Day 8, Monday, June 5, 2023
Getting Acquainted With McKinley Chalet Resort, Tundra Wildlife Tour
Writing this page almost three months later, my memory is dim on the small details of the day. I believe we arrived in Denali National Park and Preserve in the late afternoon of Sunday. Now, on Monday morning, we begin our first full day in Denali. Everything around us is simply beautiful.
We walked over to Denali Square, sort of the town center for this resort. There’s a nice restaurant there that serves a la carte and buffet breakfasts. The buffet is not massive—just the basics. Several types of fruit, oatmeal, dry cereal, eggs, bacon and sausage, potatoes, and bread. It’s rather rustic. That’s okay, but the price is steep. Oh, well—it’s a resort.
The weather was absolutely beautiful. We wore light jackets and long pants, and spent some time wandering around the area where our room was. The rooms were in the older part of the resort, a two story motel-type building with maybe six suites on the first floor and six on the second. No air conditioning, so we were grateful it was cool. I imagine the people who visited there in July and August were not so comfortable. There was a living room, bathroom, and bedroom. There was some drawer storage, but we basically lived out of our suitcases for the three nights we were there. Our bedroom had casement windows, looking towards the river that flowed by the “neighborhood.”
Here’s a nice map of the resort.
Our Tundra Wildlife Tour, which would last about five hours, was to begin around 10:30, so we wandered over to the Main Lodge, where there was a very nice restaurant, a Starbucks-ish counter, a gift shop, plentiful restrooms, and lots of very comfortable lounge chairs. When the bus arrived, we saw it was a converted school bus. Over every third bench seat was a pulldown TV screen. There was a zoom camera on the front of the bus that the driver could control and cast to the screen. So if wildlife showed up and we didn’t have a good view of it, we could pull the screen down and he would have found it and zoomed in. Some of my pictures (gallery below) show images from the screen.
Our driver had been doing this gig for about 25 years. He had wonderful experiences to share with us and many great stories to tell. Denali National Park and Preserve occupies 6.2 million acres. The forest has no pines, only spruce, white birch and aspen. It is a boreal forest, which was a new term to me. I cannot stress enough times the beauty everywhere we looked in Denali, and every place we visited and every vista we viewed along the cruise.
Our driver told us that Denali was the only park in the nation patrolled by sled dogs. Here’s an interesting page about rangers in Denali. I’m loving these pictures. If you’re a mammal lover, here’s more about the wildlife in Denali.
This wasn’t a big wildlife viewing for us, but we cherished every view we got. There was a bear running across the field; there were Dall sheep on a number of mountainsides; we saw several moose munching near a stream running through the park; and we saw a handful of caribou. We were very happy to get a view of a ptarmigan.
But best of all, we had a gorgeous sky that enabled us to see Mt. McKinley/Denali 65 miles away. This photo has become my Facebook cover photo, and it brings me joy every time I open up my profile and see it. So many people who take this tour never get a view of Denali. We were very lucky.
There are a number of streams and rivers running through Denali National Park, many of them dry during this part of the year. I was fascinated by this page describing the waterways.
The tour lasted about five hours. We were offered small box lunches and water on the bus. Then when we were dropped off at the Main Lodge, we sat out on the patio of the restaurant and enjoyed a small pizza to tide us over until later. I had been looking forward to this time in Denali National Park since we booked the cruise in August of 2022.
Since that time, I’ve learned that my stepgranddaughter, now 13, wants to cruise to Alaska with us, so I have booked three cabins on Holland America’s Eurodam for early June, 2025. My sons, Scott’s lovely partner, and Tyler’s wife and their daughter will join Jas and myself to see all these beautiful sights. We will sail round trip from Seattle and cruise Stephens Passage, Glacier Bay, and Icy Strait Point, with stops for excursions in Juneau, Sitka, and Ketchikan—followed by a brief stop in Victoria on Vancouver Island, to be compliant with U.S. Passenger Vessel Services Act. I think about this upcoming cruise for a few minutes every day. I haven’t been on a vacation with both of my boys since they were about ten and twelve years old. This is a mom’s dream trip, and I’m elated to be able to make it happen.
My goal for that trip is to simplify the writing of my travelogues so I’m not still trying to get photos edited and descriptions written six months after that cruise!
Alaska 2023, Day 8
