Denali National Park....Beautiful scenery and fabulous wildlife!

First, when a park is 6M acres and you can only drive a small part, it makes it hard to capture the essence. This is one gorgeous park with just spectacular scenery! Except for the first 15 mi you either have to take a tour bus of increasing distances or a shuttle without narration that stops at similar places. The road is all dirt and quite trecharous with twists and turns that make your stomach flip, after those 15 mi so you wouldn't want car traffic! With the Shuttle you can get off and flag another later, with the tour you are with it for the 8, 10, or 12 hours.  We chose to take the full 12 hour tour first, goes all the way to Kantishna, 92 mi each way!

We hoped to see wildlife and Mt. McKinley...one out of two achieved! It turns out that McKinley is in clouds more than sun so we may not get to see the highest peak in North America, but we will try again.  As for wildlife, we hit pay dirt...lots of moose and caribou, golden eagle, dal sheep, a bear, and even a lynx which is very rare. I don't think we would do the 12 hour again, I would chose the 8 hr trip to the Visitor center where we can also hike, but our guide/driver was phenomenal. I tried to capture just how steep and twisted this dirt road was that a full size bus takes you on, but just couldn't capture how scary it can be...

We started immediately with moose and caribou...well antlers in the tundra!

Next a Golden Eagle way up high!

Soon we began to see more moose and caribou...

These caribou were interesting, their skin is quite different than some we will see later...

Finally we got to see a grizzly bear, way off in the distance. our tour guide reminded us that few animals can survive this 50 below winter, no elk are here, no deer!

And this cute snow footed hare. I wish we had a picture of the lynx, we saw him dive into the brush as a hawk chased him away from her babies and the next thing you know, he was way off on a ledge, very distinctive, black tail tip and ears, reddish body and sooo fast!

When we got out to wonder lake, about 5 hours into the trip, they handed out mosquito nets...I knew I was in trouble. interesting the ranger that joined us didn't need one, must be immune or have much better spray, we had spray, nets and they still swarmed us!

We were treated to another Moose..in moose creek

We reached Kantisha at the 92 mi, the halfway mark in our tour, the end of the road, we took pictures of both us and the small planes that land up here.

On the way back we hit pay dirt again but with some BIG boys!

We watched this fella for quite a while as he would go down, eat kelp or something similar and come up for air, really cool to see him in his natural habitat...

next we found a big boy Caribou!

And another, big boy Jr...

We stopped at a pseudo visitor station where we could pick up moose and caribou antlers as well as dal sheep. Those antlers are very heavy!!

While the wildlife was spectacular, the scenery was even more so, hard to show...

I wish we could have seen Mt McKinley, at 20000 ft it just grabs those clouds...next time we would do the 8 hr trip out to Eielson Visitor Center and back, same wildlife, a good place to see McKinley if possible and far fewer Mosquitos than Wonder Lake or Kantishna! still a fabulous tour!  later in the week if the weather improves we may try a shuttle to Eielson to view the elusive Mt McKinley!