Travelers: Denali Bus Tour

It was a long and fun day. Today we took a bus from the Visitor Center just inside Denali National Park 63 miles towards the interior of the park to Eleison Center. Along the way we saw a huge variety in elevation, vegetation, and animals. Here are some of the pictures we took. Many of the animals like the Doll Sheep and Caribou were high in the mountains and the pics we took with the camera didn't work well.

Here are some of today's pictures:

Here's a picture of a moose about 1/2 mile from our B&B on our way to the park this morning. We have seen lots of moose and no deer. A cow and calf moose ran right in front of our car yesterday.

We sat in the front seat of the bus. This picture and the following picture are of a Grizzly sow and her two cubs. Although we probably saw a dozen Grizzly bear today, these were by far the closest we came.

This is a second picture of the bears. They did not show any fear of us and in this case there were about five loaded busses with folks clicking away with their cameras.

Yep, these are the busses. The roads are narrow and mostly gravel and occasionally you can look down a few thousand feet!

Ok, when you look at this picture you might say, "Why did they put this picture in?". Well, if you look above the hill on the right and see a small crescent of white to the left, this is the top of Mt. Mckinley (Denali). This is what we saw today, just pieces. Denali is visible only about 30% of the time and usually around winter (March). We are considering a plane ride around Denali tomorrow.

Here's another shot where above these white capped mountains, you can see more of Denali in the background.

This is Eleison Visitor Center and the turn around point for our trip. We saw lots of Caribou and Dall Sheep, some Ptarmagan (like grouse), tons of beautiful flowers, rivers, pine trees, Golden Eagles, and hares.