Backpacking Denali with Travis

First off, this post is about things that happened WAY in the past. With working coming to a close and trying to get moved back to Austin, it was very hectic and most computer things, such as email, Facebook, and this blog, were neglected. Now that I'm back in Austin, its time to update! Yay! I wrote most things down on paper so that I could remember....

July 23-25
The weekend my family was in town, we decided to go to Denali National Park. It took about 4 hrs to drive up to the park, and we, in Day Family fashion, didn't get on the road until around 9:00 pm. As we drove up, dad was amazed at how long the sun stays out up here. He got excited about it, and it's always cool to see him excited about something. We drove in and found our campsite, which turned out to be the wrong one, but whatever.

The next day, we were promptly told we were in the wrong campsite and to move our stuff. After putting the tents away, we drove down to the visitor's center to get permits for the area that we were going to go backpacking in. I suppose because Alaska is just that hardcore (or for conservation) there are no trails in Denali. If you want to go backpacking, you sign up for an area and hike wherever you want within that area. The only rule is that you can't camp within site of the road. We took the bus out to our area, and then waved goodbye to our parents. Most passengers never leave the bus, so you could see that there were some that looked on with jealous envy.

Setting up camp out of sight of the road was harder then we originally thought. The area was gently sloping up from the road, which meant that you could see a lot from the road in this area. We ended up hiking over eight miles to just be out of sight of the road! We started out by hiking in a river basin, which is a broad flat area that has lots of river rocks in it. The rivers in this part of the park are braided, so they split up and meander around. This makes river crossings difficult but not dangerous. After a while, I realized that we had hiked up the wrong river, and need to be in the one directly to our west. This meant getting out of the river bed and hiking across thick willows. It was tough. The willows were about hip-high, and would crush under foot, producing a walking feeling similar to post-holing through snow.

We arrived at our camp about 10:30 pm (still a lot of light!) and had dinner. While having dinner, a huge herd of caribou came across our path! When on the buses, you could stop for 15 minutes so that passengers can get pictures of caribou. Now we had about 40 not 20 yards from us while we were eating. I've decided that if you want to see wildlife in the park, you should definitely get off the road!

The next morning we hiked back to the road and caught a bus back to the visitors center. For the rest of the day, we did 'regular' tourist stuff, and had a lot of fun.

Oh and the mountain is really big.