Day of Discovery
We go on a Discovery Hike with Driver Dale and Ranger Tina.
Ellen, Sally and I signed up for a ranger-led Discovery Hike for today. You get on a bus at the Wilderness Access Center and it takes you into the park. Only 11 people per hike and you get dropped off along the road with a ranger who leads the group into the wilderness...or at least a way off the road where are no trails.
It was our first ride on the park road which also gave us a preview of our drive to Teklanika on Wednesday.
While the park buses take nearly 50 passengers, the Discovery bus has only 22 since it only takes Discovery Hikers and there are two different hikes each day.
We got on the bus for an 8am departure. As always, there was some concern that it would take longer walk to the bus than it did, so we were quite early to the bus stop. But...this meant we were the first on an got the first two rows of seats on the right side. While this gave us some view out the front as well as the side, we didn't realize that the left is the preferred side as it looks out over as we climb the passes.
Our driver was Dale. He has a rather wry sense of humor and was a great spotter of wildlife while driving this very twisty road over several passes cut into the hillsides on a single lane road with no guard rails...but he has been doing this every summer for 27 years...and he is only the 7th most senior driver (he's a contract computer programmer in the off-season). This seniority, though, gives him a good choice of which bus to drive and he drives only the Discovery Hike bus. It is uncrowded and has a looser schedule than the others. We chatted quite a bit on the way to the hike. After dropping off the Discovery Hikes he continues out to the end of the rod at Wonder Lake and returns to the park entrance, picking up passengers along the way.
Our hike started at Ride Mile 61 near Stoney Overlook and we picked up Ranger Tina at the Toklat River Rest Stop at Mile 53. Tina is a retired schoolteacher from Tennessee whose son, who worked at the park, suggested that she and her husband, also a retired schoolteacher, becomes rangers here...so they did. It turns out that the teacher experience serves her well leading these hikes.
On the way to our drop off point we saw much wildlife, including wolves on a caribou kill, lots of live caribou, two Golden Eagles, two Short-eared Owls and Dalls Sheep dots at the Toklat Rest Stop. The sheep stay so far away that they just look like white dots up on the high slopes. You can make out some details with binoculars, but a spotting scope would have been nice. We also had nice views of Denali. It was a pretty clear day and we got our first peeks on the way to Stoney Dome. At Stoney Dome we had our first full view of the mountain from the east side.
Dale dropped Ranger Tina and our group off just short of Stoney Overlook, a viewpoint where the tour buses turn around. We hiked up onto the tundra at the base of Stoney Dome. We took in the view of Denali for while and got the wildlife talk that comes with every ranger program. This is basically stay at least 300 yards from a bear and 75 yards from everything else. Don't run from bears or wolves. Stand your ground with bears and slowly back away. Play dead if a Grizzly makes contact, but fight off the Black Bears. Treat wolves as "Bad Dogs". Run if a Moose charges you. That's about it.
After that and an introductory talk about our hike we walked up the tundra to a higher point where we could see four Grizzly Bears, two adults, one a lone bear going in one direction, the other a sow with two cubs going in another direction. Fortunately, neither was going in our direction. They called Grizzly Bears here, but Brown Bears on the coast, same species, but have different diets. Here they live on mostly plants and berries and the coastal Brown Bears live on mostly fish. The Denali bears are a bit grumpy (wouldn't you be if all you had to eat were plants and berries, with the occasional caribou or ground squirrel while your coastal cousins were gorging themselves on salmon all day long?). The coastal bears are more tolerant of humans (you'd probably be as well while eating all that fresh fish), so the rules are different.
We stayed on open tundra, avoiding the bushy areas. As we climbed we had more spectacular views of Denali. There was an abundance of wildflowers, mostly small and close to the ground as you would expect in a harsh treeless environment, but it was mostly mosses, low lying forbs and bunch grasses, with the occasional mushroom. Much of it was rather spongy.
We hiked up onto a tundra bench, a flat overlook above Stoney Creek, and stopped for lunch. After a pleasant lunch, we hiked down to the creek and out to the road to await the next bus. Unexpectedly, it was Dale on his way back from Wonder Lake and he had enough room for all the hikers except Ranger Tina. We were a bit concerned about leaving her by her self, particularly after the bear warnings, but there was a Park Service pickup truck coming along right behind us and they picked her up. She actually beat us back to the Toklat Rest Stop.
Our bus ride back was a bit more quiet than the one out, but there were more bears and more caribou. It was a long day.
No comments:
Post a Comment