The lakes where we camped ended up to be a serious hive of beaver activity. Here they've terraced the lake and each level has a beaver home in it. We walked across one of their dams that created about three feet of difference in the level of the water on either side. It was pretty impressive.
Laura ValaasOnce we set up camp and had a snack we went for a run along the nearby riverbed. The braided stream required a lot of jumping and some backtracking with only slightly wet feet (mostly when we misjudged whether a bank was solid or not).
I don't know if Katie's a better jumper than I or if I'm a better photographer. I will say that she made me jump this stream about ten times since she wanted to keep trying to get a better picture.
Katie Ronsse
Katie RonsseWalking along the tundra meadows was great... fighting our way through the brush-- not always so great.
Katie RonsseOne of the very cool things about Denali nat'l park is that it's illegal to remove anything (I'm thinking blueberries are exempt from that rule) so there's antlers and bones and stuff to find. It's like a great big treasure hunt. They are also extremely protective of their animals so the animals haven't learned to expect food from humans or be afraid of humans shooting them. (Katie has a moose antler, although it looks like she's a little confused about where an antler might attach to your body.)
Katie RonsseI was always under the assumption that beavers built their lodges in the middle of their pond but all the ones we saw were up against the shore.
beaver skull
Between blueberry pickings we came across a bear print and a wolf print in the trail. On the bus ride back out to the entrance to the park (no private vehicles in the park, only the park buses) we saw a pair of wolves in the road. One of them was a gorgeous black and was the alpha of his pack (our driver knew because the alpha wolves get collared).
Grizzly bearand then we came upon the grizzly bear. Actually we met the grizzly about ten minutes after getting off the bus and starting our hike. Katie had been really jumpy about running into a bear and kept imagining she was hearing one. Plus our bus stopped a short ways after dropping us off and we figured that they had stopped to look at a grizzly bear. I don't know why we both automatically assumed they were looking at a bear, they could have stopped to look at caribou or moose or dall sheep. So we decided to hike up along a ridge where we could see any bears before they saw us. I was making fun of Katie because she was so jumpy and she was talking really loudly so that we wouldn't surprise any bears. At the top of the ridge we stopped to discuss where we should go next and then I glanced down the ridge side and there was a great big grizzly eating blueberries. It turned out that I was the true scaredy-cat because katie pulled out her camera to take this picture and I was the one saying, "let's get outta here." So that was closer than I really wanted to get to a grizzly, we were downwind and he didn't even notice us, but still, I was happy not to run into any more bears for the rest of the hike.
posted by LAV at 09:41
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After almost the whole summer in Alaska I finally made it up to see Denali and visit the Denali Nat'l Park. Katie Ronsse and I wandered into the backcountry this weekend,
found a beautiful little lake shore to pitch our tent,
and frolicked with the wild animals (caribou in this photo)!
