I’m in the midst of a two-week stay in Alaska, visiting family and enjoying my childhood haunts. I’m traveling with my sister, Heather, and her boyfriend, Chris.
We spent the first week in Denali National Park, visiting my mother at Camp Denali, where she works. This week we’re down in Anchorage with my father and step-mother. Later this week, I’ll fly on business up to Kotzebue, an Inupiat town above the Arctic Circle where I lived for two and a half years in the early 1990s (and where the Goo Goo Dolls recently shot a music video).
I didn’t get a chance to post anything here last week, so I’m just going to share a few things about my time in Denali now. (You can see photos in the Photos & Flicks section.)
BACKGROUND
My family moved to Denali National Park and Preserve (then called Mt. McKinley National Park) in 1976, when I was seven years old. My father worked as the mountaineering ranger at the park, managing climbing expeditions and coordinating rescues when climbs went bad (and, on the less glamorous side, leading garbage-cleaning expeditions). We lived in the park for eight years before moving on to another part of Alaska.
Our family friends, Wally and Jerri Cole, purchased Camp Denali around the same time we moved to Alaska, and my family occasionally spent time out at Camp during summers (the only time the facilities operate). Both of my sisters worked at Camp for seven or eight summers, and my mom has been working for the Coles now for ten years. I’ve never worked at Camp — I just take advantage of the family connections and visit every couple of years (Thanks Wally and Jerri!).
To say Camp Denali is in a good location is an understatement one could never understand without visiting. It’s situated on private land that was once at the very edge of the national park, but which now lies surrounded by a park that was expanded in 1980. It’s at the end of the only road into the park, and it has a view of Mt. McKinley that is unparalleled.
LOWELL THOMAS JR. AND TIBET
During our stay at Camp Denali, renowned Alaskan bush pilot (and frequent visitor to Camp Denali) Lowell Thomas Jr. showed guests an old television special featuring his trip to Tibet in 1949 with his father, Lowell Thomas. The two men were among the first Westerners invited by the then-hermit nation to visit and to meet the Dalai Lama. The footage was incredible, as was the story of their trek into and out of Tibet. Lowell Sr. broke his hip in a fall from a horse on the return trip, and had to be carried in a stretcher for 20 days back to India.
A WOLF AND KILL
It’s common to see grizzly bears and caribou from the one gravel road that winds into Denali National Park. It’s much less common to see a wolf, as they tend to be skittish about any kind of human contact. So it was a rare thing to see a wolf just ten feet off the road during our return trip through the park. It had just killed a caribou calf, and was resting after feeding. Four caribou sat resting about half a mile further up the hillside, part of the group that the wolf had taken the calf from. After sitting for a while, the wolf got up, walked alongside us, across the road and back to the kill to feed some more.
AND…
Also saw plenty of grizzly bears, had spectacular weather, did lots of hiking, enjoyed good food and company, and had a fun overnight camping trip into the backcountry.
