Day 11 Denali National Park

Today is what Eliot and I have been waiting for the entire trip. Denali. This was the big moment for seeing all the wildlife and Mt. McKinley. And let me tell you, it was RIDICULOUS. We saw more animals than any other tour of the summer--and the weather, although it started off a little foggy, was basically perfect.

We saw:

moose

caribou

bears

wolves

two-thousand kinds of birds

a lynx

a tundra squirrel

It was nuts. Some of the stuff was fairly far away, but here are some pics. . .

This guy was RIGHT by the road. He was rubbing his antlers on a willow bush to scrap off the "velvet" coating they get during the summer. You can see the dark stuff hanging off his left antler...that's the velvet. The bus just stops and you hang out and take pics, hence the tree in the foreground, but it was still pretty amazing. These things are HUGE. 7.5 feet at the shoulder with an adult male, or bull, weighing 1200-2000 lbs.

The lynx was too fast for a photo. But, we saw one. The only type of cat in Alaska. In the wild, at least.

This is how foggy it was when we left this morning. You could probably tell in the moose pic, too.

Willow Ptarmigan. Silent P. State bird of Alaska. It will molt and grow a set of entirely white feathers in the winter. Sneaky.

The picture thing keeps crashing and I am getting annoyed and tired. I will post all the pics tomorrow if it is working.

Basically, all we did today was the Denali Bus Tour--it took almost 9 hours. It was great fun, but rather exhausting.

Tomorrow we take the train back to Anchorage and spend the night before our flight home on Monday. Hopefully I can get the pics going again tomorrow. Until then. . .