Mountain Who Hides: We visit Denali and Talkeetna

You Say Denali, I Say McKinley; Tomato, Tomatto

We have noticed that Alaskans use Athabascan Indian names for a lot of places in their state. I think they do this to keep us Cheechakos (that's an indian name for newcomers) from getting too sure of ourselves.  Locals rattle off names like, Kantishna, and Toklat, and Teklanika easily.  We get our tongues all tied in knots and sound stupid trying to do the same.

Nor do we ever know what these names mean.  You can't find out. So I've decided it would be simpler if I just figured them out for myself.  "Denali," for example.  The Alaskan state geography naming office says that Denali is the official name for the highest peak in North America.  It means, "The Mountain Who Hides From Us"   

Ok, so I made that up.  It really means "Great One," but my translation makes more sense.  It is never there.  It is hidden by clouds of its own making most of the time. Hundreds of thousands of people get off cruise ships each year, then ride trains and busses 200 miles up here, just so they can enjoy not seeing Denali.

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names, on the other hand, says the mountain is named "Mt. McKinley."  Guidebooks explain that during gold rush times, prospectors crisscrossed Alaska putting names on features willy nilly.  They especially liked to name features after politicians back home whom they admired.  Hmmmm.  Politicians were admired in the late 1800s? Guess that was before television.  But I don't buy that explanation, I think it was named Mt. McKinley because no one has seen the mountain since back when Mr. McKinley was president.

The park is four times bigger than Yellowstone, but has only one road. It goes 90 miles from the first visitor center out to Kantishna and stops at a dead end.  Of those 90 miles you are allowed to drive on only the first 15.  But the park service has thoughtfully provided busses to take you further down the road, for only $50 apiece.  That's $50 for each day you are there. We chose instead to take their guided Tundra Wilderness Tour for only $125 apiece. For that you only get to go half way.  In a school bus.

Ok, enough carping. It just irritates me that members of the public have to pay huge sums to see a park they already own.  A park that is managed by the federal government, at taxpayer expense, and is intended specifically for the use and enjoyment of its citizens. 

We drove the first 15 miles ourselves twice on Tuesday but didn't see either Denali OR Mt. McKinley.  So then we bought tour tickets for Wednesday.  The bus started off at 1:30 pm and an hour and a half later stopped by the Teklanika River for us to use the official NPS porta-potties.  

Five busses arrived at the same time and 250 people found that uniformed park service sanitation employees had just closed half the potties for cleaning. 

Our guide, Lee, talked off and on as he drove, and did impart a lot of good information.  We learned that muddy glacier-fed rivers like the Teklanika don't have fish, because fish can't breathe mud all that easily.  Fish live instead in clear, non-glacier streams.  

So put the rod away.  Lee is a local dog musher, who has lived in the area for years.  He explained that in the winter park rangers patrol the huge park using dog sleds. Often over the same trails used by indians and early European trappers. There are cabins positioned across the park for them to use on winter patrol. Brrrrrr

The cabin you see below is one of the winter patrol cabins, but it is close to the visitor center so you get to visit it.  Notice the windows, which are heavily nailed from the inside. That's to lessen the interest of any passing bear or moose who might otherwise want to come in and build a fire.

Lee also explained that while the park, which is officially named Denali National Park, is so much bigger than Yellowstone it actually has far fewer animals.  There are more elk alone in Yellowstone than all the animals in Denali combined.  He tells us this after we paid $125 each for a tour to see animals.  It seems the animals have a much tougher existence here than they do down south. If they can survive the cold, dark winter, they only have a matter of eight to twelve weeks in which to bear their young and get ready for the arrival of the next cold, dark winter. The lush foliage we were seeing, for example, only leafed out two weeks ago.  At the end of June!

We finally saw two animals, both white Dall sheep, up on the side of a grassy slope maybe 500 yards away.  They looked like white specks, but Lee had a television camera he used to show us closeup views of the sheep on TV monitors in the bus.  Does anybody else see the irony in this? Visiting a park to see animals on TV? Then we got to see several caribou a bit closer to the road.

  And got a leg-stretching stop at Polychrome Overlook (below).

After another potty stop, this time at Toklat River, we finally got to see a bear.  Sort of.  It disappeared into a ravine right after it was spotted.  So Lee promised he'd stop on the way back and we'd look for it again.

We turned around at mile marker 55 or 56, at a place called Stony Dome.  I don't know why it doesn't have an indian name.  Maybe they ran out of indian names.  Lee explained that Stoney Dome overlook offers a wonderful view of Denali/McKinley, when it isn't hiding.  On this day there was so much smoke from a forest fire we couldn't have seen it if the mountain had stripped naked and paraded around in front of us.

Back to the bear. Lee was good as his word, and found the bear again on the way back.  It was a grizzly bear in sort of a buckskin color.  Tan, almost blonde body with darker leggings.  He explained that contrary to popular belief, grizzly bears eat mostly grasses, berries and other vegetable matter. This one did appear to be grazing on tall grass.  But remember, there are no fish up here. A grizzly here weighs far less than his or her counterparts living in fish country.  I took this photo, below left, with my new 750mm lens.

Then we were excited to see a pair of ptarmigans right alongside the road.  They had a gaggle of tiny babies with them.  Lee said these were the first hatchlings he'd seen in the park this year. Spring has sprung.  In July.  The male below still has part of his white winter feathers.

We got almost all the way back when something really odd happened. We saw what appeared to be cumulus clouds covered in snow, projecting up out the top of a cloud bank.  Lee focused his TV camera on it and said it was the mountain itself, making sort of an impromptu appearance late in the day.  It was 60 miles away, so all we saw was a couple of bumps at the top of the clouds.  But with binoculars and my new 750mm lens, it looked like, well, a couple of bumps at the top of the clouds.  The right bump is the north peak and the left bump is south peak, the higher of the two.  Wow.  It is almost 20,000 feet high. 

Did I mention that by then we were back on the 15 miles of pavement we could have driven by ourselves?  Sour grapes.  At least we saw the durn thing.  That's more than most people got to see this week.  We arrived back to the (closed) visitor center about  8:30 pm, so it was a long ride.  

But we did enjoy the scenery.  We saw a few animals, but not nearly so many as we saw coming across the northern Rockies in Canada.  And the Canadians let you do wildlife viewing for free!

We got to thinking about it that night and figured out that the expansive views of the huge mountain featured in photos we keep seeing had been taken from the south looking north.  At the park, we were at the north end looking south.  With a lot of other mountains in the way. So Thursday we packed up and drove south into a light but steady rain.

We passed both North Viewpoint, then South Viewpoint,  both reported to be great locations much closer to the mountain than we'd been in the park.  But we couldn't see half a mile through the rain and low clouds.  The real Denali still eludes us.

Beautiful Downtown Talkeetna

We set up camp at an RV place at Trapper Creek, maybe 100 miles south of the park.  Then drove over to the town of Talkeetna for a look-see.  Talkeetna is an indian word meaning "Place of Many Tour Busses."

Talkeetna is said to have been the inspiration for the long-running TV show Northern Exposure, along with Haines and Sitka.  Well, it had a lot of eateries and shops, but no K-Bear Radio.  I went into the small general store and found it did look a lot like Ruth Ann's store in Northern Exposure.  Except this one has a liquor store in the rear, behind the clerk.  

Marsha and I have actually been to Ruth Ann's store. It really exists in a small town in Washington state's Cascade Mountains. It was exactly what you saw each week in the TV show, except for in the show they had installed a false wall to hide--you guessed it--the liquor store in the back.

We ate a late lunch at West Rib Cafe (right).  We'd seen it featured on a Food Network show called "Man vs Food."  In this episode a man was trying to eat their five pound hamburger. They have a banner with a photo of the beast outside.  Two pounds of ground caribou; a half pound of ham; twelve strips of bacon, etc.  

Marsha settled for a half pound burger while I went with my fish n' chips staple. West Rib gets its name from a ridge route used to climb Denali/McKinley.  Talkeetna is a base for climbers.  You can see signs everywhere that say, "Talkeetna is a quiet little drinking town with a climber problem."  Ok.  People in the climbing world get to sign their names on the wall in the West Rib bar.  I have no idea what this girl in the photo at lower left did to earn the honor.  But they were making a big deal out of it. 

The other thing that drives Talkeetna's economy is "flightseeing."  They have two airports about three blocks apart.  The paved airport is chock full of light aircraft on steroids.  Beavers and Otters with turbine engines, and Cessna 180s and 185s with big engine upgrades, three-blade props and skis.  Yup, skis.  They offer tourist flights that will actually land on glaciers.  Sounds really exciting, but I'm a licensed pilot and my instructor beat into my head the notion that there are just some places a plane is not supposed to go. I think a glacier may be one of those, especially in the summer after the ice has started to thaw.

The day we were there, Thursday, July 4, the air fleet was grounded anyway.  Even if they could have made it off the ground, all they would have been able to show a load of tourists was the town itself and the nearby Talkeetna River. Everything else was up in the clouds.  Including, of course, Mount Denali/McKinley and all its glaciers.  We are totally socked in. 

But we had a nice time wandering around the town.  They had just finished their 4th of July parade when we got there.  So the town was packed with local residents and visitors alike.  The most frequent answer to the "Alaskan Question," (Hi, where ya' from?) seemed to be Anchorage.

I wondered about the shop in the photo above.  Flight Info and Gallery. The conversation must have gone something like this: "What am I supposed to do all day while you are off flying?"  And, "I don't know, paint something?"

The girl in the Moose Shop at the right is Taylor.  She has some kind of patriotic hat-like thing on her head.  It is July 4th.

So we plan to stay around here another day and if it clears at all we will take the Jeep and drive up a mining road to Petersville. This road runs right towards the mountain.  We can get closer on this road than you can in the national park and won't have to pay tour operator Aramark for the privilege.  Then, on Saturday, we will head down to Anchorage for a few days before going on to visit our friends, Gary and Marlene, on the Kenai River.  They have a salmon stream running right through their back yard, so we can forget about "combat fishing" at the public access areas and fish right off Gary's dock.  I can't wait. Gary got me addicted to smoked salmon when we worked together at NASA.

So stay tuned!  We have a lot more of Alaska left to see.  If the clouds ever lift.

John and Marsha

[Editor's Note: After I wrote this, I received a news article from our friend Jack about one of the local Talkeetna flightseeing trips that apparently made an unplanned, precautionary landing on the Ruth Glacier in snow conditions on Tuesday and as off Thursday night was still up there.  The story said the pilot and passengers have good survival gear and ground rescue efforts are underway].

(all photos copyright 2013 by John B. Taylor)