July Denali Summer

Saturday, July 6, 2019
Getting away from civilization for a little while before work today. . .

Denali! Unfortunately, after 2 perfectly clear days the smoke from fires near Fairbanks are now moving in as you can see here. I pointed out Denali in the next photo.

Ha, so much for the threat of smoke! My friend, Nancy, took this beautiful photo of Denali a short while ago from the highway on her way to Anchorage. Wow!

Sunday, July 7, 2019
Major cuteness today: A moose cow and her calf plus a yearling in the next pond over. What a big moose jam on the highway by my RV park! 😊 Took a nap this afternoon, then off to dinner theater "Cabin Night", a production that has been running for 32 years up here. The actors are employed by the same company I work for, Doyon Aramark. The winds have brought a thick fog of smoke but despite that I got to see the moose and her calf again on the way home from dinner. It's so peaceful to watch them feed, sloshing around in the pond.😊

A recreation of the Kantishna Road House is the setting for Cabin Night.

Cashe on stilts to protect pioneer's food and supplies from bears and other critters.

One of my table mates, Joel, became part of the cast and got smooches quite a bit by the dance hall girl. He was quite a hambone!

His wife, Cindy, wiping off the lipstick after the performance.💕

Monday, July 8, 2019
Yes, the atmosphere here actually looks worse than this photo posted by Tom Skilling. It started here early yesterday as the winds shifted. Many with respiratory issues are altering their travel plans. We are all watchful for fires that are breaking out closer to this area. There are no direct threats to our safety but smoke is predicted to persist through Wednesday.


Feeling refreshed! Nancy and I enjoyed white water rafting with Explore Denali Rafting today. Very professional, great tour guides and lots of 36 degree water (year round!). Called a glacial facial when you get sprayed! LOL 😅 Tourists shared this awesome bear photo with me taken from their tour bus yesterday. Wow!

Sunday, July 14, 2019

What a difference a big rain and a bunch of sunshine can make! It was a picture perfect day with 73 degrees and a fresh breeze to make our Discovery Hike with Ranger Patty memorable. Our group included 4 people in their 20's and 7 of us in our 60's.

It was supposed to be a moderate hike, but turned out to be a real physical challenge! We hiked over tussocks which are grassy knobs of vegetation about the size of basketballs that roll if you are not perfectly balanced on them as you step from one to another. Add to this balancing act the need to raise each knee practically to your waist to clear the tangle of 3-5 foot tall willow and dwarf birch that cover the terrain and you've got yourself a workout that any fitness guru would be proud of!

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that trekking poles are truly needed (at least for us 60 year olds to keep our balance) but they plunge into the tundra more than 12" till they hit permafrost then stubbornly stick and you have to yank to extract them! Oh, joy!

All of us agreed that we were happy we did the hike, but we'd never knowingly sign up for another. Sorry Ranger Patty! 😊

Our intrepid group getting what I call the "step off the bus and into the food chain" bear, moose and wolf safety talk. Note the beautiful weather and smoke-free vistas!

This terrain looks flat and harmless, right? Ha ha ha!

Still smiling ☀️

Hamming it up with a broken piece of antler from a female caribou. Both male and female caribou grow and shed their antlers annually. The female's antlers are smaller and are shed a month or so after they give birth, using them to protect their young from predators. The males shed theirs earlier, after the mating season. Antlers should be left in the wild because they are a vital source of calcium for mice & voles which nibble on them.Not shown is a video of what it's like to walk on tundra! Soft and dry! Sorry, no video of tussocks - we were too busy falling! (By the way, all of us, young and old alike fell at one time or another.) 

This spring-fed stream was a beautiful surprise. We knew immediately that it was spring fed because the water was crystal clear, free of glacial silt and about 36 icy degrees cold.

Along the way we identified caribou and moose scat as well as that of a moose which had obviously been experiencing severe gastrointestinal distress. (You can figure it out!)

Our lunch spot on the soft dry tundra. We laughed at the butt prints we left but the tundra actually springs back into place fairly quickly. The tiny little kettle pond in the distance was one of our destinations. Kettle ponds were formed when big chunks of glaciers melted, but couldn't be absorbed into the frozen permafrost.

The pond, beyond which lay the park road about 1/3 mile away. Beyond that, the Teklanika River and campgrounds. Total hike was 3 arduous miles.😊

Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Took a little junket about a 100 miles south yesterday & experienced 73 to 53 degree temps, bright beautiful sun to rain showers. That's Alaska!

Watching a family try to see Denali behind the clouds.

One of the prettiest hotel properties I've been to ever and maybe these are the only wolves I'll see during my travels.😊

Love the antler door pulls.

Salmon BLT on ciabatta bread.

Much evidence of spruce bark beetle damage in the Denali State Park.

Not shown is a video of the deep and foreboding Hurricane Gulch.

Going back to sunshine.☀️

Sunday July 22, 2019
A picture perfect day for a discovery hike at mile 55 with Ranger Pete Dally!

Denali visible from 80 miles away at beginning of the bus ride! Whoo hoo!

4-walled restrooms with sod roofs to keep them cooler.

Discovery Hike bus & driver Disco Dale waiting while we took pictures of Denali. Only about 30% of visitors get to see the mountain.

First ptarmigan of the day! Turns out they were all out crossing the park road with their kids. Also saw golden eagle, a huge grizzly sow and her twins, gyre falcons, jays, and a caribou.

Fireweed and scenery at Polychrome pass just before we saw the grizzly from a very safe distance.

Ranger Pete's pre-hike safety talk. I liked his instructions for using our voices to alert bears to our presence: he calls "Denali", we yell "National Park", then we all yell together "And Preserve"! Every sane bear would keep their distance from us crazies!

Nancy Bauter Kalmick meditating on the beauty of the park.

Very relaxed enjoying a tundra nap and ranger talk.

Ranger Pete giving our lunch time tundra talk.

Grizzly scat with a whole bee consumed and passed!

Tiny plants

Fuzzy plants

Red mushrooms

Feathery seeds

Yellow poppy

Tightly twisted seeds unfurling for distribution

Old bone . . .

Marrow hollowed out

Denali in all its splendor from about 25 miles away. (Dust cloud over the road from a passing bus.)

Fields of fireweed

Nancy Bauter Kalmick's traditional picture looking upstream from Teklanika rest stop.

Monday, July 22, 2019
Arf! Arf! Jeff King's Huskie Homestead! One of the most entertaining and informative presentations I've attended. I thought I'd learned a lot about working dogs (like the sled dogs here in Denali), but the Iditarod dogs are quite a bit different - bred to run, run, run!

Jeff King has won the 1,000 mile long Iditarod race 4 times and operates his business just a few miles from the Denali Park entrance. Today there were about 60 people attending the presentation.

Upon arrival everyone gets to hold a puppy! Mine is such a little squirt and slept soundly the whole time! Visitors are an important part of the socialization process. We were warned to banish any thoughts of puppy nabbing! Darn!

Trenton has attended the start of 28 consecutive Iditerods, works for Jeff King and is an expert in raising and caring for sled dogs. Additionally there is a staff of 16 people involved in their care. One can see they truly love the dogs.

This dog's name is Radar, but I love the use of an old sled as a planter. Trenton told us about the King family and how his daughters were in charge of naming each batch of puppies in accordance with their "theme". Radar was part of the M.A.S.H. batch, then there was a Sesame Street batch (Elmo, Ernie, Grover, Bert, etc.), Disney characters, sandwiches, you name it!

This is Sean Underwood, a very engaging, intelligent, accomplished young man from Atlanta. He came to Alaska to spend some time working with his aunt and uncle, fell in love with Alaska, started working for Jeff King and now has completed 2 of the 3 qualifying races to become eligible to enter the Iditarod. He'll be competing in 2021. Go Sean!Part of summer conditioning: a team hooked up to a firmly secured ATV all on a big, long treadmill. The dogs love to run and run and run and run. . . 🐕🐕🐕 !

Back to the Village to join friends Nancy and Karl for the dinner theater, Cabin Night. Back to work tomorrow!

Monday, July 29, 2019
Took a trip to Fairbanks today to get some supplies & thought someone might enjoy these:

At Walmart 😊

Yes, Bob Douat and Linda Sutton, it's still here! (I only stopped to take the photo!)

A really old fish catcher thingie. It rotates and scoops up the fish out of the river and deposits them into a big bin.

Whoo hoo! For Nancy Kuhajda and my master gardener friends, a lovely organic Alaskan garden, complete with electric fence to keep the big critters out. They sell the produce to restaurants in Healy and Denali.

Most unique gift shop in the area, Tatlanika, mostly goods made in Alaska and/or by native American Alaskans.💕(They want me to come work for them next year. Probably because I'd single-handedly buy everything!)

On another note, I posted this today, too. Each time I go into the park I talk to the bus drivers about wolf sightings. This article explains why there have been none that I've heard of:

A wolf pack in Denali in 2010

Four members of the Riley Creek pack in 2016

A wolf with pups walks along the park road in 1990.

Looking to see a wolf at Denali? A grassroots bus-driver survey puts the odds at ‘not-quite nonexistent’

Bill Watkins drives a bus through Denali National Park and Preserve, a destination for hundreds of thousands of visitors eager to view wildlife and one of the world’s best places to see wild wolves.

Denali sprawls across 6 million acres but nearly all those sightings come through the windows of the privately operated buses trundling down the park’s only road, a 92-mile ribbon along the Alaska Range.

Visitors are almost certain to spot caribou and moose, even bears. Wolves? Good luck.

Wolves are always a fairly secretive predator, but at Denali sightings of the animals -- or much-sought glimpses of fluffball pups -- have become even rarer in recent years.

Biologists blame a combination of natural factors, including kills by other wolves, but also the fact that hunters and trappers are allowed to kill wolves on state lands just east of the park -- where the same three wolf packs that provide most of the visitor wolf sightings tend to wander in winter and spring.

Watkins, a driver in the park since the late 1980s, realized he hadn’t spotted any wolves at all this year.So he asked his fellow drivers to participate in an unofficial survey of wolf sightings. Forty-three drivers did. All told, they tallied just 15 sightings of 25 wolves over a 75-day period between April and July.

Two-thirds saw no wolves at all. One driver said they’d seen more notoriously shy lynx than wolves.

Watkins shares the results with passengers on his tours. They get very quiet.

“I think a lot of times, people want to see wolves and they’re kind of surprised to know their chances are pretty minimal on seeing them here in Denali,” he said. "Not quite nonexistent, but it’s pretty close.”

A National Park Service index of wolf sightings by trained technicians put the chances at 45% in 2010 and 17% last year -- a spike after single-digit numbers for several years.

Biologists say this year there are 70 wolves in 10 packs roaming the park and the total population is biologically healthy. They’ll have an updated population count in November.

Still, it’s likely visitors will spot fewer from the road this summer.

The Riley Creek West pack that accounted for a spike in sightings last year because adults and pups gathered near the park road may have disappeared.

Both adults in the pack, the male and female, were killed by other wolves over the winter, according to Dave Schirokauer, the park’s resources and science team leader. Wolf-on-wolf conflict is the leading cause of death in the park’s collared wolves.

The pair had five pups, Schirokauer said. Their fate is unknown.

“The loss of pups and potential activity near the road very likely means a decrease in sightings,” he said.

Another wolf that’s been seen near the road, however, was spotted limping along with a road-killed squirrel in her mouth, according to a park pack update. The collared, aging matriarch from the Riley Creek pack was with a male, and it’s possible they denned with another male. The female has actually been spotted in Healy, Schirokauer said.

Park biologists and wolf advocates say Alaska’s resumption of hunting and trapping next to the park is also to blame for the drop.

Trappers argue the park has 6 million acres for wolves to roam, and they don’t pose a biological threat to the packs there. Advocates argue there are just a few trappers working the area but they target the wolves that visitors are most likely to see.

The probability for seeing a wolf was twice as high when a buffer was in place, biologist Bridget Borg found in 2016.The driver survey results this week prompted more than 60 individuals and organizations to call for emergency closures of wolf hunting and trapping on state lands east of the park as of Aug. 10, when hunting reopens in the area; trapping resumes in November.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Alaska Board of Game or Alaska Department of Fish and Game would take up separate requests for the closures.

The petitions argue that hunting and trapping specifically threatens not all the wolves in the park but about 20 in “the most viewed wolf packs in eastern Denali National Park.”

The National Park Service isn’t requesting the emergency closure. Instead, the agency wants the Board of Game to reinstate the buffer in the Stampede Corridor. The closure would be seasonal, running from February until July for hunting and until October for trapping.

“We’re still concerned about hunting and trapping in the Stampede Corridor affecting the opportunities for visitors to see wolves,” Schirokauer said, though the park service doesn’t believe there is a biological emergency for wolf populations overall.

The board will consider the proposal in March but if approved, it wouldn’t go into effect until the next year.

The state banned wolf hunting and trapping in the Stampede and Nenana canyons next to the park from 2000 until 2010. That protected two of the park’s three most-commonly viewed wolf packs, according to a National Park Service wolf sighting website. The Board of Game lifted the ban in 2010.

Well-known Healy trapper Coke Wallace in 2012 snared one of two breeding females in the highly visible Grant Creek pack in the Stampede area. The other female in the pack died inside the park.Hunters in 2015 killed a pregnant female and male from the fabled Toklat or East Fork pack, which biologist Adolph Murie began studying in the 1930s. A trapper in 2016 killed an adult male in the pack, which ranges near the road.

Watkins, the bus driver, said the Grant Creek pack provided visitors the chance to see wolf pups right next to the road.

“This is something visitors don’t get a chance to see hardly at all. So from an educational standpoint, these family groups are invaluable when they can actually be observed," he said. “Denali, it’s supposed to be a naturally regulated ecosystem but when you have a predator that’s being killed outside the park, it’s subverting that whole premise.”

Miscellaneous Hike around home and rainy season by Horseshoe Lake:

Clouds in the mountains at my campsite.