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Talkeetna → Denali National Park 153 mi (246 km) |
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Up, up, and away, everyone!
It was a calm night on the side of the road and a morning with a fiery sunrise! A short way down the road, the mighty Denali towered its full 20,310 feet, unchallenged by clouds! That put us in an elite group called the 30% Club. It turns out, Denali is so huge and has such an unpredictable effect on the weather that only 30% of folks who visit the mountain actually see it!
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After breakfast in the motor home, we moseyed into the old railroad town of Talkeetna, which was enjoying its last few weeks of summer!
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At the head of historic Main Street stands the iconic Nagley’s Store, built in 1916 by Horace Nagley and today the headquarters of Stubbs the Cat, Talkeetna’s honorary mayor since 1997! We stocked up on some supplies here before backtracking to a surprise adventure!
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We checked in at K2 Aviation for—oh my gosh—a flight-seeing tour of Denali! Talkeetna is the main jumping off point for flights in and around Denali, but I sure wasn’t expecting us to actually climb aboard a 1958 de Havilland Beaver, strap in, put on a headset, and take off into the Alaskan sky!
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These rough and rugged bush planes are specially designed for quick takeoffs and landings, which make them ideal for tricky feats, like landing on glaciers! They also have the capacity for an oil drum so the pilot can actually add fuel mid-flight! Even though that was comforting, I sure hoped our pilot wouldn’t need to do that this time!
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We whizzed up over the lush landscape of old forest and kettle lakes with remote fishing and writing cabins on their shores. As we approached the massive mountain, the forest turned into great, carved glaciers! From above, they looked like giant tire tracks in the slush, still carving the valley as they will be long after I’m gone! Then, we reached the mountain!
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Denali is surrounded by a whole bunch of peaks, like mini-bosses before the hero battles the Big Bad! They have intimidating names like Hunter, Foraker, and Moose Tooth, all towering pyramids of un-melting ice over a mile high! But then there was Denali herself, dwarfing each and every one of them, so huge it’s visible all the way from Anchorage, 265 miles away!
The mountain’s north peak was conquered in 1910 by a group of miners called the Sourdough Expedition, who fueled their climb with doughnuts and hot chocolate. Three years later, Walter Harper, Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, and Robert Tatum conquered the south peak. Since then, about 32,000 climbers have attempted the peak, half have succeeded, and a hundred have died trying! From our tiny plane circling the mighty mountain, it was easy to see how.
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We circled back around and left the snows of Denali, returning gradually over the kettle lakes from ice to trees, then touched down. We had lunch at Mile-High Pizza, which offered reindeer meat on their pies, then headed north into the gathering storm! On the road up, as clear sky turned to turbulent rain, as aspens turned to subalpine firs, and as cell phone reception went kaput, it became abundantly clear just how vast Alaska as a whole really is. Its mountains tower, and its valleys lead away to secret places that maybe no one has gone! Its storms are massive, and they come and go as they please!
Summer is short here, so every major construction project has to happen at the same time. It took a long time to reach our next destination, Riley Creek Campground at the edge of Denali National Park. We motored in, found our spot in the Wolf Loop, and waited for the rain to settle.
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When it did settle, I took the chance to wander the campground and explore the green! Whenever I’ve thought about Alaska, it’s always been about the glaciers and stony peaks, never the incredible northern rainforest! See, when it’s not snowing here, it’s usually raining, which makes this the ideal habitat for wildlife and mushrooms, like this gypsy (Cortinarius caperatus)!
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I think mushrooms are fascinating! If you’ll remember, I got such a kick out of discovering them in Greenbelt Park last year, but here in Denali, set among the brilliant green, the chanterelles and amanitas look like they belong in a fairy kingdom!
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We had some quesadillas in the motorhome, then went to bed early to be ready for our crack-of-dawn tour tomorrow. I hope the weather will clear up, but the forecast isn’t so good. I think we were really amazingly lucky to have had the views we did today. This will be a day I’ll long remember!
Nice to snow ya!
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Total Ground Covered: 271 mi (436 km) |
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