Roger and Pat Temples
2010-07-29

We had the good fortune to go to Denali National Park in Alaska this summer. Charles Sheldon was an early conservationist who fought to preserve the land of Denali. In response to those efforts Congress passed a bill to establish Mt. McKinley National Park in 1917. It was renamed Denali National Park and expanded threefold in 1980, and today Charles Sheldon’s vision is preserved. There are over six million pristine acres in the park, which lie between two massive mountain ranges, the Alaska Range and the Kantishna Range. Mt. McKinley, in the Alaska Range, is the high point of the trip, both literally and figuratively, soaring 20,320 ft.

While it is one of the most spectacular places we have ever seen, the lessons for naturalists are the things with which we were most impressed. Our guide and tour bus driver for the 63-mile excursion into the park was a naturalist herself. She drove a “school bus” for lack of a better description, on, at times, a very narrow and precarious road, all the while looking for wildlife and telling us the history of the park. When someone spotted an animal, usually at great distances from the bus, we were told to shout, “STOP!” and she did. Then she took out a video camera with a telephoto lens and attached it to monitors that were installed throughout the bus so that we had as close up a view of the animals as possible.

The most exciting thing about this park is the control they have in place to minimize human impact on the environment. There is one 91-mile road that goes in and out of the park. There are public lodges at the entrance to the park, and there is one lodge at the end of the 91-mile trek. Tourists cannot drive their private vehicles, but must take one of these buses into the park. Campers and RVs have limited and controlled access to camping areas.

A box lunch was included on this Tundra Wilderness Tour. Our guide told us that we had to eat on the bus and throw all of our debris in a bag before exiting the bus. Many of the animals have never seen a human because the park is such an immense land area and their chances of seeing buses or campers is minimal. However, the smell of food, even from empty bags or containers, would be enough to draw them to those areas. Park rangers want to prevent animals from depending on humans as a source of food, which would upset the ecological balance of the park. We were also advised to whisper when our bus windows were open, again to minimize human impact.

Our guide was thrilled that day that we were able to spot “The Big Five” animal species: Dall sheep, grizzly bears, three separate wolf packs (some with their cubs), moose and caribou. We also saw American eagles, merlins, many snowshoe hare, and ground squirrels, which are the bottom of the food chain, and an important part of the Denali ecosystem. And, the highlight of the trip was that we saw most of Mt. McKinley, which is generally only partially visible to most visitors because of heavy cloud cover.