Day 2 – Friday


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We woke up a 03:30 to a blazing, bright sun!! We decided to call home in order to share this insanity with our family and friends. Being good and awake, we figured we’d go ahead and get an early start on our journey. It was strange that, although the sun was bright as noontime, no stores were open yet. We headed north out of Anchorage and set our destination for Denali (better known by the name Mt McKinley which stole it’s true identity at some point in time, but the locals still refer to it as Denali). Along the way, we stopped at Talkeetna because we had heard so much raving about it. I guess we just didn’t get it. It was a very tiny tourist town that seemed to be nothing more than a launch-pad for flights to Denali or fishing cruises. We drove through it and got back on the main road pretty quickly. We got to Denali State Park at around 09:30. The view was spectacular. I should mention that Denali is sometimes referred to as “Ghost Mountain” because it is completely shrouded in clouds about 70% of the time. From the visitor station at the state park, we could see the whole mountain with only a few floating clouds moving around it. We talked with the ranger to find out what the state park had to offer and decided to camp out there for the night. We got to the campground and pulled into our spot around 10:30, which, coincidentally, is about the same time that waking up at 03:30 in the morning caught up with us. We climbed back to our bed and took a great 1.5 hour nap (open-window-luxury was no longer available now that we were outside the big city of Anchorage, but it was shady and we had our fan on). We woke up wonderfully refreshed and set out on a nice little 6.5 mile hike. It was a 4.8 mile loop trail around Byers Lake but we also hiked about 2 miles above the lake to see the waterfall and get a better view of Denali. It was a beautiful hike. Thoroughly enjoyable. While sitting up on the ridge, enjoying the view, we met and talked with a couple of backpackers who had hiked the whole ridge. They were a nice couple and I was very impressed with the size of the pack that the woman was carrying, combined of course with the distance they’d hiked. Here I was getting a stiff neck over my little 2 liter hydration pack and food supplies. I’m such a wimp. I need to build up to being able to do some real backpacking. I digress. The view of Denali was virtually unobstructed while we were up there. It was beautiful. Very impressive. We hiked back down to the lake and finished the trail around it, stopping to observe the swans and cignets and to arm ourselves with mosquito-netting. When we got back to the car, we decided to drive 20 miles to the nearest eating place. I don’t remember the name of it, some local place that the park ranger had highly recommended, but we got there to have them slam the door in our face because they closed in 15 minutes. Schmucks. So we drove another few miles to the Princess Lodge where we had a very yummy dinner and a nice wet-wipe/sink bath in the bathrooms. We went back to the state park campground and were asleep by 21:30.