I've had a lot of people ask me for pictures and comments from my trip to Denali. Since it's hard to pick out only a few pictures, and because I don't want to send around e-mails with 50 mega-bites of attachments, I thought it would be easier to just put it all into this blog so that everyone can look through it at their leisure.

I've also just returned from a few days in Yosemite (by way of Sonoma), so I added some pictures and comments from that little excursion as well.

Pay no attention to the dates here. It appears that blogs only post entries from the most recent to the oldest (who knew?). I wanted this to read from the start of my trip to the end, so I just assigned dates to each post to accoplish that. Also, please read the side-bar on how to enlarge the pictures.

Now that it's done, it looks like I've written quite a bit. Please don't feel like you have to read any of it, just enjoy the pictures if you want. And, of course, if you want any additional information on either of these ventures, please feel free to send me an e-mail at ctorrence1@cox.net.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Arrival at Denali National Park

Denali National Park covers about 6 million acres. It's about the size of Massachusetts, or half the size of Switzerland. If you could explore 1,000 acres per day, it would take you almost 16 1/2 YEARS to see the whole park.  The Denali train station is right inside the park entrance, and only a couple hundred yards from the visitors center.

Denali train station

After checking in at the visitors center, I hopped on a shuttle-bus to the Riley Creek campground - very conveninet since the campground is about a half-mile away, and I was lugging around 80 lbs of stuff.

Visitors Center


Within all of Denali's 6 million acres, there are only about 275 established campsites in 7 different campgrounds.  About 150 of the park's campsites are at Riley Creek.

Riley Creek, about 100 yds from my campsite

Most of the Riley Creek sites are set up for RV's, but about a quarter of them are "tent only" - which is where I'm staying.   I chose to reserve my campsite at Riley Creek, figuring that since I'm by myself, there'd be less chance of being eaten by a grizzly if I were sleeping among a larger group of people. I also thought that, if  I wanted to, I could move to one of the more remote "walk-up" campgrounds later in the week.


My campsite
 

Each campsite has a bear-proof food locker, and unless you're actually in the processs of cooking and/or eating, all of your stuff is supposed to remain in the locker. There's also a fire-pit, and you're allowed to pick up fallen wood around the campground. After seeing the sign in the picture below, I was a little concerned that my food locker was only about 30 feet from my tent. More alarming, though, was that as I was looking around for firewood, I found a huge pile of fresh anamal "skat" about 10 feet from my tent. Turns out that it came from a moose, however, and not a bear.  For some reason, that made me feel better.


Sign between my campground and visitors center

Also close to the Riley Creek campground is the Wilderness Access Center, or "WAC", which is the trasportation hub of the park. Outside of this area immediately inside the main gate, there is only one 90-mile road that goes into the park. The rest is all wilderness, and there are no maintained trails.  The first 15 miles of the road are paved, then it turns to gravel. At that point, there's a gate and a ranger station, and the road is no longer open to public traffic - to use it and go further into the park, you have be on a shuttle-bus from the WAC.

The smaller campgrounds are all located out along the park road at distances ranging from 13 miles to 85 miles from the entrance. Some of the sites can be reserved in advance while others are only available to "walk-ups". The two smallest campgrounds have only 7 campsites each, and no improvements, such as toilets or running water. Wilderness, or backcountry camping is also allowed, and I'll describe that a little later.

Posted by