Mushrooms And The Buses - More Denali Pictures

 Here are some more pictures from Denali - the Alpine Trail and the Healy Overlook Trail.  

This was the Alpine trail.  Nature's a pretty good landscape artist.  

I'm not sure what these black mushrooms are, but they're pretty cool.  

I think these are puffballs.  

Ever since I read Richard Wright's  The Overstory, I realize that 'rotting' log just doesn't convey the process of giving back life that trees do after they die.  They're homes and food to untold species from small mammals, birds, and too many insects to even think about.  And then they give back all their nutrients and atoms for other trees and plants to use.  "Rot" has too negative an image.  And this is why we compost most of the food scraps from the kitchen.  Watching the compost heap full of scraps and leaves and other green plants slowly turn into rich compost - a factory of worms and all sorts of little critters - transforming the 'waste' into new plant food reminds me every year  that nature doesn't need humans to sustain the planet.  

Best as I can tell from my mushroom field guide is that these tan fungi poking up out of the ground like fingers are possibly strap coral mushrooms or pestle coral mushrooms.  

I just liked the look of this clump of tree trunks on the side of the trail.  

And when we got to a road we thought (correctly) was a shortcut to our car, we passed the bus lot.  It would appear that they are using a lot few buses this summer, even though they are only allowing half as many people on.  We had no interest at all on a bus ride with strangers for hours and hours.  But if this were my first and probably only trip ever to Denali National Park, I might have thought differently.  

There was another row of buses to the left and another to the right.