Day: March 3, 2026

Getting to Denali NP – Part 2 of 2

September 19, 2025

Here are more things I saw as I drove north on Hwy 3 from Talkeetna and the Denali Viewpoints towards Denali National Park.

I am adding more lines of text here to try and make the photo below appear larger in the actual post.

If you look closely at the two photos above you may notice that the ground at the base of the mountains is multi-colored. This was the first area where I noticed it, and it will continue to appear in many parts of Alaska. You will see better examples of the effect in future posts. I have determined that it is multi-colored vegetation. There are also some places where parts of the mountains themselves display various colors due to different kinds of volcanic rock, but the areas in these photos were all at low elevation and are definitely vegetation.

The photo above was taken as I was arriving in the little town of Cantwell. I am very happy that I took all of the photos in this two-part post up to this point today because when I travel this route again in about 2 weeks I wouldn’t have seen ANY of what I photographed due to extremely low visibility.

I finally arrived at the entrance road to Denali National Park. According to their Park map it is 120 miles further north to get to Fairbanks, and it is 237 miles south back to Anchorage.

My next posts will include photos from within the Park. I will only be here for about two hours today to pickup maps and get a feel for what to expect in the small part of the Park I will be able to access. I will explain further in my next post. I will have to leave later in the day because I still have a two hour drive to Fairbanks. When I return to the Park later in my trip to spend 3 1/2 days here I will be staying in Healy which is only about 20 miles up the road.

Getting to Denali NP – Part 1 of 2

September 19, 2025

After my disappointment with the limited views at the various Denali Viewpoints I continued north on Highway 3 to get to the National Park entrance, which is about 100 miles away. Here are some of the things I saw along the way:

A rare look at me! I had bought a dark brown hooded sweatshirt to add to my collection for this trip. It was now hunting season and I didn’t want to be mistaken for a brown bear (aka grizzly bear) by either a hunter or a brown bear so I donned my Safety Sam vest for the times I was out of the car taking photos. More importantly it was also Fat Bear Week and I didn’t want to be captured, weighed, tagged and released!

My car was in a parking area and I was up by the main road. This was actually looking back towards the southwest.

More snow-covered mountains under some low gray clouds.

And a few high peaks with some snow on them not far off the highway:

Below is an old motel called “The Igloo”. There were No Trespassing signs and a chain across the access road, and it looked like it has been abandoned. No wonder, as it is out in the proverbial middle of nowhere… It was built in the 70’s but never opened. There was nothing else around for miles…

The road then opened up a bit and the mountains were further away.

This is looking back from another angle at two mountains shown earlier in this post.

The photos in this part of the post cover about an hour and a half of driving (including stops to take pictures).

(Continued in next post)

Mt. Denali photos – Day Three

September 19, 2025

Don’t get too excited….

Today I will drive from Talkeetna to Fairbanks, with an orientation stop in Denali National Park itself. Most of the photos of Mt. Denali I have posted thus far were taken at several viewpoints along Hwy 3. Those stops were all located in Denali State Park, not the National Park, and were about 100 miles from the National Park entrance.

Denali National Park (and Preserve) is enormous. At over 6 million acres it covers 9,446 square miles and is larger than the state of New Hampshire. And I stand corrected on a comment I made a few days ago. Denali National Park WAS at one time called Mount McKinley National Park. Even though our current president changed the name of the mountain back to McKinley, the Park is still (as of this writing) called Denali.

My first stop on the way to Fairbanks will be at the viewpoints I took photos from the past two days. You may recall that the first day was sunny and clear, but coming up to Talkeetna yesterday it was overcast and the snow-covered “Denali Complex” mountains were completely obscured. Today would be somewhere in between.

When I left my Airbnb in Talkeetna I saw two moose (a parent and a youngster) cross the road a ways ahead of me as I was driving back to Hwy 3. I was actually on my phone (hands free) dictating a voicemail message to some friends back home. I remember saying “OMG – there are two moose – gotta go…” and terminating the call but by the time I stopped and got my phone out of the cupholder carrier to take a picture they were in the woods on the opposite side of the road.

I stopped at a gas station when I got out to Hwy 3 to top off my tank for the day and saw this Denali bus.

Strange for two reasons – a) I was 136 miles from the Park entrance, and b) the buses had stopped running several days earlier on a pre-arranged schedule.

After filling my tank and getting coffee I headed for the Southern Viewpoint. This is what I saw when I got there:

I could only see the base of the big mountains. This is a closer view with the digital camera and zoom lens:

I drove a few miles further north on Hwy 3 to the Campground Viewpoint. It wasn’t any better. These are zoomed in even closer with the digital camera.

And here are some other mountains I could see further north in the Alaska Range (with the digital camera):

Those are the last pictures of the mountains from Hwy 3 that I will take on this trip. When I come back up this way for the final time on October 1 I wouldn’t even see the black mountains in the foreground as that day would have extremely low clouds and I could only see about a mile in any direction until I got further north of these viewpoints.

When I come back up Hwy 3 for the final time this trip I will spend 3 1/2 days in the National Park and will have views of other mountains, but for reasons I will explain later it is doubtful that I will see Mt. Denali again.

I will, however, be spending about 2 hours in Denali National Park later today so you will get a first look at some of the mountains I could see from within the Park.