HaveKidsWillTravel

Denali is different – so different, in fact, we were a bit put off at first, not sure whether it would really be a rewarding experience for the kids.

First, you can’t drive there. The only access from the park entrance is on a slow park shuttle along a single dirt road in a bumpy old school bus, that takes up to 12 hrs to do the full round trip.

Second – unlike Yosemite and Yellowstone, there aren’t any big easy drawcards – no geysers, Half-Dome or Yosemite Falls. Sure, it has Mt McKinley, the biggest mountain in North America, but its so distant from the road and the weather so fickle that less than a third of park visitors actually get to see it.

What it does have is 6 million acres of genuine wilderness – an ecosystem with caribou, wolves, moose, wolverines, lynx and grizzlies – where you are definitely not top of the food chain. (The only National Park I’ve heard of where you can’t take your car, but you can take your gun…).

Most of the camping is in a fairly non-descript site at the entrance at Riley Creek, but in a stroke of luck, we scored a last minute site at Teklanika River – the only drive-in site within the park, which as well as giving us license to drive 20miles along the park road (thus cutting an hour off subsequent park shuttle bus rides), is a truly beautiful spot. I saw an Ansell Adams print in the Fairbanks museum taken from exactly the point we sat looking over the braided river in the midnight twilight.

The other big thing Denali offers is the opportunity to get off the bus anywhere you like, walk in any direction you want (there are no trails), and (with the appropriate permit) camp pretty much anywhere you might desire (there are no defined backcountry campsites). The odd thing is that not many people seem to do it (looking at the permits board, there were about 20 people out there in that 6 million acres), but I thought the idea of taking Angus and maybe Evie for a night out in the truly great outdoors was just too good an opportunity to miss. Getting the permit involved a two hour process – while we sat through a safety briefing, video and talk discussing zero impact camping, bear safety and how to handle wildlife encounters out in what they call ‘the great humbler’. By the end of it, I think we were all starting to feel more than a little freaked out by the prospect. Pencil hovering over the part of the form asking whether I would be taking firearms or bear repellant, the kindly ranger offered me the loan of a can of bear spray – just for my nerves…

Because the grizzlies (despite outnumbering you 30-to-one) don’t really have any experience with people, they supposedly have no reason to associate you with food, so shouldn’t bother you. I guessed that by the same logic they’d have no reason to fear and avoid you – so I took the bear spray.

We spent the first night inside the park at Teklanika, went for a walk along the gravel river bed, following the footprints of a herd of Caribou that had come through the night before. Each evening, a ranger comes in to give a talk on one of the species of wildlife, and on our last night there, awarded Evie her ‘Junior Ranger’ badge for completing exercises on what she had seen and learned while in the park, much to all our delight.

Next morning, we headed off with packs loaded, caught an early shuttle and disembarked about an hour and a half up the road – about 3 miles across a tundra plain from the Polychrome glaciers (and about 10miles along the road from where we’d spotted 5 grizzlies up a hillside). While logistically, we couldn’t really all make a big overnight hike, Fiona and Digby joined us for the start to make a day-hike out of it, and to give Evie the option, once we saw how things went.

The moment we stepped off the bus, a swarm of mosquitoes descended, and chased us down a gravel ravine onto the tundra. And while this had looked like a level bowling green from the road, it was more like 6 inches of foam rubber laid over the top of the bowling balls to walk on – and then covered with thick, sharp brush varying from knee to waist deep. We tried following animal trails, which petered out, and ended up in pockets of thick willow over our heads. But the safety briefing had prepared us for this kind of situation – to avoid surprising wildlife in the brush, you need to call out as you walk (assertively and repeatedly), “Hey, Bear…”

Which all sounds a lot more amusing in retrospect than it was at the time, and it was a lot less fun still for little legs. After about an hour of tundra-bashing, we had a hurried, nervous snack and parted ways, Evie heading back with Fiona and Digby, while Angus and I made for a river bed to cut the rest of the way across the plain. Reaching it, the going was far easier – and we made it into a narrow valley in the mountain and found a great little campsite on a grassy alpine bench next to a glacial stream (and no mosquitoes!) in good time to spend a sunny afternoon exploring. We hiked up a ridgeline to reconnoiter the mountains, and after dinner spotted a red fox hunting for a dinner of arctic ground squirrel. It was good fun just the two of us, gave us time to talk about all those important Father-son things you never quite get around to otherwise – William Tell, the Napoleonic wars, Pythagoras’ theorem…

One of the key bear safety protocols is to set your tent over 100 yards away from where you store your food (in a bear-proof cannister) and where you do your cooking. Sure enough, as soon as we had set up our ‘iron triangle’, Angus found a perfect imprint of a big bearpaw in the mud – almost in the center of it. So it was a restless, uneasy night’s sleep, and by next morning, Angus was pretty tired and a little chilled, so we got a slow start. And then it started to rain. I was trying to pick a line across the plain that kept us out of the worst of the brush, so stuck to the edge of the hills as far as possible. We came across a caribou, a moose and some shed antlers – and far away, on a distant hill, saw a speck of golden blond. I couldn’t make out any details with the fogging binoculars, but Angus decided that it was definitely a grizzly. Good enough for me, and we set course for the shortest, highest path back to the road across the tundra plain.

Almost as soon as we got down onto the plain, though, we realised it was going to be ugly – stagnant, ankle-deep mushy swamp. The rain was getting heavier, and halfway across, Angus started to tear up at the fetid misery of the situation. We eventually made it, sodden and muddy, and were just a couple of hundred meters from the road, when a bus stopped, waited a few minutes, and then left. I thought I was hearing things, when from the brush in front of us, we heard ‘Broc !?’ …. ‘Daddy?’ … ‘Angus?’

And out of the bushes came Evie and Fiona with Digby in the backpack – they’d taken the morning bus, and were happily on their way up to Eiselin when they spotted us from the road and decided to hike down and meet us – ‘Stop, driver, that’s my husband and son!’.

It wasn’t long till we were all back on a warm, dry shuttle, happily joining in the wildlife spotting from the safety of our bus seat. And Angus eventually warmed up and dried out enough to agree: that despite the rain, mud and muck, the mosquitos, scary bears – and even my backcountry cooking – Denali has definitely been the highlight of the trip so far.