Day 24 – Denali National Park     09/13/10     Mileage: 0

 

The morning was coldest of the trip so far and there was a heavy frost on the tent. Fortunately, the skies were clear and the forecast was for it to remain clear and slightly warmer than normal….so I’ll take it! I caught the 8:30 bus out to the Eielson visitor’s center…an 8 hour round trip! There are no personal vehicles allowed…so the bus (aside from a 4 day hike) is the only way to get deep into the park and close to Mount McKinley. Normally I’m not one for guided tours or being led around by the nose, but I learned more and saw more wild life than I would have ever seen on my own…so it was well worth it. For the first time on the trip, I felt my point and shoot camera was wholly inadequate for the scale of the scenery and task at hand. Others on the bus with SLR camera’s and big telephoto and wide-angle lenses were getting much better shots of the landscape and of the wild life in particular. The power and grandeur of the scenery in the park and elsewhere in Alaska is not so much in the limited view of the camera lens, but in the scale of the scenery that goes uninterrupted from horizon to horizon. So, what you are seeing in the photos below is Denali as seen through a soda straw. That being said, I’ll let the pictures to the talking…