Denali with a Long Lens

Chris and I got to go to Denali National Park a couple weeks ago, and I'm so glad we did -- it's one of those things we felt like we really had to do while we were here.

There's only one road into the park, and it's closed to private vehicles past mile 15. The rest of the road is accessible only by shuttle bus, so you just pay your $30, get on the bus, and see the sights. The drivers stop for wildlife-watching and photo opportunities, so you can pretty much stay on the bus the whole time and get a decent Denali experience on the 8- to 13-hour round trip (depending on how far you want to into the park, of course).

Or you can do what Chris and I did, and get off the bus to hike. The thing is, there aren't any trails in the park's interior (just near the entrance), so if you take off for a hike, you're pretty much just wandering off into the hills. It's a really odd experience, having to decide which way to go. We had some general route advice from our bus driver (pretty much, "Walk around the back of that mountain until you come to the road again"), but the specifics were up to us.

Find the right route was easy at first, because we'd gotten off at a fairly popular spot (although we were the only ones who got off our bus) and a path of sorts had been trampled in. Once we got to the point where we couldn't see the road any more, though, it was up to us to figure out how to proceed. It was an interesting process, which required a surprising amount of thought.

Should we go down the stream bed, or up to the ridgeline? It's not the easiest climb, but there might be bears in the willows by the stream. Do we plow straight up the hill to the top, or go the long way and ease around the side? How did those other people get way up there? Etc.

The views were amazing, but unfortunately, I'd only brought our long lens (it's better for taking pictures of wildlife), so I couldn't capture the sweeping panoramas as well as I wanted to. I had to get about 30 yards away to get this shot of Chris.



There were a few points when I thought we would have to turn around and go back the way we came -- the descent was pretty steep in places, and there was no obvious hiking route -- but we forged ahead, whistling pretty tunes as we went to let the bears know that lunch was on its way (we didn't actually see any bears while we were hiking, thankfully). It was threatening to rain as we got to the toughest part of the descent, and I was getting kind of freaked out thinking about how it would feel to slide on wet brush all the way down to the creek bed, and whether I could make it back to the bus with a broken head. But it didn't rain, and I didn't break my head, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable experience.

I feel like I'm not telling the story right. It's just hard to describe how huge the landscape felt all of a sudden, when we got off the bus and just... started walking. We could have walked wherever we wanted to. Hey, there's a mountain over there that looks nice -- let's go there. I mean, our little jaunt was really nothing compared to the crazy multi-day backcountry hikes that some people undertake (I wasn't really feeling up to that), but it was still very different from any hike I've done before. And we ended up feeling like we had way more cred than the 90% of visitors who never even get off the bus.