What is it about the icy granite massif that this park is named after that makes it irresistible to humans? Is it simply that at 20,310 feet tall, on a clear day, it’s visible up to 200 miles away? Why have people been documenting their attempt to scale it since 1903? Even today more than 1,000 people attempt to ascend it each year between April and mid-July, most flying to base camp at 7,200 feet which still leaves over 13,000 feet of rugged climbing. About ½ of those make it to the top.
Most guidebooks will tell you that only about 30% of visitors to the park will even see the top of it, in part because at that height, Denali Peak creates its own weather. Despite this, it’s so large that approximately 80% of it rises above the surrounding landscape, making it likely you’ll see some portion of it and every glimpse is jaw-dropping. This perspective is both humbling and awe-inspiring. The human life, in comparison, feels insignificant and fleeting.
And it’s not just Denali Peak that provides this perspective – the size of the park and the lack of human impact on the area are also factors.
Given that Denali National Park, Wilderness and Preserve consist of nearly 6 million acres of protected land, most visitors will see only a fraction of the park from the single 92-mile road into it. In fact, due to a recent landslide, the road is blocked at mile marker 45.4!
In addition, beyond mile 15, private vehicles are restricted without a special permit for camping. Even with our Teklanika camping permit, we were only allowed to drive our RV to the campsite, park it, and drive it back out at the end of our stay. We could not simply drive the RV around.
Instead, the park service offers “school” busses that traverse the road allowing visitors to hop on and hop off at any point in time mainly because unlike most national parks, there are very few cut / marked trails. To hike in Denali, you simply bushwhack your way through wilderness to any location you want to see.
We were there 2.5 days and 2 nights. We spent the first afternoon at the Visitor Center, which provides a lot of information about the flora, fauna, and animals in the area including some unusual adaptations, like a frog that freezes itself in the winter and thaws with spring! They also have a movie where you can see Denali throughout the different seasons and one on the fact that sled dogs are still the main way the park is patrolled.
The drive into Teklanika Campground was gorgeous and nearly impossible to capture well with a camera due to the vast nature of the mountains and extensive valleys and riverbeds, but we tried anyway. Through binoculars we saw a moose.
The next morning we hopped a park bus, saw some caribou, and went to the end of the road (currently mile 45.4). We exited and descended stairs to a flat riverbed below the Polychrome Mountains to hike the east fork of the Toklat River. Walking through chest-high willow thickets, dense forests, and boggy tundra can be slow going so it’s popular throughout the park to walk the gravel bars of the braided rivers, which is much easier going.
Back on the park shuttle, we saw a grizzly and more caribou.
We had heavy rain the following day which dissuaded Doug from taking a bike ride up and down the main road. When it cleared in the early evening, we walked near our campsite as the rangers said that wolves were in that area, but we didn’t see any. We also never saw any Dall sheep in the area, whose protection were the driving force behind Charles Sheldon’s fight to protect the area, and more importantly the animals in it, in 1917.
Due to our windshield repair we had to forego our initially planned third night’s stay in Denali to complete the repair in Fairbanks. I would have liked to have taken the free bus over to the sled dog area, but we didn’t have the time.
Besides this quick post, there’s a lot of information out there on this vast and extremely wild national park and for good reason – it’s a must-not-be-missed stop in Alaska!
