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Day Three: Denali/Talkeetna

We had to be up, packed and out the door by 6am to get on the waiting tour bus. Most of us are still jet lagged, so it's quite the experience. This vacation thing is stressful! Denali National Park is big and...big. We drove around a lot looking for wildlife and seeing just a mama moose and her baby while still at the first stop. Saw one Dall sheep through someone's telescope, some snowshoe hares a little too close up (I didn't have to use the zoom to take the picture - no fear), a single harlequin duck and a gray jay (a blue jay, except not). Went to the interpretive section of the park and saw a model home that the railroad people would have stayed in. The mosquito is apparently the unofficial state bird of Alaska. They should stock repellent with their courtesy shampoos. Maybe instead of them. Seriously. Then on to the Visitor's Center in a place that begins with a P (Primrose?) to meet up with a Native Alaskan, another Athabascan Indian named Lindy Alexander (Dixie's cousin). He told us what it was like growing up in the bush off the land. Showed us some snowshoes and Native clothing, joked around. I asked if it was fun for him. He said sometimes, but it was getting old. I can't even imagine.

The permafrost has an interesting effect on the trees. It was hard to photograph from the bumpy school bus, but certain sections are referred to as the “drunken forest” because the trees literally lean in different directions due to their struggle for survival. The bus tour took about 4 hours including stops and then we had to wait another hour and a half at the train station where the weather finally started to cool down, in order to take another 4 hour trip to the hotel 40 miles from Mt. McKinley. It's more of a layover than anything else, since we have to leave again for Anchorage/Whittier by noon.

The double-decker train to the next hotel had a dining room downstairs in each car and nice plush seats up, mostly set up the same as the dining car with little tables planted between facing seats. We ate with Paulette and Judy, who are sisters and funny. We were at a tiny table at the end, with all the room we could want to stash our stuff. That was the good news. The bad news was that we were at a tiny table at the end, where we were overlooked for much of the trip. We were so tired it didn’t matter much. One interesting thing Penny, the tour guide, pointed out was the “Hundred Year Meadow”. Beavers are very active in this area and when they build a lodge, silt eventually fills in behind it and they have to build another one. This process repeats itself year after year and the clearing we passed took about a hundred years to reach a point where there was no river left for the beavers to dam up. She also told a may-or-may-not-be-true story about little Cantwell. It’s remote, as are many towns in the interior, and there aren’t many televisions around, so the locals would gather at the bar. One night, they were watching America’s Most Wanted and whispered to each other that the bartender looked a lot like the man they were profiling on the show. They contacted the FBI and a team was sent to check out the situation. Sure enough, the bartender was one of the ten most wanted. They met with the mayor and while he was out of the room, they conferred with each other and decided that the mayor looked familiar, too. Sure enough, the mayor was also one of the ten most wanted. Ever since, they’ve said you can’t hide well in Cantwell. They told us "funny" jokes ("Do Juneau the capitol of Alaska?") and that the town the tv show Northern Exposure was modeled after, Talkeetna, was where the train stopped so that we could be driven yet ANOTHER hour to the Mt. McKinley Princess Lodge in Denali State Park. I don't know what the difference is between the state and national parks but it was exhausting. The coach driver, like the others, talked pretty much non-stop. He showed us where the electric support stopped and total self-sustenance began, and said the hotel was completely self-sustaining. The Mt. McKinley Lodge was very nice, with a neat trick to help the guests remember exactly how high Denali is - the main restaurant is called the "Twenty three twenty" - 20,320 feet. Even forty miles away and half obscured, it was an impressive sight. Met a really fun young man at the front desk of the hotel. We chatted silliness and hot sauce for 40 minutes after I asked what I needed to ask. Then he thought I should see the Aurora Symphony show featuring photography by Leroy Zimmerman(?), which was so amazing that it looked more like Industrial Light and Magic than reality. We couldn't find Karen, who was busy being tired and wondering why I was hanging out at the desk for so long, so she missed out on her free ticket. Signed up for a "wake-up" call in case Mt. McKinley/Denali came out to play while I was asleep and took a picture of half of it in case that was all we were going to see - which, as it turned out, it was. Right now, it's 11:15 Alaska time and it looks like maybe 7pm. They tell me the sun grazes the mountains sometime after midnight and then just arcs back up again. At this rate, I'll be able to see for myself!