I was in Fairbanks when I last posted. I didn’t spend long there. After a couple hours in town, I started the drive south toward Denali National Park.
Sunset along the road with a few wisps of smoke from a nearby fire.
Just north of Denali I passed Stampede Road. This road turns to gravel and eventually to a trail. This is where Chris McCandless, a.k.a. Alex Supertramp disappeared Into the Wild. He hitched a ride to the end of the road then hiked about twenty miles to the bus where he lived out his remaining days.
I got to the park, got my backcountry permit, spent the night in the big RV campground near the park entrance. Then the next morning, I boarded the bus to head into the backcountry.
Private vehicles can only drive the first fifteen miles of the park road. After that you have to take the bus. I spent four hours bumping along the road in this big green machine. It was a rainy day so we couldn’t see very far, but that didn’t keep us from seeing tons of wildlife.
View from Polychrome, one of the rest stops the bus makes. I wouldn’t realize until the ride back, when it was much clearer, that this is actually a pretty lousy view.
We saw 9 bears: three sows with two cubs each. Most of them were pretty far, but this little family came right up to the bus!
View from the Eielson Visitor Center. On a clear day you can see a lot more. But I didn’t know any better so I thought this was pretty cool.
I got off the bus a few miles past the Eielson Visitor Center. This was the view at the beginning of my hike.
My destination was McGonagall Pass. My original plan was to ride the bus all the way to Wonder Lake, near the end of the Park Road, and hike in about twenty miles from there. However, I was disuaded from this plan by a ranger who told me that the McKinley River was at least chest deep. I could avoid that river crossing by hiking across the Muldrow Glacier. This added about fifteen miles (one way) to the hike, but the glacier crossing sounded cool, so I decided to go that route.
A skull I found along the Thorofare River bed. Not sure what it is. Any guesses?
The first few miles of hiking were through pretty dense brush along squishy tundra. It was raining lightly, and the brush was wet, so I stayed pretty wet too.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect crossing the glacier. The area I crossed is near the terminus of the glacier and there is a lot of moraine (i.e., rocks). So the terrain is a very irregular mass of ice with loose rock on top of it. Not the easiest hiking. In most spots you couldn’t see the ice. There were little streams running in all directions and many small ponds.
The glacier is about two miles wide where I crossed. Because the terrain is so irregular, you can’t hike in a very straight line. And since it’s so rocky, it’s slow going. It took me about four hours to hike across it.
The view back across the glacier.
After crossing the glacier, I made camp. This is the view from my campsite. Note that you can just barely see the big mountains peeking through the clouds behind the near mountains.
My second day was pretty easy. I hiked about ten miles without much elevation change. The brush was thick at places, which slowed me down. The weather, however, was much nicer than my first day. The sky was still pretty cloudy, though.
A few shots from day two.
This was taken shortly before sunset from the spot where I camped my second night. The best thing about the rainbow is that it wasn’t raining where I was!
Day three was awful. It was cold. It rained all day. I had to thrash through thick brush all day. I couldn’t see very far at all. I was not a happy camper. I’m don’t think I even got the camera out on day three. (When I’m backpacking, especially alone, I tend to exaggerate my emotions. When I’m having a tough time, I feel like it’s the hardest hiking I’ve ever done. When I’m happy, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.)
I woke up on day four and it was pouring rain and freezing cold. I had hung up my wet clothes inside my tent and they were frozen stiff. I was only a few miles from McGonagall Pass, which was my goal. But I didn’t want to move, especially with the lousy visibility. In the afternoon it started to clear, so I started to hike. I hiked for a few miles, within two miles of the pass. Then it started to snow. I couldn’t even see where the pass was. So I set up camp, planning to hike in the morning.
The spot where I initially set up camp on day four.
Looking back toward the road from camp. Note that it’s clear in the distance. There’s hope yet!
After I cooked dinner, it stopped snowing and the temperature warmed up a bit. I was feeling good, the pass was near, visibility was getting better and I had a few hours before dark. So I decided to pack up camp and hike a little more. I started to head up the pass. It took a bit longer to get up there than I expected.
The sun setting as I’m heading up the pass.
Shortly after sunset, during the long northern twilight, I arrived at the pass. I couldn’t see much, but I could see the glacier. This is the Muldrow glacier again, several miles further up the glacier from where I crossed it.
The glacier, shortly after sunset.
I knew Denali (Mt. McKinley) was hiding in those clouds somewhere. When I woke up the next morning, it was incredibly clear, and this was my view!
The glacier and Denali in the early morning.
Not a bad place to camp, if you ask me!
I scrambled up nearby McGonagall Mountain and took this picture looking up the Muldrow Glacier toward the peaks. This glacier was one of the earlier routes climbers took up the mountain. These days most fly into an air strip on the other side of the mountain to avoid the long hike that I spent the last few days doing. It was hard enough with backpacking gear. It would be quite an ordeal lugging all the gear a climber would need.
A panorama from McGonagall Mountain.
Another panorama, taken from near where I camped.
There was one other person camped up at the pass. He was the first person I had seen since passing one other hiker about an hour after I got off the bus. He had come in the direct route across the McKinley River (the way the ranger talked me out of). He said the river crossing was not as bad as I had been told. It is also fifteen miles shorter and, most importantly, it follows a path, so there’s not nearly as much thrashing through waist-high brush. So I decided to hike out that way instead of going back across the glacier.
I spent much of the day up at the pass. It was one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been, and the weather and visibility were perfect, so I didn’t want to leave. Finally I started hiking about 3:00 pm.
One more close-up picture of the glacier and mountain. Why not?
Looking back up toward the pass.
Looking down the pass toward the valley.
Someone’s homemade climbing gear I found alongside the creek.
The valley near the pass. The pass follows the creek up, turns left and follows the creek between the closer black ridge and the further snow-covered ridge.
A little further down the valley.
I saw tons of these guys. They often startled me when they flew away as I approached.
Mount Brooks.
The way back follows a trail most of the way. It's an unofficial, unmaintained trail (the Park Service swears it's not there). It's pretty easy going for most of the way, but there’s still a lot of thrashing. Alder seems to love to grow right over the path.
And sometimes the path is barely perceptible under all the brush.
The high snowy peak on the left is Mount Brooks, the dark peak near the center is McGonagall Mountain, and the far right peaks are Denali. It’s not obvious from this perspective, but Denali is almost 14,000 feet higher than McGonagall and more than 8000 feet higher than Mount Brooks.
I hiked most of the way out on my fifth day. My sixth and final day of hiking I only had to cover about eight miles. But I had the McKinley River to cross. The river is braided here--it flows into many smaller streams that flow across a wide bar of gravel and silt. The crossing is over a mile wide.
I believe this is a young caribou. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I saw it along the river. The first several braids of the river were trivial--knee deep at worst and pretty gentle current. Then they got a bit deeper and faster moving. I was crossing one that was about waist deep when I got swept off my feet and went for a swim! This is water that’s fresh off a glacier, so it’s about as cold as it gets. Fortunately the air temperature wasn’t bad--probably in the 60s. So I changed into dry clothes and started hiking and it didn’t take me too long to warm back up. All in all not too bad, but the swim was pretty scary.
Looking back across the river toward the mountains. The relative size of Denali is clearer here than in the earlier pictures.
A couple last pictures of the mountains before I got back to the road. These last two were taken near Wonder Lake, which is near the end of the road the buses take through the park.
Once I was across the river, I just had two more miles to hike to the road. Then it was five more hours on the bus back. We saw lots of bears. (I never saw one hiking but I saw over a dozen from the bus. I guess that’s ok.) We also saw caribou, moose, and this little fox.
The next day I was back on the road, heading toward Anchorage. This is a gorgeous drive. It’s only 200 miles, but I could have taken days to do it.
Mountains west of the highway. I’m too lazy to figure out what they’re named.
Lucky timing at a railroad crossing!
Looking back toward the park. I believe I'm looking across the Susitna River here. Denali itself is not visible in this picture because it’s too cloudy. The lower area left of the middle of the picture is the Ruth Gorge. I hope to climb there someday, but I think it’s a bit above my level these days.
Thanks for reading!
