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Day 28 Denali National Park
Early start today as we had to be at the main lodge by 6.45am ready to board our Tundra Wilderness Experience. The bus is an old school bus supposedly converted for tours. Not sure how it was converted. We think the original seats were still being used as they were quite narrow. Luckily Vince only needed to sit on half a seat so Margaret had plenty of room.
Scott, our tour guide/bus driver, has a love for the park and he was full of information on the park, plants and animals in the area (you could say he was "full of it" in a positive way).
Not far into the park, (we were still on the bitumen road) we sighted our first wild animals, a female moose. She was rather timid as she was hiding behind a bush only showing her head. A little further we were lucky enough to site another female moose with two young calves. Then in comes the bull. Mum was not sure if she wanted to keep an eye on her babies or check out the handsome male sniffing (and I do mean sniffing!!) around.
A couple of miles further along we spotted an impressive bull moose. His antlers were huge (Informative fact: antlers grow each year and fall off after mating season and when the weather cools down).
Next was a bear sighting. This bear was doing the 'berry bob". Its head was going up and down as it foraged in the bushes for the blueberries growing wild across the tundra. He/she was working the bushes approx 150 metres from the road. Good thing we have a telephoto lens on the camera. The iphone showed the bear as a small dot on the photo.
Although we could see all of these animals Scott had a telephoto video camera which was hooked into small TV monitors (oh, that would be the conversion the bus underwent!) So no matter which side of the bus you sat on and which side the animal was on you could get a really good look at the animal and its movement.
A short stop to stretch legs, take some photos of the scenery and have a toilet break and we were off again.
Often our animal sightings (where Scott stopped to allow us to watch and photograph the animals) were from the tour bus that was ahead of us, pulled over giving us a clue that there was something to see. One such sighting which people said "bear" was when we saw the Dall Sheep. These sheep are the reason that Denali was designated a national park nearly 100 years ago. They are about one and half to two times the size of domesticated sheep and they live in the rocky upper areas of the mountains. Oh, the bear turned out to be a rock - "bear rock".
The 62 mile marker into the park was also the marker for the bus to turn around. This should have been where we would get a wonderful view/picture of Denali (previously Mt Mackinley). Unfortunately, due to the low lying cloud, we could not see any part of the mountain. This apparently is more the norm than the exception.
Scott stopped along the road side so we could get out and experience walking on the very spongy tundra. We also spotted the blueberries and crowberries that the bears love to eat. The wild blueberries, though small, were very tasty.
On our way back, as we were coming up to a rest stop, a herd of caribou was noticed making its way along the river. While we were stopped at this point the 5 caribou continued their walk past us. They did move over to the farther side of the river bed area, keeping their distance from the human population.
We came back along the winding mountain road with sheer drops and where the road is one bus wide (with intermittent pull off areas to allow passing) where Margaret's love of heights had butterflies stomping around in her stomach. Back on the two lanes of road we spotted ground squirrels and spruce grouse.
We had hoped to be dropped off at the Visitor Centre and walk home from there but the rain had just restarted so we went back to the Chalet. We made a cuppa and caught up on some of the blog writing and downloading of photos to the computer. We then headed up the road (our cabin was at the bottom of the property) to the Pizza/Ale house for a pizza dinner. We then headed home to repack, ready for out departure the next morning.
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