Day 21 – The Denali Highway to Denali National Park
It snowed trace amounts last night, but we were warm in our sleeping bags. Another excellent breakfast of chocolate oatmeal and coffee from the Bialetti. We had been inquiring lots about the Denali Highway up until now and had been highly warned against it by everyone. It is the most direct route to Denali National Park, bypassing the route north to Fairbanks or the route South to Anchorage. We were told that it wasn’t paved and was likely snow covered. We figured we’d take these warnings with some salt, from our experience of other people’s warnings up until now.
We headed towards the highway 135 mile highway, with the paved first 30 miles being in excellent condition. When the road became gravel, it still wasn’t bad. We occasionally passed huge heavy duty snow plows and highway grading vehicles, one worker telling us that the highway was only opened for the season last week. Lucky for us! It would have been a pain to go back out and up to Fairbanks or down to Anchorage. The highway was stunning, the most scenic we have seen up until this point. We drove through varying weather conditions, through sun and through snow flurries on high mountain passes. Katie got some excellent shots of a bald eagle.
We made it through to Denali National Park by 2pm or so. After lunching on soup and scrambled spiced egg sandwiches, we checked in with the visitor center and the backcountry office. A condition of getting a backcountry permit is to watch a 30 minute how-to-act-in-the-wilderness video. It wasn’t terribly useful, being exclusively focussed on summer conditions. At the moment most of the park is still blanketed in snow. We learned that there are no trails in Denali National Park, and instead they pride themselves on allowing visitors to bushcrash wherever they please. We chose the Saveage River area, without much information apart from a paragraph description and an $8 USGS topo.
We planned to go for 4 days, 3 nights, packing for 4 nights. It wasn’t until 7pm that we finally departed from the viewpoint closest the the valley we were headed towards.
We weren’t keen on bushcrashing for too long this first evening, so we were focussed on getting the requisite half mile from the highway and out of sight of the highway. It was particularly hard getting out of sight, since the highway has good vantage of a huge amount of terrain up the Savage River basin. We decided on a place after an hour or so of bushwacking just behind a ridge. I thought it would be an excellent time to test out the emergency shelter, and after suggesting the idea to Katie, she too was keen. It ended up being quite a nice shelter, if short. I figured it would be worth it to sacrifice headroom for a closer-to-the-ground and more storm proof shelter.
No bugs, some wind, no precipitation, and an incredible view right from our sleeping bags. Not bad!
| Published on May 9th, 2011 | | Posted by admin |