We got up at a much more civilized hour this morning and discovered that the weather had changed overnight. It was significantly cooler, much less smoky, and raining.

We packed our bags, wandered around the hotel for a while, and eventually boarded the bus for the short trip to the Denali Park Railroad Depot. We had time enough for a short visit to the Visitor Center, where we finally saw a moose.

We made a quick trip to the Park Shop and returned to the depot with plenty of time to make the train – especially since it was running a little late. I suspect we would have had enough time to walk the Spruce Forest Trail at the Visitor Center, but neither of us wanted to take the chance – next time for sure!

This segment of the trip was more photogenic than the stretch from Fairbanks to Denali; some of that might have been due to the misty, rainy weather.

About 15 minutes after leaving the depot, we passed by Denali Park Village where we’d spent the last two nights. We could even see the Thai food truck across the street that had saved the day for lunch yesterday!

We paralleled the Nenana River for most of the trip.

You can see the difference in water color where Carlo Creek (snow melt) joins the Nenana (glacier-fed).

Panorama Mountain isn’t as large as Denali, but it’s still a big mountain; we could only see a little of it.

The Northbound and Southbound trains met near Broad Pass and swapped conductors and supplies.

When the trains started moving again, Deana (our guide and rail host) told us to give the passengers on the other train the moose salute, and we did. They didn’t return the gesture.

The rain didn’t bother the ducks in the river.

The telegraph lines which once connected the far-flung outposts of Alaska were abandoned decades ago – they are now officially protected historical artifacts.

The bridge over Hurricane Gulch gave us some dramatic views.

Once we passed Hurricane Gulch, we entered the “flag stop” area; there are no roads here (the Parks Highway is about ten miles away), so the railroad is the lifeline to the outside world. Residents flag down trains and they stop – it’s almost like using Lyft!

The houses here are off the grid and the residents have to be able to handle whatever Mother Nature throws at them.

The line is mostly single-tracked, but there are sidings to allow two trains to pass one another; the conductor of one of the trains has to get off the train and manually throw the switch to change tracks. Our conductor had to do that when we passed a train pulling cars for another cruise line.

There was more beautiful scenery along the Indian River; on a different day, we might have seen Denali as we crossed the river.

Gold Creek was named by prospectors early in the 20th Century. I don’t know if they found gold, but now they offer R&R.

The trackside vegetation had changed; instead of spruce trees and grass, we were seeing meadows of Queen Anne’s lace and fireweed, with occasional ferns.

The conductor stopped by our car for an expresso and chatted with us a bit.

We disembarked at Talkeetna about 4 hours after we boarded; buses were waiting to take us to our home for the evening, the Talkeetna Alaska Lodge. The view out our window is in the direction of Denali, but the weather forecast says that we aren’t likely to see it. There are signs saying that moose have been spotted on the property, but I’m not optimistic about seeing them, either.

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!