day 2

Day 2
The second day, we decided to take a bus 65 miles into the park, try to see Denali, and take a hike on the tundra

The four-hour trip out wound along the only road that runs through the park. This 90-mile road is paved only for 15 miles, beyond which only park busses and specially registered private vehicles are permitted. The park decided to preserve the original single lane gravel construction to maintain Denali’s wilderness character. Our driver gave us an informed nature tour, telling us about the animals and their winter habits that they are just now breaking. The road was only opened a few weeks ago and great piles of snow still rest in the gullies on the mountainsides. Snowshoe hairs were everywhere, even squashed in the road.


The only other animal we saw in relative abundance were caribou. We had a few instances of Dall sheep, showing up as distant white specks against the emerald and tan mountainsides. A sow grizzly and her twins also graced our ride, and for a brief, shining moment, a black and brown fox trotted alongside our parked bus. We even saw a ptarmigan, that ill-fated bird that seems to be the primary prey of every creature with teeth.

At the end of our journey waited the newly opened Eielson Visitor Center and a stretch of tundra. We were among the first visitors to the new complex which replaced a much older and more intrusive building. This updated version was recessed into the hillside and was mostly invisible from the road; our bus pulled up and parked on the roof. Down below, the rest of the center housed art exhibits, a great diorama of the mountain, its glaciers, and the many climbing approaches, and a section devoted to the experience of the great mountain in many people’s words and stories. In order to be low-impact, much of the construction was done with recycled and renewable materials, as well as materials reused from the former center. This building, once inspected, is hoped to achieve the Platinum level of LEEDS certification, a green building system.

We rode the bus, saw the building, and then were ready to hit the great outdoors. Just outside of the center was a trail that took us out onto the hillsides of the tundra. We walked along established gravel paths to avoid damaging the fragile permafrost vegetation. Because the latitude and elevation, only a thin layer of topsoil manages to thaw even during the long daylight hours of the summer.
This causes the plants to adapt if they wish to thrive, even survive here. Most species are dwarf to begin with, carpeting the ground with tight, fuzzy leaf-cover and blossoming into miniscule fireworks. Larger species manage only to produce shallow root systems and short crowns, only growing to waist-height. Our trail led us to a couple of forks and since we had time and really wanted to see the gravel Thorofare Riverbed, we chose some less-traveled trails, possibly game trails, down into the ravine. As we descended, we realized that what goes down must come up, and also that the riverbed, massively close as it appeared, would take much longer to reach and probably twice as long to return from than we expected. And that’s just how things are here. Everything appears so close—the mountains, the rivers, the crags—that you can just reach out and grab them. But the proximity is one of the parks many great and humbling deceptions. All these things are so massively huge that they can’t help but seem at arm’s length, even when they are several miles away.

Our last great goal for the day was to try to catch a glimpse of Denali, Athabaskan for “the great one.” The highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet, should be hard to hide, but because of its utter mass and height, the mountain is often said to make its own weather. Warm, moist air is driven north from the Pacific Ocean to run smack into the Alaskan range and the huge mass of Denali, only to be quickly condensed into heavy clouds. 75% of the time, the mountain enshrouds itself in billows of white, and people can visit the park several times without ever catching a glimpse of its crown jewel. Alas, we too, were thwarted in our efforts, but we expected this. And I had a nice time amusing myself listening to all the binoculared visitors around me exclaiming and pointing at some phantom slope or dubious peak, that “just disappeared behind that cloud!”