Road Trip 2010: Day 40 (Part 1) Denali National Park

Let's do the time warp again!

Turn the calendar back a few days and lets start with last Sunday, July 18


If you've been paying attention to the titles of these posts, you've seen that I skipped our day at Denali. (I did, however, mislabel our days skipping #40 all together. I've now made the necessary corrections, however.) The reason for that was that our little 7-8 hour bus tour into Denali National Park produced so many great pictures that I spent half my time while editing them going "oooh!" and "aaaaahhhh!"

I've finally managed to get through them all and am faced with the difficult decision of which ones to post. Since there are so many, I've decided to put up a Part 1 dedicated to the wildlife and Part 2 focusing on the scenery.

So, without further ado...



The Wildlife of Denali National Park

Our bus tour of Denali started bright and early on Sunday morning when the bus picked us up at our campground. nearly everyone was going on this trip and there were only a few seats empty when we got on board. Three of those seats were reserved fro folks we would pick up at the park entrance. (By the time the tour was over, they seemed to have melded with our crowd pretty well. They gleaned a lot of information about our caraventure from several members and one of their party was from PA--down in the York area--so we talked about that.)

There is only one road into and out of Denali National Park and unless you're on either a tour bus like ours, or one of the commuter buses, you can not go passed the ranger's gate. The only private vehicles permitted belong to the owners of a lodge that is an in holding from when the park was formed. Our tour bus would take us some 60+ miles from the main road into Denali NP and even then we would still be 30+ miles from the mountain...if we could see it.

Even before we crossed through the Ranger-manned gate into the regulated part of the park, we spotted our first bit of wildlife in the form of three caribou bulls grazing along the hillside.

Caribou bulls


Ranger Welcomes us to the park.


While the caribou are lichen eaters, there are many predators in the park that will eat meat either exclusively (hawks, falcons, Golden Eagles, wolves, wolverine, lynx) or as a substantial part of their diet (grizzly bear, black bear, red fox). What those predators eat most are snowshoe hares and ground squirrels. Both are high in protein and calories. They are the "fast foods" of the park.


Snowshoe hare.

Ground squirrel.

While caribou calves may be preyed upon by Grizzly Bears and wolves, another prey species takes to the mountains to avoid the bears and wolves.
Dall Sheep

We saw fairly large numbers of Dall Sheep including one small flock of 20 or so that included ewes and lambs. The sheep may escape the wolves and bears by taking to the cliff faces and steep slopes, but the Golden Eagle still takes its share of lambs in season and adults when they become victims to accidental falls.

We saw lots of predators during the day. Mostly Grizzly Bears. Seems the soap berries are ripening along the river banks and they were out here taking advantage of the first berries of the year.


Solitary Grizzly


Sow Grizzly with cubs (one is out of view)

We saw somewhere between 14 and 18 bears during our tour. (The disagreement stems from the number of cubs in a group and whether the one group was seen both on the way in and out.) Most, like the second photo, were sows with either 2 1/2 year old cubs (who will be shooed away pretty soon) or year-and-a-half old cubs. The newly born are probably still back in the wild with their mom. Solitary bears--and we saw two--were possibly adult males. Surprising to me was how blond all the bears appeared. None of that dark brown that you saw on ole Gentle Ben.

A much smaller predator that walked out to us on the road was a Red Fox. He took his sweet time walking ahead of the bus for nearly 100 yards stopping to mark his hunting territory regularly but not presenting either me or Terry a good photo opportunity.

Nor did I get a photo of the two Golden Eagles that were soaring almost directly over the bus as we were driving back from our furthest point of entry.

However, two wolves favored us with a slow walk in front of and along side the bus. The second was actually too close when I got a clear shot, but the first was right in front of the bus...
Wolf

The wildlife viewing was great but the scenery...that was even better. More on that in the next post.