August 12: Denali Park
Well, as you can see from the photo above - the sunrise WAS amazing. And the "glass is half full" way to approach the start today was that we DID get to see that. But the truth of the matter was that the tour bus to take us all around the interior of Denali Park left the chalet at 5 am. Ouch that's early. We actually considered not doing the five plus hour adventure because we'd done it on one other trip here and saw mostly trees and mountains. But in the end, our second excursion wasn't until 5 pm, and our gal-pal fellow travel companion Patti had not done it, so we got up. BOY are we glad we did. In our five previous trips to Alaska we've never seen this much live wildlife, in person. And it was made even more stunning by new technology being used on the re-vamped school buses that are used for taking visitors into the interior of the park - where for the most part any other motorized vehicles are not permitted. The drivers now have a super-zoom video camera that feeds into monitors on the bus. I will say, that on this morning with the naked eye I personally saw more wildlife than I've seen COMBINED on all our other Alaskan trips. But here's one example....a bear was spotted, and when I zoomed in with my camera I captured the image on the right. Meanwhile the driver had zoomed in and was playing the image on the left. Yes, wow.....
Early in the trip we saw Mt. Denali - and we were told (and could tell) that probably by day's end visitors to the park would no longer be able to see the tallest mountain in all of North America. The pic below that shows you the dirt road we were on and the "tour bus."
At our first "comfort break" there was an overlook and we posed for a selfie and I took a pic of the panoramic scenery and did an intro video for the day.
Here's the screen capture of the main wildlife we saw. Our driver said that the we had topped the "grand slam" sightings level with what he called the "inside the park homeroom" of viewings" - we saw Mt. Denali, which is unusual...we saw caribou, moose, sheep, bear (3 of them), and most unusual we saw wolverines sprinting across the field. All just wow sightings.
Jeep Driving Excursion
This evening the three of us joined other guests in driving our own jeeps through Denali Park. We'd done this three years ago and while I wouldn't rank it at the top of my most favorite Alaskan excursions, I remembered it as enjoyable. And besides - what else would we do this evening? We enjoyed a late lunch/early dinner. At 5 pm we were picked up, loaded into jeeps and were on our way. Kim was the expert driver, I was the official photographer, and Patti was the official passenger :) Right away we saw a moose and her baby calf on the side of the road, which was cool. And while it wasn't a bad time, it was long....the roads were very VERY dusty and full of potholes. And honestly everything we'd normally have thought was cool, we'd seen it on the morning tour. Still, it was a pleasant way to spend the evening together with our great friend Patti :) We're up and out of the lodge by 8:30 am tomorrow, board the scenic domed train to Anchorage and will spend about six hours riding the rails south before having dinner and then on Sunday, it's on to the ship!
No comments:
Post a Comment