A few weeks ago, the wonderful folks who run our internship program drove us out to Denali for the day, and paid for us to go on a bus tour of the park. We gathered together ay an ungodly hour, and headed off down the Parks highway to Denali, where we arrived about an hour later. I was more than a little bit tired, having camped out in front of the bookstore to buy Harry Potter the night before.
Denali's huge. Gigantic might be a better word. The park itself is about the size of Massachusetts, and is surrounded by another very large state park, and protected lands everywhere else. In short, it's really really big.
For those of you who have never been to Denali, apart from at the very perimeter, cars aren't allowed inside the park (they didn't want it to turn into one huge traffic jam like Yellowstone). There's a single "park road" that extends 91 miles into the park, and doesn't loop around on which tour buses are permitted.
There are various grades of tour buses available, depending upon how badly you want to be gouged. More expensive buses serve lunch, have dedicated tour guides. Being put on the cheapest of the buses actually worked out rather nicely for us, as we packed our own lunches, and our bus driver gave his own narration without that condescending tour guide voice, and not saying "Ooooohhh! Another mountain!" every 30 seconds. Not having to put up with cruise ship passengers was also a fantastic bonus, although the woman sitting in front of me was a complete [word I'm not going to write here because my mom reads this] to us.
Although most of the people on the bus were primarily interested in spotting animals along the way, I was perfectly content to look around and take in the scenery. Some of the people on the bus had remarkably good vision, and were able to spot animals far enough away to only look like a speck, even through my camera's 200mm lens -- although it fascinated most of the people on the bus, it elicited more of a "eh, whatever" reaction from myself. We did get up close to a bunch of Caribou, saw a bunch of sheep in the distance, and got fairly close to a brown bear. On the way home, we saw a group of three moose drinking at a lake.
The landscapes were absolutely breathtaking. Unfortunately, it was quite cloudy, and we didn't get a clear view of McKinley, not to mention that the cloudiness ruined a lot of my pictures...
I'll try to post the rest of the updates this week before I fly back home on Sunday. I've got to finish the last bits of my project, finish (start) writing my paper, and on top of that I've made the awesomely responsible decision of committing myself to yet another endeavor, and have been volunteering at the fair for the past few days...
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