Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Off to Denali








 


Monday July 14


We arrived in Fairbanks at about 1:30am on Monday July 14th, after 16 hours of travel. It was another indication of just how large and remote Alaska is. After a few hours sleep, we spent several hours at a local bird sanctuary. We did not see a large number of species, but the dragonflies and bees tried to compensate.  We met our trip leader and fellow travelers for dinner. 


Tuesday, July 15


This morning was devoted to traveling from Fairbanks to our lodge in the back country of Denali National Park, but that description does not cover the diversity of the experience!  We left Fairbanks about an hour early to provide a time buffer in case there were delays through the area of the Nenana Ridge Complez wildfires. This same itinerary two weeks ago had to adapt to the highway being closed, and last week traffic was delayed by 1.5 hours in two locations of fires. Wildfires are a natural aspect of the Boreal(Taiga) forest, and in most cases the fires are allowed to burn unless human habitation or infrastructure is threatened, We drove past fire damage very close to the highway but were lucky and had no delays at all!


With the extra time we were able to stop in the small town of Nenana, where the final golden spike of the Alaska Railroad was placed by President Harding in 1923. Nenana is also home to the Ice Classic, an annual competition to predict when the ice on the Nenana River will break up enough for a large ceremonial tripod to fall into the water. Along the way, our trip leader provided interesting Alaska and Denali environmental information— for example, the tree line in Alaska is at about 2000 feet, compared to 11,000 feet in Colorado. 


We also had time to stop at the Denali park visitors center before proceeding to meet our helicopters for the next piece of the journey. We learned that the initial founding of the park in 1917 was to protect the Dall sheep in the high mountains. En route to the helicopters we saw a moose cow and two calves by the side of the road— a rare and lucky sighting. 


The helicopter ride took about 40 minutes to transport us 90 miles deep into the park. The park road has been closed since 2022 from a landslide but is expected to reopen in late 2026. With the road closed there are only three lodges operational in the back country of Denali, and all rely on flying guests in and out. This means that right now there are less than 100 people in a 50 mile radius, including all the staff and guests of the lodges… a rare chance to have this part of the park “all to ourselves”. We were again lucky to spy three Dall sheep from the helicopter windows. 


After lunch, the group chose which of several hikes were offered by the lodge naturalists. We chose the longer but lower elevation hike and got to investigate an abandoned beaver lodge as well as identifying prints (and scat) from wolf, bear and moose along the way. We saw a number of interesting native plants and returned to the lodge for a talk on the medicinal uses of many of them.  A long but satisfying first day.


Pictured: the moose cow and one of her calves, Nenana Ice Classic tripod, helicopter in Denali, dragonfly, female Redpoll, fire damage near the Parks Highway 

No comments:

Post a Comment