Denali - a TRUE wilderness within "The Last Frontier"

We arrived in Denali on Friday, June 20th and will be here until Saturday, the 28th. It is an INCREDIBLY beautiful place. We have yet to see Mt McKinley, or Denali (the "Tall One"), as the Athabaskans refer to it. The mountain is only visible about 10-15% of the time and, thus far, the weather has not cooperated. We are, however, optimistic that we will see the great mountain. Believe us, the entire Alaska Range is awe-inspiring, so we can only imagine what we are in for (hopefully).

On Sunday we took a 12 hour bus tour to Kantishna at the end of the park road. There is only one road that goes the 90 miles into Denali and to the base of Mt McKinley. No private vehicles are allowed past the first 16 miles, so one must take a park bus. It was an incredible trip with LOTS of wildlife and park history. The bus had a naturalist and a park ranger and we received a lot of interesting information. There was an abundant amount of wildlife - bears, moose, caribou, eagles, wolves, fox and much more. We have included several pictures within this Blog as we're having difficulty getting a sufficient Internet connection to publish photos to ShutterFly. Perhaps we'll be able to catch up with some additional pics in the future.

We have done several hikes, gone to the Denali NPS Dog Sled Kennels and viewed them in "action", attended some interesting Park Ranger presentations and taken a couple wildlife drives. In the next couple days we're going to take a Jeep safari into the Park where WE actually drive the jeeps and also go on a Monster 4X4 Truck that goes deep into the backcountry. Lot's of fun coming up.

We'll keep you posted; we enjoy hearing from you,

Stay safe,

P&J