The Many Faces of Denali

Thank you to our new friends, Tom and Heather, for a wonderful home cooked meal.     It was so nice to spend time at their home after our usual diet of hotels and restaurants.

We are off to Denali National Park.      We pass thru Wasilla and Willow on our way.     We find out later in the day that we just missed a major fire around Willow that closed the highway and unfortunately destroyed many homes.     The last I heard it is still burning.     We talked with a couple that came through a couple hours after us and they witnessed planes dropping chemicals and water trying to contain it.     It has been unseasonably warm and dry, so fire danger levels are very high.

We were soon treated to numerous vistas of the great one - Denali.     We were 100 miles away, but the cloud cover was cooperating, so I took pictures whenever possible.    Who knows what tomorrow will bring.............

This sign was at one of the pull-offs.     It shows the heights of the two major peaks.

I pulled out the big lens, again, and caught the light cloud cover on the mountain.    

Monday morning we boarded a Denali bus for our 11 hour trip to Wonder Lake and back.     Keep in mind that these are pretty much school buses and the road is gravel.     What were we thinking???   Our driver, Jeremy, had started driving here just last year.      He also seemed a bit of an introvert.     Fortunately, people on the bus were friendly and we supplied our own narrative.     We met a fun couple from Indiana and talked with them a lot.

The distance between the north and south peaks is about 1.25 miles.    It certainly gives some perspective to this shot.

 

You can see most of the mountain range in this shot.      For those of you who have been here, have you noticed the oddity in all my shots?       Yes, we had a day in the mid-70's, no wind, and not a cloud in the sky the entire day.      How did we get so lucky?

I did a little hiking to get this, our final location.     After seeing the grizzly earlier  (see tomorrow's post) I was constantly looking around since RJ stayed behind to talk with a couple from Minnesota.

We are about 24 miles from Denali in this shot.     The perspective is off in the above shot because I use the zoom a lot!       This one is more realistic of the actual distance.

Tomorrow - The Animals of Denalli