The sky was bright this morning at breakfast time, even though it was only 5am. We had to get up very early to take the Denali Tundra Wilderness Tour – we were on Tour Bus 8 and had to be on the bus by 6:45am (I’m curious when Tour Bus 1 left and happy we weren’t on it).

We were on the Park Road by 7:20. Our driver/guide, Cassie, told us about the landscape we were passing through, beginning with the taiga forest.

She told us to keep our eyes open for interesting animals and to yell “Stop!” If we found one.

We reached the Sanctuary River bridge without any interesting animals being spotted.

At Mile 30 of the Park Road, we turned off for the one and only rest stop on the route, the Teklanika Rest Stop overlooking the Teklanika River. We’d been in the park for 90 minutes and were still interesting-animal-free.

A few minutes after leaving the rest stop, we had our first sighting of the day, a Dall Sheep far off in the distance, a few hundred feet below a small ice patch. Cassie said we could consider the trip a success!

Ten minutes later, our bus came upon a couple of hikers on one side of the road and a grizzly bear on the other! Cassie pulled the bus between the bear and the hikers and told them to get on the bus. They did.

The bear lost interest and took off on the best trail in the Park – the Park Road.

The hikers departed, too – we saw them a couple of hours later on our way out of the park, so I guess they survived.

The grizzly bear wasn’t ready to leave the area entirely – we saw him again just a couple of minutes later and stuck around until he was no longer visible.

Our next encounter was with another Dall sheep, this one much closer to the road.

After a while, she got tired of showing off and bounded away into the vastness of Denali Park.

There was a batchelor band of Dall sheep at the top of a ridge on the other side of the bus; I didn’t get to see them with my own eyes but Cassie used her video camera to show them to the whole bus, so I guess they count!

Our next sighting was a Willow Ptarmigan. It was on the far side of the bus and I didn’t really see it – but I did get its photo. When I was sorting through my photos from the trip today, I thought there was something unusual near the lower left of this picture, and I was right.

The Park Road is 90 miles long, but it’s closed at Mile 43 due to a huge landslide, so we turned around there. Cassie gave us another chance to get out of the bus (it had been an hour) – she had a hard time getting us back!

About 20 minutes into the return trip, the cry of “Stop!” rang out – someone had seen a caribou to the right of the bus.

When they were building the Park Road, they set up cook shacks every ten or so miles to keep the workers fed. Today, those shacks house Park Rangers during the winter months.

Tourists can drive their own cars into the park, but only to Mile 15 on the Park Road. There’s a checkpoint there – and an interesting rock formation.

During the winter, the Rangers use dog power instead of snow machines; the sled dogs live at the park year-round. Volunteers take them out for a run every day.

And that was the tour. Cassie told us that we’d seen more interesting animals than was typical; unfortunately, we were quite typical in not seeing Denali itself – only 30% of the people who come to the park see the mountain.

We returned to the Denali Park Resort (our hotel) for lunch. That was a mistake – the restaurants aren’t open for lunch! There are two dining options: the coffee bar and the bar bar. The coffee bar offered only pre-packaged sandwiches; the bar bar had four dishes on the menu, only two of which were available. None of the choices appealed, and there was no transportation available to the park for a couple of hours.

Fortunately, we’d been told about the Thai food truck at the Denali Grizzly Bear campground across the Parks Highway – we walked over and were pleasantly surprised.

This afternoon, we took a very short hike on the Oxbow Trail in Denali Park; the trailhead is just across the river from the resort.

We had to get back to meet our friends for dinner – fortunately, it was only a ten-minute walk!

We leave Denali for Talkeetna tomorrow morning; bags don’t have to be out in the hall until 8:30am, a positively civilized hour!

Today began bright (what else would you expect? We’re in Alaska in the summer) and early so that we could get our bags into the hall by 6am and depart for Denali on the Wilderness Express. They got us to the depot before 8 and we boarded our tour group’s private car for the day, complete with a bar.

We left around 8:20, and a few minutes later we were leaving Fairbanks, just as the temperature was finally getting more reasonable – it was the coldest temperature we’d seen on the trip so far.

The car was two stories high with lots of glass on both floors. The restaurant was downstairs, and there was Alaskan art decorating the staircase.

The first two-thirds of the trip was mostly through spruce forests and one small town, Nenana (on the Tawana River). There were lots of curves where we could see the front half of the train (the Wilderness Express cars are at the rear).

The scenery started changing about 11:30am as we started paralleling the Nenana River (like the Tawana, it’s glacier-fed and milky) as we neared Denali.

I knew we were nearing the park itself when we started seeing rafters in the river – they have to wear dry suits because the water is very, very cold.

We reached Denali Depot a bit after noon and were faced with a choice. We could stay in the Park and take a shuttle to our hotel in a few hours or go with our bus to “Glitter Gulch” (Nenama Canyon) for lunch and some light shopping before the bus took us to the hotel (the Denali Park Village). Our Tour Director strongly suggested the latter course, and we agreed. “Glitter Gulch” wasn’t all that glamorous, but we had lunch and then walked down the bike/pedestrian path to the bridge over Kingfisher Creek.

Hikers had built cairns in the retaining wall near the North end of the bridge for, as far as I can tell, no particular reason.

We walked to the second viewpoint on the bridge and then turned back to the Gulch because it looked like we were going to be hit by thunderstorms.

The storms never arrived, so we looked around some more, talked with the bus driver, went shopping for chocolate, and enjoyed a comfortable ride to the hotel. Two of our friends, serious dog people, had stayed in the park to see the sled dogs – they thought it was great, even though they had a hard time getting to the hotel due to shuttle issues.

The hotel is pleasant (even without air conditioning) and is on the Nenana River. Unfortunately, our room faces an interior road, but there’s a nature walk along the river that we enjoyed before dinner.

Dinner was a musical show called “Cabin Nite” – the cast (who doubled as the wait staff) were early settlers in this part of Alaska and they told us why they were here. Robert W. Service poems were prominent, beginning with the pre-show outside.

Several of the cast members came around to the table so we could take close-up photos – thanks, Wendy, for taking this photo of the chorus girl!

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be taking the Tundra Wilderness Tour, a 5-1/2 hour bus ride through Denali. We leave the hotel at 6:45am. Good night!