Denali Road Lottery No. 2

After driving the length of the Denali park road on a Saturday in September (as detailed in the previous post) we hung around on Sunday. We went to church at the little branch up in Healy, which is a little town about 10 or 15 miles north of the park entrance. They had a nice little church building there with 30-40 people in sacrament meeting. Then we hung around the hotel most of the rest of the day. As on our trip to Fairbanks over the summer, Marel and I were able to leave a baby monitor with the kids sneak out for dessert in the hotel after they were in bed. We stayed at the Grande Denali Lodge, which is up on a bluff overlooking the main highway. Here is a view from the road down from the hotel.

And here it is from below.

The short road up to the hotel has a dozen or so joke road signs that said things like "Watch for falling coconuts" and "Speed limit: 13.2 mph." Our favorite was the mosquito flying off with a person.

Then on Monday we headed back out on the park road. A game we played along the road was that every 10 miles everyone would get 10 Jelly Bellies. Marel would feed me mine without letting me see what color they were, and it was surprisingly difficult to guess what flavor they were without being able to see them first. The first wildlife we saw was this bird, I think it was a ptarmigan. It was midway between its summer and winter plumage.

There was a herd of Dall sheep at the base of this peak.

Another bear pretty far off, wandering around the river basin.

The weather overall was a little bit stormier Monday than it was on Saturday, so the sun was in and out of the clouds all day.

Here is another of Marel breastfeeding.

Two more bears. These two had much lighter fur than the others we saw. Not sure if it had to do with their age or some other factor, or if it's just natural variation.

Another Dall sheep herd.

And another.

Another bear way off in the distance. Can you see it?

We saw this little critter, and we didn't know what it was at first. It poked its head up like a prairie dog and looked around. Then it ran away and crossed the road in front of us. We couldn't tell when it was sitting, as in the picture, but once it ran away we could see that it had a surprisingly fat little belly. No doubt it was preparing for winter hibernation. We later asked at the ranger station and they told us it was an Arctic Ground Squirrel, a close relative of the Marmot.

Can you spot the 3 caribou in this picture?

Another bear. This one stuck around and got much closer to the road by the time we circled back.

We didn't go all the way to Wonder Lake this time since the mountain was more socked-in than the previous day, so we knew the view wouldn't be any better than it was the previous day. This time we stopped at the Eielson visitor center, which is at around mile 80 of the park road. We stopped there and had our picnic, along with a handful of other picnickers. While there the kids got to try on a pair of Dall sheep horns.

This is a nice backcountry visitor center. It's well off the grid so it's all solar powered and fits in well with the surroundings.

After our dinner at the visitor's center we saw the same bear we saw earlier on the slope of the ravine (we assume it's the same bear because it was in the same area and grizzly bears have fairly large territory). This time it got much closer to us than any other of the bears we saw. It was closer than the 25-30 yards the rangers want you to be in your cars for, but since it was down a fairly steep slope from the road they didn't seem to be as worried. We stuck around for a quite a while and watched this one because it was so close, but we felt safe because of the slope. And after seeing this one so close and even rearing on its hind legs, we didn't feel like we needed to spend much time watching the bears we saw after it.

Like this one.

More sprawling vistas.

Not Denali, but there are a lot of impressive peaks in the area:

Most of the Dall sheep we saw were way off in the distance and appeared just as white specks on the hillsides, but we did see this one that was only 20 or 30 yards up the side of a cliff from us so we could actually see its features (though its horns sort of blend in with the rocks in the photos... it was rooting along the ground for whatever it is Dall sheep eat, so it stubbornly refused to lift its head up against the backdrop of the blue sky).

This bear was so much darker than the others we saw that at first we thought is might be a black bear instead of a grizzly, but turns out it was just a dark grizzly.

The girls had junior ranger workbooks they worked on along the road, so when they got back they took their oath and got their own Denali National Park junior ranger badges.

And this photo rounds out our Denali breastfeeding series.

All in all it was a highly enjoyable trip. In total we saw 13 bears, 8 caribou, 7 Dall sheep herds, 1 ptarmigan, 1 arctic ground squirrel, and about 1,000 views we couldn't quite capture in a photograph.