Into Denali

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Where do we begin? Our day started early with pick up at 7am and it was amazing from the first 15 minutes. We saw a mommy moose along the roadside brush. They were 2 of 6. I will post pics but the baby wasn't viewable long enough for me to snap. Today was special because we saw 5 grizzlies, 1 as close as 40 yards. We also had a wolf hop on road and walked towards our bus. Note..there is only 70 wolves in Denali which covers 6.2 million acres. There are only 300 bears here do to lack of vegetation to eat..can u imagine? It takes 400,000 berries a day to sustain a bear. Our bears were eating ground berries in the pics. We even saw 1 bear chase a moose in the tundra.

We also saw a linx cross the road, and many dall sheep. They are the only white sheeps in the wild in the world. They look like small spots in my pic. There was a bull moose up along mountain side too far to zoom with my camera. Since we were on a school type bus we all jockeyed for pics. Hope you enjoy the pic of the tundra squirrel who posed for us.

There are really only 3 main trees in Denali, the popular, the black birch and white spruce. Lots of ground berries and brush. We were very fortunate to see Mt Mckinley without being covered by clouds. Our driver said she has only seen it 4 times this year. Many visitors to the park never see the animals and we saw so many.Amazing.

As soon as bus returned us to hotel we changed into warmer clothing and went on our atv tour along the river beds outside of Denali. A wind storm started up from a big front coming up from anchorage area blowing gusts from 30 to 60 mph. We rode in the large river bed which flows in summer when glaciers melt. It was so windy a rock broke our travel van back window which they duck taped..lol

Pizza and alaskan white beer for dinner. We check out early morning for bus ride down to Seward.

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Comments

[April]

WOW! Beautiful pictures! I love the mountain shots #27 and #29 are stunning! And that moose is massive! What a great experience!