Last summer, my family went on a hiking and camping trip to Alaska, and spent 3 nights camping in and around Denali National Park.
I wrote this travel story for the Toronto Star Travel editor, on spec, and he said it would be in the September 2010 papers, but it never got printed.
I thought it was good, and decided to share it with you here.
(Denali National Park -July 8, 2010)
At the Visitors Access Centre of Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, Trevor Archibald pulled out two cans of bear guard.
Holding both the black bottles with yellow labels casually in his right hand, the experienced outdoorsman made a thumbs-up sign with his other hand.
Then he taught us the best way to avoid bear attacks. We were about to hike through a 24,585 square-kilometre wilderness about the size of Massachusetts.
“Make a lot of noise when you are hiking today,” Archibald said. “Clap your hands, so you warn the animals you’re there.”
My husband, John, and I were with our sons, Alex, 13, and Evan, 10, at the entrance to Denali.
We’d taken family hiking trips before, to Italy and to Newfoundland and Labrador, but we’d always organized our own itineraries. For Alaska, because of the sheer size of the place, and because of the risk of bear attacks, going with an experienced outfitter was probably the safer thing to do.
Trevor, 24, works for Alaska Outdoors, based in Wasilla, the home of former US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The company offers weeklong family hiking and camping adventures, where they put clients together with two other families. They provide all the supplies, a van, two canoes, and the guide.
For four days in early July, we’d been camping in tents in southern Alaska, near salmon streams in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and climbing on ancient glaciers.
Denali was our ultimate challenge. It’s home to Mount McKinley, at 20,320 feet, North America’s highest peak.
And Trevor wasn’t coming in with us.
The US National Park Service doesn’t permit private guides or vehicles. They aim to reduce human interaction with the wildlife.
Denali was created in 1917 originally as a wilderness game reserve, and even today, though it is considered the most accessible of Alaska’s national parks, it has very few trails.
Both novice day hikers and experienced backcountry adventurers are free to simply wander anywhere in what the Frommer’s guidebook calls “the overwhelming vastness”. But very few people actually “get off the bus”, as Trevor had put it.
Instead, most of the 400,000 summer visitors take one of the park’s green shuttle busses on a safari. The park’s only road is a narrow, gravel track that runs 90 miles through the spectacular mountain scenery, above the tree line. It can take 12 hours round trip. The drivers help you spot wildlife through the windows.
But we planned to get off the shuttle and hike.
As we set off, I couldn’t help thinking of the 2007 movie “Into the Wild”, about the young American, Christopher McCandless, who hiked into Denali in the winter of 1992, and starved to death.
The abandoned school bus where McCandless died is still there, on the far northern edge of Denali. It has become a place of pilgrimage for some hikers.
At Mile 9, the two snow covered peaks of Mount McKinley came clearly into view out our bus windows. Our driver, Elton Parks (his real name) explained that most people call the landmark Denali, which means “The High One” in an Athabascan language.
“You’re lucky,” he tells us, adding that he’s been driving passengers in Denali for 29 summers. “The weather in Denali is clear like this only 15 to 20 per cent of the year.”
It was already 23 Celsius, and sunny. We had been advised to bring rain gear and gloves and warm jackets to Alaska. We wouldn’t need them.
After about two hours of driving, we arrived at Polychrome Overlook, where we got off the shuttle. It’s named for the many colours of rock visible on the expanse of mountain-passes created several hundreds of millions of years ago. Hues of brown and green and orange blend with some ancient hanging glaciers in the Alaska Range to the south. We could see for miles. (Hanging glaciers do not touch the ocean, but hang in mountain valleys. Tidewater glaciers actually touch the ocean.)
Climbing up from the Park Road through patches of willow thickets and dwarf birch, I remembered what the driver had told us. These patches of trees are favourite snacking grounds for moose. I clapped my hands to warn off any wildlife, as Trevor had advised us to do,
About 400 grizzlies roam Denali, along with packs of caribou, moose, Dall sheep, wolves and black bears.
We’d just come through the brush and into the clear wide open tundra when I turned to see what was behind us. A lone brown caribou looking for lunch didn’t notice me, grazing in the bushes below us. Evan called out to it. It lifted its head for a moment, twitched its ears. It continued eating. We watched silently until it moved away.
As we ascended towards Polychrome Mountain (5790 ft or 1,765 m), the terrain changed to springy, moist sub arctic tundra. Some of Denali’s 450 species of miniature wildflowers poked up through the green and brown moss: the bright yellow frigid arnica, and the pink meadow bistorts. It was too early in the season for berries.
The film “Heartbeats of Denali” showing at the Denali Visitor Centre depicts scenes of Native Alaskans harvesting berries in Denali in late summer. Until the grizzlies scare them off when the animals turn up looking for the same berry patch. The grizzlies need the berries to fatten up before hibernation. They eat mostly berries because surprisingly, there are few salmon in the park. The rivers are full of fine sediment called glacier flour, which is ground down by the glaciers. It not only turns the water milky blue but makes it inhospitable for salmon. I found it comforting to know that this also makes the grizzlies in Denali weigh just 350-450 pounds, which is a lot smaller then in other parts of Alaska.
Naturalists joke that at this altitude, the flowers and plants are tiny, but vital survivors who feed some of the largest, fiercest animals in the Denali food chain.
Every so often, we’d see patches of white fur on the ground.
The park is home to 2,500 wild Dall sheep. Each one can weigh close to 300 (136 kilos) pounds and stand over 3.5 feet (1.06 metres) tall.
Alex eventually spotted five or six in a pack, sure-footedly picking their way, one by one, across a steeple of rock.
After two hours, we reached the top, a narrow, grey, windswept ridge.
For 360 degrees, all around us there were more mountains, book-ended both east and west by two forks of the Toklat River, with its dry, rocky beds. The park road was a tiny, off-white sliver way below.
For my husband, this was what Alaska was all about.
“The beauty, in a pristine wilderness, where you can experience being alone, walking on the tundra with your family,” he said.
As I hung on to Evan, who was being buffeted by the wind, the air smelled big, clean, and timeless. I thought about what a friend who’d been to Alaska had warned me before we left home.
“There will come a moment,“ she’d said, when Alaska will make you will feel tiny and insignificant and awestruck in the face of this last frontier of nature.
I felt all that. I thought about God.
I then understood what the kids’ Sunday school teacher meant when he once told them that a miracle was anything in nature that made you say “Wow”.
Alex stretched out his arms and turned in a circle on the ridge, his brown hair blowing under his frayed blue and white Maple Leafs toque.
With his new brown hiking boots from Mountain Equipment Coop in Toronto, and his teenaged boy’s growth spurt limbs, he looked as sure footed as the Dall sheep.
“When I’m older, I’ll come back to Denali, “ he vowed. “Maybe with two or three guys, but this time, camping on my own inside the park.”
Earlier, he’d met a trio of young men in bandanas and shorts who were sitting by the side of the park road. They were wide eyed, and laughing with relief, but drained from having survived a close encounter with a mother grizzly and her two cubs earlier that afternoon.
The three had been camping in the backcountry overnight several miles from the road, when they’d come upon the bears. They’d backed away slowly, but deliberately, as they’d been trained, but not before snapping some photos of the four legged visitors.
We also saw plenty of bears in Denali, but we saw them the way I had hoped we would: from the bus.
The kids’ favourites?
Two young grizzlies that we spotted playing wrestling games on the gravelly banks of the Savage River near the Rangers station.
“They’re about a year old,” the driver estimated, as we marveled at the bears‘ pale golden fur, about the colour of a wet Golden Labrador Retriever.
When the bears got bored, one of them decided to try balancing on the wooden logs near the outhouse.
I thought it looked like an audition for Cirque du Soleil, and said so.
Alex rolled his eyes.
Eventually, the duo lumbered up the hill, past the Rangers’ parking lot.
One tourist actually followed, on foot, until a dumbfounded park ranger raced up to stop him.
“Do they give tickets for stupidity in Denali?” I wrote later in my diary.
“I wanted to get closer,” Alex told me.
I rolled my eyes.
-30--
Alaska Outdoors LLC
Camping and Multi Sport Adventure Tours
info@travelalaskaoutdoors.com
(800)320-2494
PO Box 875649
Wasilla, Alaska 99687
Outside U.S. (907)357-4020
Fax (907)357-4022
For $1,095 per adult, and $995 for kids under 18, families are provided an experienced local guide, canoes, tents, all entrance fees, all meals except two, twice daily hikes, and plenty of optional activities such as white water rafting, mountain biking, and horseback riding. And with daylight lasting 20 hours in the summer months, you can actually canoe at midnight! Airfare and accommodation before and after the trip are not included. Sleeping bags and mats can be rented.
Earth Bed and Breakfast
1001 W. 12th Avenue,
Anchorage, Alaska
99501
info@earthbb.com
907 2799907
Denali Room
Rates start at $120 plus local taxes.
Denali National Park and Preserve
http://www.nps.gov/dena/index.htm
P.O. Box 9
Denali Park, AK 99755-0009
907-683-2294
flights to Anchorage from Toronto, Air Canada via Vancouver.
or From Toronto, on United Airlines or American Airlines via Chicago O’Hare,
I wrote this travel story for the Toronto Star Travel editor, on spec, and he said it would be in the September 2010 papers, but it never got printed.
I thought it was good, and decided to share it with you here.
 |
| Wildlife in Denali Park |
 |
| Climbing in Denali Park |
 |
| Trevor Archibald from Alaska Outdoors showing us how to use a can of bear guard |
(Denali National Park -July 8, 2010)
At the Visitors Access Centre of Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, Trevor Archibald pulled out two cans of bear guard.
Holding both the black bottles with yellow labels casually in his right hand, the experienced outdoorsman made a thumbs-up sign with his other hand.
Then he taught us the best way to avoid bear attacks. We were about to hike through a 24,585 square-kilometre wilderness about the size of Massachusetts.
“Make a lot of noise when you are hiking today,” Archibald said. “Clap your hands, so you warn the animals you’re there.”
My husband, John, and I were with our sons, Alex, 13, and Evan, 10, at the entrance to Denali.
We’d taken family hiking trips before, to Italy and to Newfoundland and Labrador, but we’d always organized our own itineraries. For Alaska, because of the sheer size of the place, and because of the risk of bear attacks, going with an experienced outfitter was probably the safer thing to do.
Trevor, 24, works for Alaska Outdoors, based in Wasilla, the home of former US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The company offers weeklong family hiking and camping adventures, where they put clients together with two other families. They provide all the supplies, a van, two canoes, and the guide.
For four days in early July, we’d been camping in tents in southern Alaska, near salmon streams in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and climbing on ancient glaciers.
Denali was our ultimate challenge. It’s home to Mount McKinley, at 20,320 feet, North America’s highest peak.
And Trevor wasn’t coming in with us.
The US National Park Service doesn’t permit private guides or vehicles. They aim to reduce human interaction with the wildlife.
Denali was created in 1917 originally as a wilderness game reserve, and even today, though it is considered the most accessible of Alaska’s national parks, it has very few trails.
Both novice day hikers and experienced backcountry adventurers are free to simply wander anywhere in what the Frommer’s guidebook calls “the overwhelming vastness”. But very few people actually “get off the bus”, as Trevor had put it.
Instead, most of the 400,000 summer visitors take one of the park’s green shuttle busses on a safari. The park’s only road is a narrow, gravel track that runs 90 miles through the spectacular mountain scenery, above the tree line. It can take 12 hours round trip. The drivers help you spot wildlife through the windows.
But we planned to get off the shuttle and hike.
As we set off, I couldn’t help thinking of the 2007 movie “Into the Wild”, about the young American, Christopher McCandless, who hiked into Denali in the winter of 1992, and starved to death.
The abandoned school bus where McCandless died is still there, on the far northern edge of Denali. It has become a place of pilgrimage for some hikers.
At Mile 9, the two snow covered peaks of Mount McKinley came clearly into view out our bus windows. Our driver, Elton Parks (his real name) explained that most people call the landmark Denali, which means “The High One” in an Athabascan language.
“You’re lucky,” he tells us, adding that he’s been driving passengers in Denali for 29 summers. “The weather in Denali is clear like this only 15 to 20 per cent of the year.”
It was already 23 Celsius, and sunny. We had been advised to bring rain gear and gloves and warm jackets to Alaska. We wouldn’t need them.
After about two hours of driving, we arrived at Polychrome Overlook, where we got off the shuttle. It’s named for the many colours of rock visible on the expanse of mountain-passes created several hundreds of millions of years ago. Hues of brown and green and orange blend with some ancient hanging glaciers in the Alaska Range to the south. We could see for miles. (Hanging glaciers do not touch the ocean, but hang in mountain valleys. Tidewater glaciers actually touch the ocean.)
Climbing up from the Park Road through patches of willow thickets and dwarf birch, I remembered what the driver had told us. These patches of trees are favourite snacking grounds for moose. I clapped my hands to warn off any wildlife, as Trevor had advised us to do,
About 400 grizzlies roam Denali, along with packs of caribou, moose, Dall sheep, wolves and black bears.
We’d just come through the brush and into the clear wide open tundra when I turned to see what was behind us. A lone brown caribou looking for lunch didn’t notice me, grazing in the bushes below us. Evan called out to it. It lifted its head for a moment, twitched its ears. It continued eating. We watched silently until it moved away.
As we ascended towards Polychrome Mountain (5790 ft or 1,765 m), the terrain changed to springy, moist sub arctic tundra. Some of Denali’s 450 species of miniature wildflowers poked up through the green and brown moss: the bright yellow frigid arnica, and the pink meadow bistorts. It was too early in the season for berries.
The film “Heartbeats of Denali” showing at the Denali Visitor Centre depicts scenes of Native Alaskans harvesting berries in Denali in late summer. Until the grizzlies scare them off when the animals turn up looking for the same berry patch. The grizzlies need the berries to fatten up before hibernation. They eat mostly berries because surprisingly, there are few salmon in the park. The rivers are full of fine sediment called glacier flour, which is ground down by the glaciers. It not only turns the water milky blue but makes it inhospitable for salmon. I found it comforting to know that this also makes the grizzlies in Denali weigh just 350-450 pounds, which is a lot smaller then in other parts of Alaska.
Naturalists joke that at this altitude, the flowers and plants are tiny, but vital survivors who feed some of the largest, fiercest animals in the Denali food chain.
Every so often, we’d see patches of white fur on the ground.
The park is home to 2,500 wild Dall sheep. Each one can weigh close to 300 (136 kilos) pounds and stand over 3.5 feet (1.06 metres) tall.
Alex eventually spotted five or six in a pack, sure-footedly picking their way, one by one, across a steeple of rock.
After two hours, we reached the top, a narrow, grey, windswept ridge.
For 360 degrees, all around us there were more mountains, book-ended both east and west by two forks of the Toklat River, with its dry, rocky beds. The park road was a tiny, off-white sliver way below.
For my husband, this was what Alaska was all about.
“The beauty, in a pristine wilderness, where you can experience being alone, walking on the tundra with your family,” he said.
As I hung on to Evan, who was being buffeted by the wind, the air smelled big, clean, and timeless. I thought about what a friend who’d been to Alaska had warned me before we left home.
“There will come a moment,“ she’d said, when Alaska will make you will feel tiny and insignificant and awestruck in the face of this last frontier of nature.
I felt all that. I thought about God.
I then understood what the kids’ Sunday school teacher meant when he once told them that a miracle was anything in nature that made you say “Wow”.
 |
| top of Polychrome |
Alex stretched out his arms and turned in a circle on the ridge, his brown hair blowing under his frayed blue and white Maple Leafs toque.
With his new brown hiking boots from Mountain Equipment Coop in Toronto, and his teenaged boy’s growth spurt limbs, he looked as sure footed as the Dall sheep.
“When I’m older, I’ll come back to Denali, “ he vowed. “Maybe with two or three guys, but this time, camping on my own inside the park.”
Earlier, he’d met a trio of young men in bandanas and shorts who were sitting by the side of the park road. They were wide eyed, and laughing with relief, but drained from having survived a close encounter with a mother grizzly and her two cubs earlier that afternoon.
The three had been camping in the backcountry overnight several miles from the road, when they’d come upon the bears. They’d backed away slowly, but deliberately, as they’d been trained, but not before snapping some photos of the four legged visitors.
We also saw plenty of bears in Denali, but we saw them the way I had hoped we would: from the bus.
The kids’ favourites?
Two young grizzlies that we spotted playing wrestling games on the gravelly banks of the Savage River near the Rangers station.
“They’re about a year old,” the driver estimated, as we marveled at the bears‘ pale golden fur, about the colour of a wet Golden Labrador Retriever.
When the bears got bored, one of them decided to try balancing on the wooden logs near the outhouse.
I thought it looked like an audition for Cirque du Soleil, and said so.
Alex rolled his eyes.
Eventually, the duo lumbered up the hill, past the Rangers’ parking lot.
One tourist actually followed, on foot, until a dumbfounded park ranger raced up to stop him.
“Do they give tickets for stupidity in Denali?” I wrote later in my diary.
“I wanted to get closer,” Alex told me.
I rolled my eyes.
 |
| Cubs playing at Savage River, Denali National Park |
-30--
Alaska Outdoors LLC
Camping and Multi Sport Adventure Tours
info@travelalaskaoutdoors.com
(800)320-2494
PO Box 875649
Wasilla, Alaska 99687
Outside U.S. (907)357-4020
Fax (907)357-4022
For $1,095 per adult, and $995 for kids under 18, families are provided an experienced local guide, canoes, tents, all entrance fees, all meals except two, twice daily hikes, and plenty of optional activities such as white water rafting, mountain biking, and horseback riding. And with daylight lasting 20 hours in the summer months, you can actually canoe at midnight! Airfare and accommodation before and after the trip are not included. Sleeping bags and mats can be rented.
Earth Bed and Breakfast
1001 W. 12th Avenue,
Anchorage, Alaska
99501
info@earthbb.com
907 2799907
Denali Room
Rates start at $120 plus local taxes.
Denali National Park and Preserve
http://www.nps.gov/dena/index.htm
P.O. Box 9
Denali Park, AK 99755-0009
907-683-2294
flights to Anchorage from Toronto, Air Canada via Vancouver.
or From Toronto, on United Airlines or American Airlines via Chicago O’Hare,
