Denali National Park 2010

This is the second portion of the Alaska trip. We camped 4 nights at Wonder Lake, hoping to see Mt. McKinley, also called Denali, "The High One." At over 20,000 feet Denali is the highest point in North America and is often shrouded in clouds and fog. Our diligence was rewarded gradually, as the white mountain slowly revealed itself. We loved seeing the Common Loon nest on Wonder Lake and hearing their hauting wail. There were large rafts of Surf Scoters and White-winged Scoters there as well, and we got scolded several times by territorial Wilson's Warblers. We saw a mother moose actually blowing bubbles in a pond not far from her twin calves. Another thrill was staking out a Gyrfalcon nest on a veritcal cliff and seeing a dark-morph parent bring food to its brood (Gyrs are the world's largest falcon and quite majestic).

At Denali we finished Adolf Murie's A Naturalist in Alaska and started Mardy Murie's book Two in the Far North, a chronical of her life in Alaska as a child, her arctic adventures as a young bride to federal biololgist Olaus, and her life-long advocacy of wilderness preservation in Alaska. I loved Mardy's idea of preparedness--once after a plane crash, the first thing she did was dig out her supply of molasses "cry baby cookies" to share with the lucky survivors.

The bears we saw at Denali were brown bears, or grizzlies, and these we saw from the safety of the bus. The park rangers at Denali go to great lengths to teach visitors about bear safety: DO NOT RUN from a bear, but make your presence known. Although bears are mainly foragers of grass and berries (and the occasional ground squirrel), they do not like to be startled. Author Jonathan Waterman has noted that humans are far more deadly to bears, and that a person is more likely to die from bee stings, a lightning strike, dog attack, or homicide than from bears. One of the places we reliably saw bears was at Sable Mountain. Adolf Murie wrote about observing a sow and cubs from this very same location many decades ago. Like Adolf, we were treated to the play-fighting of twin bears. How excellent that this place has been protected so that generations of brown bears may continue to live wild.

We got a wilderness camping permit to explore the heights of Cathedral Mountain and the views of Igloo Mountain and the Teklanika River basin. I learned not to put all my trust in the GPS and USGS maps, because the thin blue line we thought was a stream turned out to be a bed of dry rocks, so we had to hike 1 mile down the mountain and over tundra tussocks to the river to get our water supply, and hike back up a mile to our camp. It really made me aware of how precious water is, and thankful for abundant access to it at home.