Ahmet Erkun

WOW! We’ve been away from home for 30 days already! How time flies when you’re having fun. At least we still have another 55 days to enjoy Alaska before it is time to head to the Lower 48. And a couple of weeks after that before we are back home.

Today was the first day this season that the Denali National Park buses began driving to the Eielson Visitor Center ... 66 miles into the park. With only camper buses running to Wonder Lake, this is as far most visitors can go in 2021.

With our Tek pass, we had a “reserved” bus ride today. That doesn’t mean that we had specific seats reserved. Rather, it means that we were guaranteed a seat on the 11:00a bus that would be picking us up from the Teklanika River Campground at 12:10p. We would have preferred an earlier bus, but with fewer buses running this year ... well, we took what we could get.

Since the campground is at mile 29 of the Park Road, we essentially shaved off about half the round trip bus ride to/from the front country. That turned out to be a good thing as this time the bus was at capacity. While the seats have been upgraded so that they are “softer” than they used to be, it’s tight quarters on the bus. And yes, masking up was still required.

We started the drive under overcast conditions that began to change a tiny bit by the time we got to Eielson where we had spectacular views of the Alaska Range. No views of Denali ... but we saw it partially-cloaked several times along the road, so happy campers anyway.

Our plan was to leave the bus at Eielson to do a hike and catch a later bus back. That meant giving up our reserved seats. The dispatcher was discouraging people from doing so ... especially since there were only two buses after ours ... with already many people waiting for seats. We probably would have taken our chances as they are not going to leave people stranded out there. But the wind was blowing stiff and cold. So we nixed the hike and returned on the same bus.

This was a caribou and grizzly bear kind of day. Those were the only animals we saw ... except for a herd of Dall sheep in the high reaches of one of the mountains near Toklat.

I lost count of the number of caribou we saw ... individuals and herds ... near and far ... on the snow fields ... in the brush ... grazing ... migrating from one side of the road to the other.

But I know exactly how many bears we saw ... five plus two cubs that couldn’t have been more than three-four months old ... all at a distance, but no mistaking them for anything but bears. Mama and the cubs were on a caribou kill. The ranger at the Eielson Visitor Center said mama bear found the dead caribou under the snow and began feeding on it. Our driver and a few fellow-passengers on the bus claimed the bear had a bloody mouth and thought it was a fresh kill. I couldn’t say either way.

This trip out to Eielson wraps up Denali for us. We are not wilderness hikers ... no formal trails out here in the back country ... you make your own. We’ve hiked the gravel bar twice already ... our ankles are protesting at the thought of another hike on that wobbly terrain. We’ve done the bus ride enough times that it is no longer very exciting ... we’ve seen and enjoyed the scenery ... we’ve seen five of the six big animals of Denali (the only one we haven’t seen is the wolf). And we’ve seen and enjoyed the majesty of Denali from every viewpoint in and outside the park .... many times over ... circumnavigated the Great One by air as well.

We’ve had a grand time, but there’s nothing left to keep us here. Tomorrow, we’re going to move on to greener pastures, so to speak ... two extra days that buy us time to check out other places. But before we leave, perhaps we’ll see mama moose and her calves at Riley Creek when we stop there to pick up the toad from where it has been resting these past few days.Lue lisää