June 30--Denali National Park, Alaska

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June 30th, Thursday Teklanika Campground, Denali National Park

Left Rosie II at 8:30 after packing our lunch plus drinks and snacks. Walked to shelter with Jim and Diane to catch the bus.
While waiting for it to be time to walk to the bus stop, I spotted a pair of bohemian waxwings in top of the evergreen trees near Rosie II. Valerie was able to get good pictures of them. They are almost the same as the cedar waxwing, but have a larger and brighter red bar on the wing.

Our seat reservations for the bus ride was scheduled for July 1, but since you are stuck at this campground for a minimum stay of three days, you are allowed to ride any shuttle bus that comes along, if there is room. Our friends, Jim and Diane who reside in Kansas, had reservations for an 8:55 bus and we decided to see if there was room for us also. There were two seats left—one in the back and the one I got sitting in the front, over the tire well with your legs up to your chin. The bus was a little better than a school bus. However, we are so glad to have gotten on this particular bus!!! Watching for wildlife is all in the luck of the moment. As the bus driver stated, this is WILD life, not the zoo. Even though we wished it, they can’t be cued for our viewing pleasure.

This park is dedicated to being a preserve in every sense of the word. We were on the only road that goes about 90 miles inside the park and it is dirt and there is only the Eielson Visitor’s Center with flush toilets about half-way up, chemical toilets about every couple of driving hours , and a very few cabins in the Park. No telephone lines, tourist T-shirt shops, or other buildings. The animals are wild and not given any medical treatment—It is the Park Service’s policy here to allow nature to take its course, but with great care to guard the well maintained eco-system. They do have lots of studies going on of the animals, but in a limited contact way.

You may hike anywhere in the park, but there are no trails and when hiking you are asked to hike abreast and not in a line so as not to make a “trail.” We saw plenty of signs that stated that a specifically defined area was closed to hiking for various reasons, such as, nesting animals or a fragile condition of some sort.

Words cannot adequately describe our experiences of this day. Awesome, glorious, fantastic, breathtaking, beautiful, and un-believable, are a few I can think of. The bus had many good “wildlife spotters” on board and soon after we were picked up, a lynx was spotted in the undergrowth along a creek bed. We watched it for some time with the bus motor turned off and everyone staying quiet and it made its way out of the bushes and into a clearing near a river bed. This was so rare a sight; the bus driver was taking pictures along with us. Valerie got fantastic photos of the lynx as it stood and posed for us all. Look carefully at the head of this lynx as it blends completely into the rock background.

Not all the pictures she took were this clear, as often, the picture had to be taken out through the dirty bus window if the person next to her or in some cases across the aisle didn’t lower their window.

We continued to climb up into the mountain passes on this steep, barely two lane dirt road with no guard rails. The mountain views are fantastic and the country is wild tundra with patches here and there of short forests of aspen, spruce, and willow. We were very near the tree line.

Our next animal sighting was a grey-white wolf that came up out of a dry creek bed and headed off onto the tundra. He was quite a distance away and you could only spot him as he moved away from us because his whiteness showed out against the green grasses, mosses, lichen, and ferns that covered the ground. He was headed in the direction of a couple of caribou, but one wolf wouldn’t be able to bring down a full grown adult. There may have been others around since, they tend to travel in packs, but we didn’t see any.

On we drove and the driver spotted a red fox on a small hill that had a good size hole dug in the side of it. He stuck his body in this hole and came out with something in his mouth. It was hard to tell if it was a pup from a “den,” but my thinking, from the way it was held in his mouth, that it was some sort of prey that he had caught. It was a large, healthy looking, pretty fox with a really bushy tail. The driver said that all foxes with a white tip on the tail are red foxes no matter what color the coat.

The park has lots of arctic ground squirrels and several of them sat up along side of the road or ran in front of the bus as we continued up and down the mountains and into river valleys. We crossed several rivers that were scoured out by slowly moving glaciers. This left a wide river bed full of gravel and the river flows in multiple small streamlets along these beds. They called this type of river bed “braided rivers,” which is most apt when you look down upon them.

As we came down one of the passes, and came onto a flatter tundra expanse, we saw three grizzly bears on a grassy hillside. Since they were together, they have to be a family group---a mother and two 2+ year old cubs that were almost as big as she was. We watched them for some time as they dug up stuff---roots, ground squirrels, and what have you. The mother bear was lying on her stomach, we think eating something and the cubs would come up and check on her, going nose to nose, while we watched.

We then, continued on up the road toward the Visitor’s Center and as the bus pulled into the parking lot a calico looking fox was moving along the rock retaining wall. Later we found from some of the people on our bus that he caught the ground squirrel he was after---the Rangers call the squirrels a 2000 calorie snack. Like a snickers bar for the foxes and grizzlies.

We ate our lunch looking out over the valley and beyond it to the Alaskan Mountain Range. Mount McKinley was not visible from here as it was covered by clouds. Looked around the very nicely done center that opened in 2006.

After about a half hour break here, we boarded the bus for our trip back to the campground. Some people elected to stay at this spot to hike or whatever, so I was able to move back to a seat next to Valerie. The driver informed us that the ride up to the visitors’ center took approximately 4 hours depending on the stops for wildlife viewing, but the drive down would be shorter as we wouldn’t stop to look at caribou, ground squirrels, foxes or other animals we had already seen unless it was a lynx or a wolf.

We did, however, stop to look at the three grizzlies again as they wandered along a ridge near where we had seen them before. There are approximately 300 grizzlies and 6 million acres of Park. Grizzlies wander about 300 square miles in their hunt for food. Doing the math, we were extremely lucky to see 4 grizzlies that day!

Got back to camp about 5:30 after about 8 hours of an extremely exhilarating bus ride, had dinner and fell into bed.

What a day!

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