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| Our Poser Moose |
Our day at Denali National Park was good but definitely not what we had hoped for. The weather was beautiful, except you could no longer see Mount McKinley. We discovered while on our tours, that Mt McKinley was only visible approximately 30 days a year. We were very fortunate to have take pictures the day prior because we never saw it again the rest of the trip. Prior to departing for our trip we did fairly little planning, choosing against our norm to be more spontaneous on this trip and hopefully profit from a more relaxed less time constrained vacation. There were only a couple of things we actually planned and I will say the time constraints introduced by those events definitely negatively impacted other events that were actually much more enjoyable part of the vacation. This fact, coupled with the fact that the "planned" events cost considerably more money than any of the other activities we participated is pretty persuasive to the idea of open schedule vacation time.
We are not "tour" type people. In general we opt to read up on an area and show ourselves around, unless a tour is required. The one tour we signed up for on this trip has convinced me that is the plan we should stick to for all future endeavours. When we ordered our tour online, it was much more built up and vaguely misleading about what we would get for our tour. Let's start with the morning part of the tour in Jeeps. We arrived for our tour, after having driven the 8 hours from Anchorage to Fairbanks the day prior and the hour and 45 minutes back down from Fairbanks that morning. The Jeep tour was to be 5 hours down a road through Denali National Park. We had been led to believe this tour would take us to places we would be unable to go without being on the tour-- wrong! We could have simply driven our own car down the road at our own pace. Aggravation number one. Second, we arrived to find that the tour was booked in such a way that you had to share your jeep with total strangers. The people who shared our Jeep were nice enough but it was a bit awkward driving along with complete strangers for 5 hours just stopping at scenic sites to take pictures. There was nothing much historically significant to the area so pretty much all we were doing was driving and stopping to take pictures at different sites on a road we could have driven by ourselves. Hmm. Well lets just say, they sell that tour really well. I did get some beautiful pictures, but who cant get beautiful pictures pretty much anywhere in Alaska!? Halfway through the drive, Chris who had been driving quite a bit on this trip already, tried to trade off driving with the other man who had also signed to be a driver. The man actually said, "No thanks, I have really been enjoying just going along for the ride". REALLY? Now we just felt glorified chauffeurs. The whole time I couldn't help thinking about how much money I had paid out for this craziness and I kept kicking myself. But then, I thought, maybe the second half of the tour -the ATV riding- would make up for the dismal start.
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| Another Glacier from a distance. |
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| Shy Moose -- I was the only one on the tour able to catch her picture It is amazing how quickly such a large animal can disappear |
After the Jeep tour, we walked around the town (both blocks) for a few minutes and checked out the locations to eat. We stopped in the place that was recommended only to be ignored for so long that we left to find another place to eat. The place where we ended up was actually pretty good. We had an enjoyable lunch and then headed out for an action packed afternoon (2 hours) riding ATVs. Again, the company did a really good job of selling an afternoon of ATV trail riding. It wasn't a bad time, however, nearly half the people in the group had never been on an ATV and had no business getting on one. Almost the entire route was dirt roads not trails, we moved at an incredible slow pace (so as not to cause difficulty for those who were beginners), and we spent nearly half the time stopped, milling around at overlooks. I had just really expected/wanted to ride ATVs and enjoy the ride so I was a bit disappointed. I have no pictures of this ride because I didn't want to take my good camera out riding ATVs. At the end of the day, we saw some pretty country, caught a glimpse of two moose, and had an enjoyable time together despite all the weirdness. Oh yeah, we learned we are most certainly NOT tour people, and it will be quite sometime if not NEVER before we go on a tour again.
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| Sunrise/Sunset -- Not sure there was a distinction between the two -- This was at about 11PM |
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| The sky over the Alaskan Mountain Range at 11 o'clock at night The darkest it got while we were in Alaska |
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