Month: March 2026

Preview of Denali NP – Part 1 of 2

September 19, 2025

I decided to spend a little bit of time in Denali National Park while on my way to Fairbanks so I could get an idea what to expect when I come back later to spend several days here.

One of the signs at the entrance had a great photo of Mt. Denali, as seen from high above Wonder Lake, well within the Park.

Here is a map of the only road within the Park.

(Photo credit: NPS.gov/Denali)

The majority of the time that the Park is open, passenger vehicles may only drive the first 15 miles of the road unless they have a special permit to go further. Park buses transport visitors deeper into the Park, and are the best way to see much more of the Park’s interior (and get closer to Mt. Denali itself).

The buses stopped running for the season on September 15, so the rangers told me I could now travel an additional 15 miles (on an unpaved road) IF the weather permitted it. I was here on the 19th, but the road had already been shut down once this month for a snow event.

Here are some of the things I saw on this first visit:

That is a metallic bear outside the Visitor Center.

That is a view of the “Puppy Cam”. There were signs on Park Road which warned drivers to watch out for Sled Dogs which may be exercising along the road. As you can see, they were all zonked out in one of their enclosures and I never did see any out and about.

That is a 3-D relief map showing Mount Denali (aka Mt. McKinley) and it’s proximity to Wonder Lake. In the lower left hand corner you can also see a reference to the Eielson Visitor Center, located within the Park and only accessible by bus. I am at the Main Visitor Center out near Hwy 3.

That is another angle of the relief map showing the Main Visitor Center at the bottom, and revealing that from this vantage point, and the first 15 miles of the Park Road I was allowed to drive on (to the Savage River), I would be looking down the spine of what I call the “Denali Complex” of mountains. There is one spot where I theoretically could see Mt. Denali from the Park Road but we’ll see how well that works out…

OK. Enough talk. Let’s get out on Park Road and see what’s in store for us.

From the Visitor Center the road climbs up to about 3,000 feet elevation and is then fairly level for most of the first 15 miles. There are mountains on both sides, but fairly far off the road. There were 3 or 4 wide, rocky spots (shown above) where the snowmelt drains from the mountains on the right (north of the road) towards the south. The photos above are looking south so the water would be running away from here in the Spring.

The photo above is looking north from the same spot on the road. Those mountains are a little closer to the road and not as tall or “jagged” as the ones to the south.

The mountains to the south are taller and many had snow on them already. I don’t believe I saw snow on the mountains to the north this trip but they will have snow when I return in about 2 weeks.

This is getting close to the 15 mile-mark and the road changes elevation slightly before going up to a high point, then dropping down to the Savage River. You can see relatively short pine trees scattered about and brown scrub brush (you’ll see a better photo of it in the next post) in the “open” areas. The scrub brush ranged from knee-high to almost chest-high in places.

The photo above shows a large brown mountain which is on the other side of the Savage River. You can see a road climbing the hill to the left but it is the dirt road on the other side of the 15-mile bridge.

The rock formation shown above is next to a parking area just before the bridge.

That shows two hikers near the left base of the big formation, giving it some size perspective.

That is from that parking area looking north. There are hiking trails on both sides of the river, which is between the two hills.

That is the bridge going over the Savage River (2,780 feet elevation at this point). The dirt road to the left on the other side continues deeper into the Park. The road on the right appeared to be additional parking for hikers. There is a shack on the other side of the bridge in which a ranger will check permits for those drivers wanting to go further. There was a gate on this side of the bridge which was closed if people weren’t supposed to continue due to weather.

I was told by the rangers that people could continue to Mile 30 since the buses were no longer running, which is why you are seeing vehicles on the other side.

The next post will contain photos driving back out towards Hwy 3, a chance to perhaps see Mt. Denali, and my first wildlife sighting in the Park.

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.

Fairbanks Loop

September 18, 2025

I referenced this “loop” in my previous post and thought it might be wise to post a picture of map and explain my thinking:

(Photo credit: AAA.com Alaska Map)

The two biggest towns in Alaska are Anchorage and Fairbanks. There are major highways (1,2,3 and 4) which connect them in a loop fashion. I will use smaller towns along them to illustrate my overview.

A small town fairly close to Anchorage (lower left corner of the map) is called Wasilla. From there north to Fairbanks is 316 driving miles on Hwy 3 and according to Google Maps takes 5 hours 22 minutes to drive. Coming down the east side of the loop, Fairbanks to Glennallen is in two parts – Fairbanks southeast to Delta Junction on Hwy 2, then Delta Junction south to Glennallen on Hwy 4. Total distance of those two parts is 247 miles and drive time is 4 hours 20 minutes. Then from Glennallen roughly west to Wasilla is on Hwy 1. Distance is 148 miles and drive time is 2 hours 38 minutes.

To do the whole loop covers 711 miles and takes 12 hours and 20 minutes (without stops). Hence the need to break it up into bite-sized pieces.

This first lap I am stopping in Talkeetna, Fairbanks, Gakona (near Glennallen) and eventually back to Anchorage. I was originally going to do a second loop in the opposite direction later in the trip because I often see things driving the opposite direction on some roads than I saw going the other way. It turned out that I would do both loops in the same direction for reasons which I will explain when I get to that point in my trip.

My first loop is to visit those towns and get a feel for road conditions and elevation changes. This is my first time in Alaska and I have no idea what to expect. My first big lesson was that Talkeetna is a LONG way from Denali National Park, and the Alaska Range where the Denali Mountains are located is also a LONG way from Denali National Park. On my second loop I will stay in Healy, about 20 miles north of the Park entrance, and visit the Park for 3 1/2 days with much less driving!

Anchorage to Talkeetna

September 18, 2025

When I left Anchorage to make my first loop up to Fairbanks and back (covering several days) I had booked my first Airbnb in the little town of Talkeetna (pronounced tal-KEET-na). I drove past the turnoff when I made my impromptu trip up to see Mount Denali on a clear day yesterday. Talkeetna is actually about 14 miles off Hwy 3 on a roughly parallel road. Today I once again overshot the turnoff and went right to the various viewpoints I had visited the day before.

Before I left Anchorage I took this photo of a neon sign I saw on a tiny ice cream shop I drove past every day. For some reason I liked it’s simplicity:

As I drove north on Hwy 3 I saw this vehicle just off the highway to my right, in the little town of Houston AK.

It was promoting the “Grass Station,” a marijuana dispensary (of which there are many on Canada and Alaska).

Points for being clever.

I also passed an elementary school with this impressive (covered) outdoor recreation space for the kids to safely play away from the highway:

There was also a fenced in area on a grassy lawn on the other side of the building with the usual park-type playground equipment for kids.

Just up the road from the school was a company which apparently makes and/or markets seaplanes:

The plane on the roof was motorized to rotate slowly. There was a small lake behind this building with a few seaplanes docked, and I took a video of one taking off. I saw LOTS of seaplanes flying around while I was in Anchorage and will have photos later in the trip of a lake by the Anchorage International Airport which claims to have the highest concentration of seaplanes in the world.

When I finally made it to the South Viewpoint I had visited on a clear day yesterday, this is what I saw:

Exactly NONE of the big, snow covered Denali mountains. Only the shorter black mountains in front of them.

I really had nothing else to do so I just hung around and talked with other visitors. It was too far to drive up to the actual Denali National Park entrance, and I will be stopping there tomorrow on my way to Fairbanks.

After a while I headed back to Talkeetna to be there at my check-in time. It was a nice new house (bigger than a tiny house but not by much) and even had heated floors! What a concept. It had two levels (my part was at ground level) which is why I really didn’t think of it as a tiny house. The owners lived nearby but I never had a chance to meet them. The house was on a rough unpaved road and was in the woods. They told me I might see moose in the yard but I never did, though two walked across the road a short ways in front of me as I was leaving the next morning. It happened too quick for me to get photos.

I did come upon the Denali Brewing Company on my way to the Airbnb. I was surprised to find it near such a small town.

Oh, and I had seen this colorful display just off Hwy 3 as I drove south to Talkeetna from the Viewpoint.

It was across a large sandy area from the highway but the colors caught my eye so I parked and walked over to take a photo.

Tomorrow I will drive much further north to get to Denali National Park itself and will have a few hours there to get a sneak preview of the Park before continuing on to Fairbanks.

Other Denali Mountains

September 17, 2025

There were a few other mountains in the “Denali Complex” that I could see as I drove about 30 miles further north on Hwy 3 from the Southern Viewpoint. They are mostly other large mountains, but I don’t know exactly which ones they are. And I found three more of Mt. Denali itself, taken from a more northerly viewpoint and which clearly shows the separation of the South and North peaks. Let me show those first:

And I used the digital camera with zoom lens to get a closer look at the two main peaks:

The rest of these are mountains further northeast of Mt. Denali itself. One of them is probably Mt. Silverthorne and another may be Mt. Mather. The Alaska Range continues for quite a distance, and the entire range is aligned from southwest to northeast.

Some photos were taken from the highway and some are from the North Viewpoint (but there was no sign there identifying them as there was at the South Viewpoint). I didn’t want to post these with the others as I presumed that most people were interested in the three main mountains.

The mountains in the Alaska Range southwest of Mt. Foraker are further away from the highway so I never even got a glimpse of them as I drove north. The road had trees on the side in many places which blocked my view, and of course I was mainly focused on driving.

The second one appears to be the same mountain on the left in the photo above it, but the road had turned left so I was looking right at it. They were taken 2 minutes apart.

These were all taken the same day as I took the main Denali photos. I would come back up here the next day but you will see in the next post that it was overcast and I couldn’t see these mountains at all.