Discovering The Bush(es)
Today was time for another discovery hike. As we are an hour further down the road, we didn't have to be at the bus stop until 9am. Today's driver was Frank who, unlike Dale from our last Discovery bus, was totally silent. For the entire trip, about 30 miles, he asked for our passes and announced the stop at the Teklanika Rest Stop. It was like riding a city bus.
As the bus was approaching the Teklanika River bridge we could clearly see a big male Grizzly Bear walking along the river on the shore opposite where we had hiked when we first arrived at the Teklanika Campground. We saw another male bear and several caribou on the way out to the hike, but no wolves today.
Today's hike was Ranger Jessica, much younger than Ranger Tina, and the hike was in the area behind Polychrome Mountain. It started by walking up a stream bed which was quite rocky. Most of the other hikers were much younger than us an one of the men leaped into the lead. Unlike Tina, Jessica didn't really keep things under control and gave little guidance as to where and how we should go and the pace was a little fast for some of the hikers.
The hike came out of the drainage to a very rocky tundra area and we walked over that most of the to the base of a scree field at the bottom of the cliffs up the mountain. At that point we had gone well over a mile, so we turned back and went back down to a point where we could climb up onto a soft tundra field and an overlook for our lunch stop.
As we were walking through a low bushy area, a caribou popped up out of the bush not more than 25 yards away. She must have been resting in the bushes and we disturbed her. She just stood there looking at us for a couple of minutes, then trotted off downhill. At least it wasn't a bear sleeping in the bushes.
It was a virtually cloudless day, but the haze from the fires was even heavier than yesterday. We could just make out the peaks of Denali in the haze and it had just about disappeared by the time we finished lunch.
It was now time to go back down to the road. Unlike the last hike it was not tundra all the way and we had to do a bit of bushwhacking through heavy bush, sometimes over our heads. While billed as a moderate hike, we felt that it was more difficult than our hike yesterday.
We decided to take the bus west one stop to Toklat to the rest stop before heading back to camp. The buses always make a short stop here, but we'd never had the time to actually look around. After that it was the bus back to camp to end another long day.
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