The Birding Traveler is BJ's blog you should check out!
We are a Denali National Park and Preserve this week. What a magnificent national treasure we have. It just goes on and on and on and on!
You can only drive into the first 15 miles of the park. So on Monday we took one of the bus tours into the interior of the park - we went 44 miles to the Eielson Visitor's Center and then turned around and came back. It took 4+ hours to go in and about same coming back. We saw Dall Sheep way up on the mountain tops where they hang out to make it hard for predators to get to them. We saw bears snoozing on rocks near the road. Another mamma bear with her cubs feeding along a stream. Caribou hanging around ice patches because the mosquitoes bothered them less there! And, miles and miles and miles and miles of beautiful scenery including majestic Mt McKinly, the highest peak in North America. In this area they refer to it as Denali Mountain, the Native American name for it!
The original park was Mt McKinley National Park, but in the 1970's it was tripled in size to 6+ million acres and renamed the Denali National Park and Preserve. The original park is now designated a wilderness area where human impact is minimized to the greatest extent possible. The road we took Monday remains unpaved to help minimize the impact.
Here are some magnificent scenes we have seen. Pictures are worth a 1000 (or more) words but even pictures do not do this wonderful place justice!
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| Denali Mountain - before the clouds obscured the view! |
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| A fox that was backlit by the reflected light from the damp bushes behind |
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| Polychrome Valley and the road we traveled! Note no guardrail! |
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| Another view of Denali across a valley |
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| A Ptarmigan, BJ got to add it to her list of first in her life bird sightings! |
The town of Chicken AK we visited on the Top of the World road way last week was going to be named Ptarmigan in honor of the this bird which is readily found there! But, nobody was sure how to spell it, but some did know how to spell chicken, so that is what they named the town - or so they say!
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| A Dall sheep in protected space! |
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| Some more Dall sheep |
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| However, the females and the lambs spend some time in lower, greener pastures because they needed the better nutrition there! Of course some of them became nutrition for somebody else! |
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| The caribou shedding the last of his winter coat |
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| Some more caribou |
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| A moose enjoying some salad |
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| Our guide said the caribou lay in the ice patch to avoid the mosquitoes. If they got too bad the caribou would stick their snout in the snow to keep the mosquitoes from flying up into their nostrils! |
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| Mamma bear and her cubs on a morning outing near a stream! |
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| Pappa bear was looking for a quite spot to nap! |
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| Our road crossed Savage River on the bridge. |
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| The scenery just goes on and on and on and on!! |
Always at home, no matter where we are!!
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