Anita here, before we lined up to get on the bus, I spent a few minutes with Courtney, one of the girls at the central information desk. She and her boyfriend Brian are working at Denali for the second year. They have been traveling and enjoying various parts of the world since acquiring their undergraduate degrees. They plan to work as they travel for a few more years. What a great way to enjoy your time before you settle down to start your career.
Todays 12 hour tour is actually (supposedly) just a shuttle bus ride to Kantishna and back. No tour guide, no freebees, just a ride, or so they told us. Well it was certainly much different than that. The driver, Kim, turned out to be one of the best tour guides you could ask for. She has been an employee for several years as a bus driver, but yet she was able to give a great explanation of all questions. She was able to locate virtually all the wildlife we saw and to include a prehistoric dinosaur. Have you ever seen a Treeasaurusrex. Well, let me tell you. We did and I'll post a photo below.
Grizzleys. Mon & cubs (@ 2 years old)
Dall Sheep
Caribou
Bear ate the posts
loose moose
Right off the bat, she lay'ed out the rules for stopping and watching and the reasoning behind them. It was clear she was in charge. I like that. It made watching extremely good and respectful of the animals surroundings. She would stop at every spotting and allow everyone to take all the photos they wanted. She imparted her experiences with watching events and pointed out peritnant things we needed to know. Her safe driving ability while driving the bus over and around sharp curves on dangerous mountainsides with deep drop offs and little room to spare was commendable. Thank you Kim
We rode the bus all the way to Kantishna, which is an old mining town 92 miles into the park. It has a small airport--grass runway for small planes. Most I saw were Cessna, Dehaviland's or Piper Cubs. It apparently was busy at times since most of the flights are to transport either employees or business people. They do bring in some supplies and fly in tourists that stay in a couple beautiful lodges there. Some supplies are brought in by truck, but little because of the dangerous roads.The millions of mosquitoes there are much larger than elsewhere in the park, or so it seemed. They were there in swarms within seconds after departing the bus. If you didn't have proper protection from them you were in immediate trouble .
Restored Fanny Quigleys house
The home of Fanny Quigley is located there, as I mentioned in Thursday's posting. It is a small four room house with only bare necessities. No running water or electricity. Normal for the day. I seriously can't understand how she coped with the mosquitoes. I haven't seen them so bad since I was in Frobisher Bay in the North West Territory of Canada way back in 1962. There, they were the size of a half dollar and swarmed in the megamillions. Never have I ever seen them so ferocious as there.
We stopped at the Eielson Visitors Center at mile 66. It was a modern building built inside the mountain so as to reduce the exposure to the wildlife and increase to ability to heat it. The water to it was fed from a stream in the mountain.There were exhibits of stuffed wild life and their droppings as well as a huge reproduction of the mountain range and indications of where the mountain climbers would start and those who completed the climb. There is an interesting story about who actually was the first to complete the climb. It was claimed by a man named Cook, but it was actually a Athabascan Indian named Walter Harper. along with Hudson Stuck, a Episcopal archbishop, Robert Tatums and Harry Karstens (later the first superintendant of McKinley Park--now Denali National Park)
layout of the mountain range-McKinley is in the middle at 22,320 ft
Clean up of an avalanche from earlier in the month
Bears ate the posts
Nice road? 80 miles of gravel (each way)
see the road?
Thrill hill?
Panning for gold. See mosquito head net?
All in all, the shuttle bus was the highlight of our stay in Denali National Park. After the shuttle returned we decided we wanted pizza. We had seen the "Prospector' Pizzeria" a few times driving by and decided to make that our destination. On arrival, we were fortunate to get seated at the bar. the place was packed with tourists as well as locals. The bar is noted to have forty nine (49) different beers on draft. I counted them as they had the taps all in a row on a wall on the back of the bar. The beers were from all over Alaska as well as national and a few foreign. Nita ordered a "Copper Creek" and I ordered a "Root Beer" that was locally made. It was sweet but really good.
The pizza menu was a pizza artist delight. there had to be up to twenty five different pizza on the menu. We selected a small (13 inch) "Better than the lower 48 states" pizza. It came with elk and reindeer sausage, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. The waitress, Megan, had set a plate support rack on the bar to elevate the pizza because it was hot.
As Nita was taking slices of it off the rack, she dumped it on the bar and on the floor. Everyone got a laugh and Megan ordered us another one. I started serving the second one and dumped a slice on the bar. That brought out more laughing and some razzing. I had told Megan earlier I couldn't drink and we had settled on the root beer, So I told her "see what happens when you serve me beer". A customer sitting next to us remarked "maybe you should order a closed calzone next time". During the "pizza throwing" activity, the other bartender was delivering a drink to a lady down the bar from us and he tripped and poured it on the bar. Blamed it on us. LOL
Sadly enough, I didn't have my camera with me.
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