92 miles to the end and it is a gravel road after mile 17. After mile 17, only buses are allowed, so if you want to go past that, you must purchase the $30-$70 bus pass. The pricing depends on which stop you want to make it too. We chose to ride to the Eielson Visitor Center, which was at mile marker 66. We chose to stop at Eielson because it was a 12-14 hour bus ride to the end at mile 92 and Eielson has the best view of Mt. McKinley. That made it a 4 hour ride to the center and a 4 hour ride back to the park entrance. It was a long day. You could tell the bus to stop at any point and let you off to hike around and then you could just catch another bus when you were done. Denali was a bit intimidating. There are only a couple of marked hiking trails, the rest of the park is without, so you really have to know what you’re doing to hike around in Denali.

The only way I can describe Denali National Park is like the scene in The Lion King when they are singing The Circle of Life and it is showing all of the herds of animals running in the valleys. That is really what it looked like. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I really cannot put into words how beautiful it was. The views were on such a large scale, they wouldn’t even fit into my camera (the camera is a whole different story! We needed a much nicer camera for this trip, a point and shoot just didn’t cut it. When wildlife was far away, it looked like a spec on our camera!). We saw a grizzly bear, dall sheep, arctic squirrel, and golden eagles. We were VERY lucky we got a warm sunny day because Mt. McKinley was out of the clouds for most of the morning. It is only visible about 4 days out of the summer due to cloud cover and we were there on one of those days! We were told that since it was such a nice day, we didn’t get to see much wildlife because it was too hot for them. It was about 65 degrees that day. Which was upsetting because we were desperate to see a moose and it didn’t happen.

We also stopped by the Denali Park Kennel and saw some sled dogs. These dogs work for the park and go out on daily patrols. Sled dogs have become more of a hobby than a necessity. They have been replaced by snowmobiles. They say it is very expensive to own sled dogs. Each dog is $800-$1000 and requires daily exercise. They will burn 10,000-12,000 calories during their daily exercises and therefore are expensive to feed! The joke goes, you only have to put gas in the snowmobile in the winter, you have to feed the dogs year round!

Below are some photos from Denali National Park: