The merits of a snooze…..
I’ve come to believe that an afternoon nap is one of life’s greatest pleasures. What a shame we have to reach an advanced age before the realization that we can slow down and not always be rushing for more of everything. Now I’m a fine one to talk because I live my life as if there’s no tomorrow and everything must be done today. I need to go everywhere and see everything, afraid I might miss something along the way. But it seems that I have learned from Fernie the delight of taking an afternoon nap. It started with a bit of the “if you can’t beat them, join them” sort of thing but now I long for the time, after we’ve been tramping around all day, and we’re bone weary, when we crawl onto Maggie’s luxurious bed, windows open both sides, Caesar in between us and we settle in for our siesta.
The afternoon sun is warm and a breeze wafts across my face and bare arms; the shadows from the supple trees move in the gentle waft of air and cause my eyes to flicker. Caesar’s warm little body is snuggled in tightly to my side and he unknowingly emanates an occasional twitch and a sporadic sigh of contentment. I quickly reach a state of euphoria and enter the netherworld where I’m no longer awake but I’m not yet asleep. I’m somewhat aware of my surroundings and yet feel removed from it rather like being hypnotized. I am aware of every inch of my body; my mind follows the sensations from my toes, up my legs and my trunk, down my arms, my fingers, up to my neck and my head. There are no negative thoughts; all I feel is beauty and ecstasy. This should be what heaven is like, if there is such a place - and all of a sudden it’s Blotto!
The next thing I feel is obtrusive – I’m shaken from my reverie.
“Gerri.i.i.i.i.i….. it’s time to get up” Fernie in his sing song voice who lives by the clock. Oh well, there’ll be another nap tomorrow afternoon. What a trip! No drug could do better. However, a vodka martini is of great assistance in getting me to that special place.
But I digress; I’m supposed to be writing about Denali. So far, Denali is dark, dank, dingy, dismal and downright depressing with the clouds low on the mountains and the wind whistling through the canyon spinning up miniature dust tornadoes and whipping doors open and slamming them shut. Luckily, there are a few geocaches in the area – that kept us busy and me smiling for the afternoon. Fernie has found a new passion – he’s collecting pins, which he sometimes finds in the caches. So far he has eleven and he’s hankering for more – that’s good for me because he wants to go Geocaching as much as I do now. Caches are not allowed in the national park area, so for the next few days, we’ll have a break from my addiction.
Riley Creek, a National Park campground at the entrance is where we stayed for our first two days in Denali. It has all the amenities – showers, laundry, dump station, fresh water, store, and wifi at the store. There were hardly any English-speaking visitors there, some French (from France) but mostly German – that’s not surprising; they are the world’s adventurers. They were mostly young – in their twenties, I’d guess - and the men wore those funny little knit hats in Fairisle pattern, with two ear flaps that looked like braids and a tassle dangling from the crown. They all wore expensive outdoor clothing and boots and they were ready to tackle the higher realms of Denali, some even to climb Mt. McKinley – AKA Denali meaning ‘the great one’ in Athabaskan. Some of them rented motorhomes but more of them carried large backpacks and tents. I wonder how they’ll like Denali in this weather.
Riley Creek is within walking distance of Glitter Gulch – about a mile away. That’s where Princess Cruises and Holland America have their lodges and the resultant tacky tourist souvenir shops have sprung up all around them. You’d have thought that the cruise companies would have located their lodges away from such a tawdry area and offered their clients something a bit more refined and tranquil. But I guess the patrons love this sort of stuff – that tells me something about the average cruiser in today’s market.
Monday morning dawned – yes it actually did get dark last night – to torrential rain and low clouds and this was the day we were driving into the park to the Teklanika campground. It’s 30 miles inside the park and we are only allowed to drive our RV in and drive it out 3 days later – no tow car allowed and no driving around once we’re there. All travel is to be done by the regularly scheduled shuttle buses or tour buses. Apparently, a wolf pack has a den in the area and so no soft-sided camping apparatus is allowed. I wouldn’t have thought wolves would pose that sort of danger – I understood them to be elusive and evasive. So tonight, I’ll be waiting for the howl of the wolves as I lay in my bed – I’ll be so disappointed if I don’t hear them. As for a sighting, that’s not likely.
The first half of the drive into Denali was pavement but after that it was fifteen miles of winding, gravel road through the taiga and tundra. The speed limit is low – 35 mph - and it was pouring rain so instead of dust, it was mud we had to contend with. When we reached our destination and I went outside to guide us into our campsite, the motorhome was encrusted with muck and all I could think was “Oh no, Fernie’s gonna be all upset and grouchy that his Maggie is so filthy”. So I warned him……but that didn’t stop the moans when he got out to see for himself and his usual expression of disgust “That’s lovely; that’s lovely ………” on and on he went.
The rain never let up, so we spent the rest of the day curled up with our books and playing a mean-spirited tournament of Spite and Malice – the card game that brings out the worst side of me.
Just outside our front window – maybe about 20 feet away, under the shade of a small white spruce an immobile ‘snowshoe hare’ sat as if waiting out the pouring rain. He was not at all perturbed by our movements inside the motorhome. After a bit, he scooted over a few feet to a small shrub and commenced munching down some tender leafy branches. Known as rabbits locally, they are brown with white furry paws but they turn totally white in the winter. When Fernie took Caesar out for his constitutional later on, even with his bad eye, Caesar took off at a run after the rabbit and a dozen others that appeared out of nowhere. No success in catching one, of course and thankfully but he had the thrill of the chase.
Tuesday morning, 4am – no sound of rain on the roof – was that a good omen? Yes it was – when we got up there was no rain and we saw a couple of patches of blue sky. Caesar encountered a group of chattering ground squirrels (they look like gophers) on his early morning walk, which gave him his thrill for the day. They seemed to be goading him on unafraid, which drove him absolutely mad.
Our shuttle bus was due about 9am so we packed up sandwiches, thermoses of coffee and tea, put on our hiking boots, carried our rain gear just in case and headed off for the day. Our green shuttle came along – it had an almost full load from the headquarters – we were an hour and a quarter down the road and the only ones to get on from Teklanika.
“Have you seen any wildlife yet?” I asked the friendly group.
“Just a herd of caribou” they chorused.
“Well that’s a good start” I thought – maybe we’ll have a good day of sighting.
All the buses, including the white tour buses stop at designated rest areas – there were about four of them along the way. Restrooms, of course plus we had about a quarter to half an hour to walk around each area. With the shuttle system, we could stay longer in an area and catch any of the other green buses that came along after.
The terrain in the park is a lot like that along the Dempster but because the weather wasn’t good, its beauty was not displayed at its best. Receded glaciers have left long wide beds of ‘plaited’ rivers. There were occasional peeks of blue sky and the sun glinted off the Technicolor mountains. The road is very narrow and the mud was oozing after the monsoon of yesterday. Work crews were out in force repairing washouts. The mud splashed up onto our windows, so at each rest area squeegees were provided for us to clean them. The road is so narrow in some places that one bus has to pull over in a widening to allow another to pass. When this happens on a tight cut across a slide area, it’s a bit freaky.The ‘Big Five’ of Denali were what we hoped to encounter but didn’t hold out a lot of hope. However, the weather was obviously conducive because we saw four of the five.
1. High up on a green peak were dozens of little white blobs – binoculars brought them in clearer; they were Dall Sheep and there are about 2,500 of them in the park.
2. Unbelievable! there was a grizzly, just across the stream on a steep bank ambling along while grazing. Beautiful thick blonde fur on his head and back and a dark underbelly and feet, he was only about 500 feet away and with our binoculars we could see him clearly. We encountered another grizzly and a cub not long after but they quickly disappeared into the undergrowth. Further along, another grizzly was fast asleep on the hillside after a big meal of berries and roots, I suppose. Then another grizzly bear; we watched him rouse lazily and mosey back into action – they seem to always be alone unless with cubs. With only 300 to 350 total bears in the park, I am amazed that we had four sightings (5 counting the cub).
3. There were many herds of caribou; they favour the tundra and so were easy to pick out. One herd was right beside the road and crossed in front of our bus – the stag had an absolutely massive set of antlers – I wondered how he held his head upright. In another spot, a couple with no other herd in sight braved the swiftly running waters of a deep river and swam strongly across, quivering their little white rumps when they clambered out to shake off the excess water.
4. A cow and a calf moose were grazing in the taiga area of low shrubby trees. Guess we’re a bit ho-hum about moose.
5. The elusive wolf was not to be seen or heard. There are only 80 to 100 in the park and I guess we’d have to be well off the road to have an encounter with those reclusive creatures.
Mt. McKinley (AKA Denali, the great one), the tallest mountain in North America at 20,320 feet was not to be seen – it remained shrouded in cloud even though the sun came through around it. It is said that ‘McKinley is so tall that it makes its own weather’ and you’ll seldom see the whole mountain in the summertime. A bit of trivia: Because of plate tectonics, Denali is still growing at the rate of about a millimetre a year.
What a great day! I take it back about Denali being ‘dark, dank, dingy, dismal and downright depressing’ – instead it’s thrilling and alive.
Wednesday - more downpours started in the middle of the night and continued through the morning. It was a good excuse to linger in bed a while. After a late breakfast, we spread out all the brochures we’d gathered and planned the next couple of weeks of our travels mostly around the Kenai Peninsula…….and unexpectedly, the sun came out.
We hiked along the Teklanika River, through mystical mossy taiga forests, full of orange, green, white, yellow and brown mushrooms and other magical fungi. The green of the springy moss dazzled the eyes and the mushroom caps were so large, I could imagine we’d fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland. There were plenty of rabbits around – unafraid, they’d sit watching from underneath a spruce tree their eyes following our movements. I can see why they call them snowshoe hares – they’re feet are absolutely huge.
All around our campground were
red warning posters that a grizzly had recently been seen in the area, so we whistled and talked loudly as we walked so as to not come upon one unexpectedly. We almost stepped in a huge pile of fresh grizzly scat (feces) – it was full of undigested red berries and leaves and was so recent we decided it was time to turn around. 
They look so slow and cumbersome but apparently they can exceed 30mph in a chase, which is way faster than I can run, even when scared to death.Caesar had his share of fun when we took him out after. We kept to the campground roads and trails within the perimeter. Every tree and bush has a warren under and the ground squirrels scampered around teasing Caesar relentlessly. He’d stick his nose right down their burrows and it would come out black. Westies were bred from Cairn terriers that are the rodent hunters of the Scottish highlands. Cairns with their brown, grey and black colouring would get lost, sometimes stuck halfway in a burrow. So they bred them white so they’d stand out on the sparse slopes and called them West Highland White Terriers. Caesar was just doing what he was genetically programmed to do.
Thursday - finally the weather is perfect and holds out hope that Denali (Mt McKinley) will shrug off the shroud of fleecy cloud and emerge denuded. It was so cold overnight that we had extra fuzzy blankets on top of our duvet but once the sun truly rose, everything warmed up and the countryside sparkled in its glaring light. And yes, there was Denali, its white slopes and glaciers dazzling in the early morning. The peaks were still veiled by a residue of mist but it seemed to dissipate as we watched it.
The gravel portion of the road out of the park had several washouts over the last couple of days but we were fortunate that the road crews had managed to restore the surfaces before we had to attempt the run. Maggie was still encrusted with dirt, so we hoped to find a facility to wash her before too long.
It was a day of Geocaching (so we did get some exercise) and admiring Denali, the mountain from all her sides as we descended south on the terrifically scenic Parks Highway towards Anchorage. The sun made us sing as we drove. We found a wonderful little spot right beside a lake to spend the night. Life is good!
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