9. AK, BC & YT — Fairbanks to Denali

My first morning in Fairbanks started with a “Real Alaskan Breakfast” — two big sausage patties, hash browns and a pile of scrambled eggs. I don’t remember where I ate, but my journal gives it a positive review. The ride from Tok had been hard. I may have told the waitress about it. Anyway, I suspect she encouraged the cook to take good care of the hungry cyclist.

I went shopping at Fred Meyer after breakfast. It was about a quarter mile away so I walked. The produce section was staggering. It was about 4,000 square feet in size, and the variety was amazing. Not what I expected after picking over skimpy selections all the way from Whitehorse. (I recently learned that store in Fairbanks is their biggest when I mentioned it to my grandson Nick.)

I went to the Alaska Railway Depot in the afternoon and got my tickets for Denali and Anchorage. Then I walked around downtown. There were still some nice hotels and gift shops there, but it was a pretty shabby place. Many once-nice buildings were empty and there were not many cars or people there. It had obviously been a booming place when the pipeline to Valdez was being built. Now it looked a little like the “South of Market” district in San Francisco before its recent gentrification.

Denali National Park is 2,085 square miles, or about 50 x 50 miles in size. (Yosemite is a little more than half that size.) Denali is a word in the native Athabaskan language. It means “the high one” (it was named Mount McKinley in 1897 by a prospector). One road, with limited access, bisects the park. Denali, which is the highest peak in North America at 20,300 feet, towers over the park’s mountain range. I’m writing this on the 100-year anniversary of the park.

Tourist access to the interior of Denali is by bus, bicycle or boots. Automobiles are prohibited. I planned to take the excursion bus. I hoped to see many animals and get a glimpse of Denali.

Details count when you’re camping. It rained during the night and water got in my tent. Nothing important got wet though. All I could do was pack up and head for the train depot anyway. Moral: Don’t let your ground cloth extend beyond the edge of your tent. It will catch the water that runs off the tent and divert it back under the tent.

As with many things in Alaska train operations are a bit casual. I found one of my tent poles damaged when I organized my gear for the baggage car. I needed a piece of stiff wire to work on the pole. The young lady in the baggage room looked around until she found what I needed. I rolled my bike into the baggage car myself after I finished.

Soon after we started, the conductor came around to punch tickets. When he got to me he asked if that was my bike in the baggage car. I said it was, and he told me that he tours in the “Lower 48” in the winter. We talked about touring for a while and then he moved on. All very low key.

The train runs through the long, narrow Nenana River valley on the way to Denali. There are marshes and lakes along much of the track. We saw moose, moose with calves and bull moose as we went along. There were few signs of civilization. It rained most of the time we were traveling, which added to the primeval feel. It would have been a great bicycle ride, but I wanted to experience the scenic train ride.

There’s a river gorge at the Denali visitors center, and we crossed over it on a high bridge to get there. It was interesting looking down. There’s a train station right in the park, and a campground next to it. The campground had a big walk-in steel container for you to store your food in to keep it away from bears.

I retrieved my bike from the baggage car, stored my food, and got my tent set up. I bought lunch at a nearby snack bar and then went looking for the place to get a bus ticket. My recollection is that only one excursion was available (there are two longer ones now). After I had things organized I did some exploring on local trails.

The Tundra Wilderness Tour was quite successful. We went about 30 miles into the park on a mostly level road. There were mountains on the north and south, and the big range, including Denali, to the west. The big range was covered with clouds, so we didn’t expect to get a view of Denali. The terrain was rolling and covered with tundra and brush. (This would have been a two-day round trip if I’d ridden my bike. And I wouldn’t have had a naturalist with me.) [photos] [video]

The first animal we saw was a moose. Nothing new about that. After a while, we spotted two Grizzly Bears with their cubs. They were about 1/4 mile away. They were all taking a nap but after a while, they began to move around. One bear’s cub was 2 years old and the other bear had 1-year-old twins.

On down the road, we saw two Golden Eagles in a nest. We came to another bear shortly after that. She had a new cub, who was tripping on lumps of tundra, running off to the side, and generally frustrating its mother who was trying to reach some destination. It was very comical. After that, a red Fox came down the road and trotted right by the bus.

Denali was hidden by clouds when we reach Eielson Visitor Center, which is as far as we went. It was cold and we turned back soon after that. Soon we came to a Caribou (reindeer). Like the Fox, he walked right by the bus, nonchalant as you please. A while later we spotted three groups of Dahl Sheep, but they were quite a way off.

As we neared the end of the ride, some excitement came from the rear of the bus. One of the riders looked back and saw that Denali was in the clear. There it was, about 60 miles away. It really looked big. We all streamed off the bus and shutters were clicking (this was before digital cameras). The naturalist told us we were very lucky. Many visitors never see Denali.

I finished the day with a nice salmon dinner at a restaurant in the commercial area right outside the park entrance.