More Denali Pictures and Thoughts

You can drive into the park 12 miles to Savage River.  From there on you need to take the bus or get a special permit to drive.  At Savage River there's a wonderful 2 mile loop trail which I've posted about in the past.  While people stopped in the parking lot, relatively few went on the trail.  And only we had masks ready to pull up if people were nearby.  The first view is from the bridge looking southeast.

There are lots of rocky outcroppings along the trail.  

And lots of lichens.  

The trail comes along Savage River on one side for a mile.  Then you cross a bridge and come back the other side.  You can see the sun on the water despite the mostly cloudy day.  

The Alpine Trail starts near the Savage River campground, and if you take the whole trail, gets you to the Savage River Trail parking lot where the pictures above are from.  We started on the Alpine Trail once and got a ways in, but turned back.  Then we went to where it ends and watched a mother bear and several cubs go up the trail we would have been arriving on had we continued the hike.  

The Alpine Trail is  lovely with totally different terrain and vegetation from the nearby Savage River trail.  Here's a tiny waterfall in the creek you go by.  

And this is from the road driving back to Riley Creek Campground.  This is an example of why you may easily miss the wildlife around you.  There is a herd of caribou in this picture.  No, don't even try.  I could barely spot them in the original higher resolution version of this picture and I knew where to look.  We found them the most common way to see wildlife - see other people looking through binoculars out into the distance.  It took a while with my binoculars until I saw them.  They were the only large animals we saw.  And a ground squirrel and a bunch of tree squirrels.  There was also a golden eagle flying around at this spot.  

Despite the forecast of rain, we had a rainless Wednesday and the sun was making its location known through the clouds enough that we could see our shadows most of the time.  It was a fine day and the campfire at the end led to a delicious meal.  

I look at this picture and it's hard to believe we've had this van since 1998.  It replaced the one we'd originally bought in 1971 after we got married and honeymooned on a road trip from LA to the Great Slave Lake in the Canadian New Territories.  Followed by a summer trip to Mexico, British Honduras, and Guatemala the next summer.  Then we had kids  and didn't take a long trip until we drove up to Alaska.  I remember when we finally sold the first one after 24 years (and my mechanic telling me the holes in the floor couldn't really be repaired), that my son told me that he and his sister got worried.  After all, we'd had the car longer than we'd had them and they were concerned we might get rid of them next.  We finally got new sleeping bags last year, but we still have some stools and a hatchet that were in the original van.  (As I write that I realize they're in the picture.)

And I'd also like to compliment the folks who designed the Riley Creek campgrounds.  The spots of the cars and tents had absolutely no mud even though it had rained a lot before we got there.  And you're a very good COVID distance from the other sites.  Though you have to go into the Mercantile (a small grocery there) to claim your reserved campsite.  But the visitor center is closed.  There are two masked rangers behind plexiglas barriers giving information to tourists, many of whom were not wearing masks.  This was really the most contact with others since early March and only our second outing.  And we only did this to let the carpet guy install our carpet that came last fall, but they held up installing until the kitchen floor was put in.  But the bamboo flooring didn't come til really late.  It got in, but there wasn't time to put in the carpet.  So our life has been on hold to a certain extent since last fall when we started putting as much stuff as we could downstairs so we could clear the upstairs.  Then the virus hit and I didn't want anyone spending a couple of days in the house.  

But we've had time to learn more about how the virus spreads and other friends have had workers in to do things with no bad consequences.  So we decided on the Denali trip to be out of the house while the carpet went in.  But the carpet installer had a longer estimate for the work than the salesman.  So only the living room and the hall were done, not the upstairs bedrooms.  But I'm delighted that this got us up to Denali.  And the carpet looks great and we're going to be very careful about what comes back upstairs and what gets given away or tossed.