08/11 -08/13 Our Journey took us next to Denali where we had scheduled a Natural History tour into the Park by Bus. As we drove north we were blessed with clear sunny skies and a fantastic view of Denali from the South. It is my understanding that due to it’s extreme height of 20,308 ft. It creates its own weather and is only clearly visible about 30% of the time. We were lucky enough to arrive on one of those days. We made the Cantwell RV Park our home base for our time here found it to be clean and well maintained with good WiFi a nice selection of books to exchange and hot showers. We hiked around the Denali Visitors Center and were amazed at the variety of mushrooms growing. We met our bus and our tour guide Chris who took us into the park for our tour. There are a number of choices for tours but we chose the shorter one. When the bus arrived it was already pretty full and we wondered if there would be space for us all but Chris has roped off some seats for our group as we had made reservations in advance. This tour took us approx. 23 miles into the park and we were able to photograph both Cariboo and Moose. The Park itself was set up specifically to protect the wildlife in this area and is a great place to study the natural behavior of the animals. Everyone is encouraged to keep their voices low when the bus stops for wildlife. We were also treated to a talk by a native Athabaskan about his culture at one of our stops in the park. The rangers here patrol year round and use dog sleds in the winter. Again we were hoping to see some bear or wolves but were not lucky on this tour.
Living the Dream 