Alaska, Part !!!! (Denali)
The Park:
Like the experienced travelers to state and national parks that we are by now, we came to Denali National Park ready to spend a day seeing what this place had to offer, but not willing to ford our way across the crowds and crane our necks to see the wildlife from the road. We did all of that in Yellowstone and elsewhere. Now we found ourselves wanting Alaska to be what the license plates promise: “The Last Frontier.” As we drove toward the park we assumed that the overdevelopment that seems to happen in and around National Parks would not be the place to find frontierland. It would be an understatement to say that our assumptions were misplaced with this park.
Denali is the home to a piece of the Alaska Range, a set of mountains that doesn’t get its due if you ask me, as snow peaked mountains surround hundreds of miles of valleys with rivers and gorges and streams snaking and cutting their way from glaciers to the Arctic Ocean (we crossed the northern continental divide on our way up here and at one point sat at the triple divide between where water flows to three oceans from the same water source). The spruce forests give way to tundra at the tree line of about 3,000 feet (significantly lower than the 7,000-8,000-foot tree line we found in much of the Canadian Rockies), which gives one the sense of stepping on alien land—the summer-melted tundra squishes underfoot like jello. One quickly realizes in coming to Denali that this is the park of the wild and untamed, not the Mecca of RVs that we have seen in other parts of the Parks system.
There is one 80-mile road into and out of the park from the highway and cars are not allowed past milepost 23 where the road turns to dirt. If you want to go beyond, you ride one of the park’s busses in and out. Most visitors stay on the bus for up to eight hours and feel their day worth it for seeing such magnanimous mountains, and especially so if they have glimpsed a bear from the window. We decided quickly upon coming to the visitor’s center that we were not interested in this route but began to think that this might be the place in which we could have a go at backpacking; something that both Hanna and I have done but never together.
Backpacking in Denali turns out to be unlike anywhere else either of us have experienced. Most specifically because there are no trails on which to hike, no recommended routes to take, and one rule of the backcountry is that you must not stay where others have camped before. The idea is conservation and necessitates that the hiker not only forge their own route but be continually on the lookout for modifications, easier ways around, as well as on the lookout for bears that far outnumber people in the park. We chose the section of the park we would like to occupy on the basis of availability (they only allow 4-12 people a day in any given area) as well as recommendation (glaciers cover the mountains at the end of the valley and the Toklat river flows the length of the valley that constitutes Unit 9). We signed up for 3 days in the area starting the next morning and set to packing up everything we might need to undertake such an experience and did our best to fall asleep early (even though the sky doesn’t get totally dark until well after midnight).
Day 1:
Sunday. We woke up early, called our parents to let them know of our plan, and boarded a camper bus that took us through the fog and spitting rain to mile 53 where it stopped and let us off on the border of the area we signed up for. We were given the recommendation on how to hike down the riverbed carefully (a popular spot for bears), and were wished luck as we stepped into the 40-degree rain that awaited us. Well waterproofed and excited, we felt ready to tackle the challenge and began pushing our way through the willows that make up “I Scream Gulch” (an icy dogsled route in the winter). Upon emerging from the gulch we saw the braided river in front of us and decided that we should stop for lunch before crossing the river that would allow us through the valley toward the glaciers at the other side. After a brief stop for lunch we were ready for our first attempt at fording a river (no trails means no bridges).
After scoping out our best visible route we took our boots off and put on our tennis shoes and stepped gingerly into the glacier fed water. At about 10 miles from the melting glacier, needless to say the water was cold. We crossed one braid at a time hoping it would mean that the water would stay shallow all the way across. As we pushed toward the middle of the riverbed, from gravel bar to gravel bar the water in each braid was getting faster, deeper ,and colder. We made one last push to get across. I stood behind Hanna to brace her against the current but when the water lapped up to her knees, she balked and we jumped back to shore. I felt the end of my rope coming quickly. Needing to get to the other side quickly we jumped a few frantic times to warm our toes and plunged back in. We got to the other side, with glacial water locking our muscles, and pulled our shoes off as quickly as possible. I couldn’t move or feel the front half of my foot and seeing how blue it was, Hanna quickly handed me a plastic bag to wrap my foot in while she got her boots back on. Hanna—worried for the future of my toes—did all that she could to bring pain and movement back into them (this included the extreme of putting them into her mouth and blowing pain back into them). Finally able to move again we pushed through the rain and within an hour or so were too exhausted to do anything more than find a place to set up a tent. We hiked part way up a hill to a bluff and found what appeared to be our best shot at a soft spot on the tundra (it turned out to be quite lumpy, but livable).
During the process of setting up our tent and making dinner 100 yards away from it (to protect us from interested bears), I looked across the riverbed to the opposite shore and saw movement. We watched for a while and determined that what we were seeing was a gigantic male grizzly plodding along the riverbed and eating berries along the way. We were thankfully a good 300 yards away and were happy to watch him as he wandered the other direction. Exhausted, we dove into our bed and did our best to warm ourselves and fall asleep with the rain steadily falling all around us.
Two views of the valley in which we hiked. These were taken on our last day, hence the sun, but this is essentially what we were looking at when we got off the bus...
Day 2:
We awoke to a blue-skied day. After having talked of heading out of the park after our first day of some of the hardest hiking we had done, we were happy to take advantage of the weather and go at it for another day. We left our packs and tent and went out for a hike toward the glaciers.
Loungin in the gulch...
One of three glaciers whose melt gave us water and whose existence brought us as close as we could manage.
As we went deeper into the valley the winds picked up to the point where we were ducking into gulches for breaks, but we were enthused to be out in this unique, unaltered nature. Five or six miles into the hike, after getting to a spot with a great view of the converging mountain s, we decided to head back to camp for fear of the weather that appeared to be blowing our way. Thankfully we turned around when we did because by the time we got back to our tent the winds had become strong enough to blow our tent nearly flat to the ground. Needless to say, we needed to move our tent if the winds were going to keep up as they appeared to be and to the river flats we went.
We carried all of our gear a few hundred yards down the hill and found some brush to guard us against the wrath of wind. Luckily we caught a break in the weather and quickly managed to set up our tent and got ourselves some dinner. Happy with our day we went on another quick hike to scout possibilities for our next day, where we were expected to cross a mountain pass into the next unit. After this two-mile jaunt up the side of a mountain we were ready for bed and climbed into our now shaking tent as it did its best to stand up in the wind. We nervously watched our tent quake and read to each other from the book we brought with us, trying desperately to fall asleep. The winds were getting worse as we began making guesses as to its strength “Do you think it’s 30 mph? I don’t know, maybe even 40?” “No, couldn’t be 40 I don’t think.” Our fly stakes began to pull themselves out of the ground one at a time and every 15 minutes for an hour or so, so we were continually crawling out of the tent to tie them down to what proved to be the heartiest bushes we could imagine. They helped us stay attached to the ground despite the creeping feeling that we were going to be blown through the valley as if riding a flying carpet. To put it in our friend Ian’s words (he had a similar experience with the wind) it felt all night like “We owed the wind money and it was coming to collect.”
Tying the tent down. Over and over again. These bushes you see are some of the strongest bushes that I can imagine and we thank them for holding onto our tent.
Day 3
We made it to morning tired after one or two hours of sleep. We were now determined to make it out to the road and sacrifice our last day for the sake of a good night’s worth of sleep, which had eluded us the previous two nights. We even forwent breakfast as the winds were not letting up with the coming of day. They even seemed to be getting stronger. We walked about an hour into the wind, trying to find a place to cross the river. Every two steps forward we would be blown to the side and stumble to regain our balance. Twice Hanna was blown off her feet when the wind caught her pack just right and pushed her to the ground but we were determined to make it back to the road so on we pressed. We estimate it took us about an hour to travel 100 yards this way. When we finally found a place to cross the river perpendicular to the wind we needed to do it fast again and both of us were a little afraid given our first experience two days earlier. Hanna, exhausted and frustrated by the difficulty of simply standing upright in the gusts, fell into my lap crying and (literally) screaming at the wind to give us a break while we crossed the river so we wouldn’t end up sitting in it. After regaining our composure and strength, we pushed our way to the other side and were surprised by the ease with which we accomplished it. In order to avoid more water, we hiked up a bank and ended up in a thicket of willows that lasted for a couple of miles. For those of you who haven’t experienced a willow thicket, it is like the ivy of the tree world. It grows strong and tangled and walking through it means looking for the least tangled part and pushing your way through until you are out of breath twenty yards later. And then doing it again. After a couple of hours of this (all the while yelling, “Hey bear. Hey bear!” at the tops of our lungs to avoid any surprises) we finally made it to the road, about three or four miles from where we started, and exhaustedly fell onto our packs. We spotted a group of caribou wander through the gulch that had just given our gateway to the road again.
Hanna barely standing in the wind
Tired. Collapse.
This may sound horrible. In certain real ways, it was horrible. But throughout each hardship, we were surrounded by some of the most beautiful and wild terrain we have seen and continually thanked each other for being out there. It is another understatement to say that it is an experience that we will not soon forget but on a trip that has given us so many incredible experiences lapped on top of one another and concentrated into such a short amount of time, that is definitely saying a lot. Sometimes we look back at our pictures and remember something else that we did but this is an experience that pictures will never do complete justice to and will stick in both of our memories as we press further on.
Curiosity. On our last day out, after the wind and rain had taken all of the smoke haze away, we looked up at the sun and saw this...
It appears to be a nearly complete halo, the outer-most pert of which was a rainbow. Does anybody have any idea what it was and why we could see it so clearly?: The park rangers couldn't figure it out, can you help us out?
Like the experienced travelers to state and national parks that we are by now, we came to Denali National Park ready to spend a day seeing what this place had to offer, but not willing to ford our way across the crowds and crane our necks to see the wildlife from the road. We did all of that in Yellowstone and elsewhere. Now we found ourselves wanting Alaska to be what the license plates promise: “The Last Frontier.” As we drove toward the park we assumed that the overdevelopment that seems to happen in and around National Parks would not be the place to find frontierland. It would be an understatement to say that our assumptions were misplaced with this park.
Denali is the home to a piece of the Alaska Range, a set of mountains that doesn’t get its due if you ask me, as snow peaked mountains surround hundreds of miles of valleys with rivers and gorges and streams snaking and cutting their way from glaciers to the Arctic Ocean (we crossed the northern continental divide on our way up here and at one point sat at the triple divide between where water flows to three oceans from the same water source). The spruce forests give way to tundra at the tree line of about 3,000 feet (significantly lower than the 7,000-8,000-foot tree line we found in much of the Canadian Rockies), which gives one the sense of stepping on alien land—the summer-melted tundra squishes underfoot like jello. One quickly realizes in coming to Denali that this is the park of the wild and untamed, not the Mecca of RVs that we have seen in other parts of the Parks system.
There is one 80-mile road into and out of the park from the highway and cars are not allowed past milepost 23 where the road turns to dirt. If you want to go beyond, you ride one of the park’s busses in and out. Most visitors stay on the bus for up to eight hours and feel their day worth it for seeing such magnanimous mountains, and especially so if they have glimpsed a bear from the window. We decided quickly upon coming to the visitor’s center that we were not interested in this route but began to think that this might be the place in which we could have a go at backpacking; something that both Hanna and I have done but never together.
Backpacking in Denali turns out to be unlike anywhere else either of us have experienced. Most specifically because there are no trails on which to hike, no recommended routes to take, and one rule of the backcountry is that you must not stay where others have camped before. The idea is conservation and necessitates that the hiker not only forge their own route but be continually on the lookout for modifications, easier ways around, as well as on the lookout for bears that far outnumber people in the park. We chose the section of the park we would like to occupy on the basis of availability (they only allow 4-12 people a day in any given area) as well as recommendation (glaciers cover the mountains at the end of the valley and the Toklat river flows the length of the valley that constitutes Unit 9). We signed up for 3 days in the area starting the next morning and set to packing up everything we might need to undertake such an experience and did our best to fall asleep early (even though the sky doesn’t get totally dark until well after midnight).
Day 1:
Sunday. We woke up early, called our parents to let them know of our plan, and boarded a camper bus that took us through the fog and spitting rain to mile 53 where it stopped and let us off on the border of the area we signed up for. We were given the recommendation on how to hike down the riverbed carefully (a popular spot for bears), and were wished luck as we stepped into the 40-degree rain that awaited us. Well waterproofed and excited, we felt ready to tackle the challenge and began pushing our way through the willows that make up “I Scream Gulch” (an icy dogsled route in the winter). Upon emerging from the gulch we saw the braided river in front of us and decided that we should stop for lunch before crossing the river that would allow us through the valley toward the glaciers at the other side. After a brief stop for lunch we were ready for our first attempt at fording a river (no trails means no bridges).
After scoping out our best visible route we took our boots off and put on our tennis shoes and stepped gingerly into the glacier fed water. At about 10 miles from the melting glacier, needless to say the water was cold. We crossed one braid at a time hoping it would mean that the water would stay shallow all the way across. As we pushed toward the middle of the riverbed, from gravel bar to gravel bar the water in each braid was getting faster, deeper ,and colder. We made one last push to get across. I stood behind Hanna to brace her against the current but when the water lapped up to her knees, she balked and we jumped back to shore. I felt the end of my rope coming quickly. Needing to get to the other side quickly we jumped a few frantic times to warm our toes and plunged back in. We got to the other side, with glacial water locking our muscles, and pulled our shoes off as quickly as possible. I couldn’t move or feel the front half of my foot and seeing how blue it was, Hanna quickly handed me a plastic bag to wrap my foot in while she got her boots back on. Hanna—worried for the future of my toes—did all that she could to bring pain and movement back into them (this included the extreme of putting them into her mouth and blowing pain back into them). Finally able to move again we pushed through the rain and within an hour or so were too exhausted to do anything more than find a place to set up a tent. We hiked part way up a hill to a bluff and found what appeared to be our best shot at a soft spot on the tundra (it turned out to be quite lumpy, but livable).
During the process of setting up our tent and making dinner 100 yards away from it (to protect us from interested bears), I looked across the riverbed to the opposite shore and saw movement. We watched for a while and determined that what we were seeing was a gigantic male grizzly plodding along the riverbed and eating berries along the way. We were thankfully a good 300 yards away and were happy to watch him as he wandered the other direction. Exhausted, we dove into our bed and did our best to warm ourselves and fall asleep with the rain steadily falling all around us.
Two views of the valley in which we hiked. These were taken on our last day, hence the sun, but this is essentially what we were looking at when we got off the bus...
Day 2:
We awoke to a blue-skied day. After having talked of heading out of the park after our first day of some of the hardest hiking we had done, we were happy to take advantage of the weather and go at it for another day. We left our packs and tent and went out for a hike toward the glaciers.
Loungin in the gulch...
One of three glaciers whose melt gave us water and whose existence brought us as close as we could manage.
As we went deeper into the valley the winds picked up to the point where we were ducking into gulches for breaks, but we were enthused to be out in this unique, unaltered nature. Five or six miles into the hike, after getting to a spot with a great view of the converging mountain s, we decided to head back to camp for fear of the weather that appeared to be blowing our way. Thankfully we turned around when we did because by the time we got back to our tent the winds had become strong enough to blow our tent nearly flat to the ground. Needless to say, we needed to move our tent if the winds were going to keep up as they appeared to be and to the river flats we went.
We carried all of our gear a few hundred yards down the hill and found some brush to guard us against the wrath of wind. Luckily we caught a break in the weather and quickly managed to set up our tent and got ourselves some dinner. Happy with our day we went on another quick hike to scout possibilities for our next day, where we were expected to cross a mountain pass into the next unit. After this two-mile jaunt up the side of a mountain we were ready for bed and climbed into our now shaking tent as it did its best to stand up in the wind. We nervously watched our tent quake and read to each other from the book we brought with us, trying desperately to fall asleep. The winds were getting worse as we began making guesses as to its strength “Do you think it’s 30 mph? I don’t know, maybe even 40?” “No, couldn’t be 40 I don’t think.” Our fly stakes began to pull themselves out of the ground one at a time and every 15 minutes for an hour or so, so we were continually crawling out of the tent to tie them down to what proved to be the heartiest bushes we could imagine. They helped us stay attached to the ground despite the creeping feeling that we were going to be blown through the valley as if riding a flying carpet. To put it in our friend Ian’s words (he had a similar experience with the wind) it felt all night like “We owed the wind money and it was coming to collect.”
Tying the tent down. Over and over again. These bushes you see are some of the strongest bushes that I can imagine and we thank them for holding onto our tent.
Day 3
We made it to morning tired after one or two hours of sleep. We were now determined to make it out to the road and sacrifice our last day for the sake of a good night’s worth of sleep, which had eluded us the previous two nights. We even forwent breakfast as the winds were not letting up with the coming of day. They even seemed to be getting stronger. We walked about an hour into the wind, trying to find a place to cross the river. Every two steps forward we would be blown to the side and stumble to regain our balance. Twice Hanna was blown off her feet when the wind caught her pack just right and pushed her to the ground but we were determined to make it back to the road so on we pressed. We estimate it took us about an hour to travel 100 yards this way. When we finally found a place to cross the river perpendicular to the wind we needed to do it fast again and both of us were a little afraid given our first experience two days earlier. Hanna, exhausted and frustrated by the difficulty of simply standing upright in the gusts, fell into my lap crying and (literally) screaming at the wind to give us a break while we crossed the river so we wouldn’t end up sitting in it. After regaining our composure and strength, we pushed our way to the other side and were surprised by the ease with which we accomplished it. In order to avoid more water, we hiked up a bank and ended up in a thicket of willows that lasted for a couple of miles. For those of you who haven’t experienced a willow thicket, it is like the ivy of the tree world. It grows strong and tangled and walking through it means looking for the least tangled part and pushing your way through until you are out of breath twenty yards later. And then doing it again. After a couple of hours of this (all the while yelling, “Hey bear. Hey bear!” at the tops of our lungs to avoid any surprises) we finally made it to the road, about three or four miles from where we started, and exhaustedly fell onto our packs. We spotted a group of caribou wander through the gulch that had just given our gateway to the road again.
Hanna barely standing in the wind
Tired. Collapse.
This may sound horrible. In certain real ways, it was horrible. But throughout each hardship, we were surrounded by some of the most beautiful and wild terrain we have seen and continually thanked each other for being out there. It is another understatement to say that it is an experience that we will not soon forget but on a trip that has given us so many incredible experiences lapped on top of one another and concentrated into such a short amount of time, that is definitely saying a lot. Sometimes we look back at our pictures and remember something else that we did but this is an experience that pictures will never do complete justice to and will stick in both of our memories as we press further on.
Curiosity. On our last day out, after the wind and rain had taken all of the smoke haze away, we looked up at the sun and saw this...
It appears to be a nearly complete halo, the outer-most pert of which was a rainbow. Does anybody have any idea what it was and why we could see it so clearly?: The park rangers couldn't figure it out, can you help us out?
1 Comments:
I wanted to let you know I think this is a great post, and well written. Im not a blogger, and found it accidentally in a search, but Im glad i did. It takes me back to a few of the month or longer car trips I've made in the last 5 years, including a 5 month from Colorado to California to Anchorage and Palmer (where i settled for 2 months), and back to Pennsylvania.
As for you sun Halo picture, if you have not already determined what it was, here goes. It looks like what you saw was an 'ice halo', and in particular a 22 degree halo. Halos can be the produced any time of the year from tropics to the poles by ice crystals in cirrus clouds 5 to 10 km (3 - 6 miles) high in the always cold upper troposphere.
Pretty cool thing to see, for sure, and similar to rainbows in how they are formed. The difference is that ice crystals refract the sunlight, rather than raindrops in a rainbow.
Good luck with your reintegration into 'normal' society, and in future endeavors.
Cheers,
-Rob
Post a Comment
<< Home