I came to Alaska 2wks early to do some traveling before I had to be at my clinic on August 3. I landed in Anchorage at 7pm and by 9pm I had rented a car (a 1997 gold pontiac grand am, a real jewel, but this is an entirely separate story on my car-renting fiasco which we'll save for another day), nearly hit a moose's two baby calves that were playing by the road, and was setting up a tent for the night in Chugach State Park north of town (in plenty of daylight).
The first morning in Alaska (I had survived the night without any bear-on-tent encounters), I walked over to see Eklutna Lake. There was a long, flat, 13-mile long trail alongside the lake. I walked out a little ways just to see views of the steely gray-blue lake surrounded by mountains, and was thinking that walking on flat ground for 13 miles would take too much time and get boring. If only I had a bike. As I walked back toward the trailhead of the trail I wanted to hike up into the mountains to overlook the lake, I saw a trailer with small-print signs on the side that looked like it might be a menu. I was hoping I had stumbled onto coffee in the middle of the park, although it seemed unlikely. Turns out it had bikes and kayaks for rent. Perfect. I decided to go do the hike and then rent a bike when I came back down. This "moderate to strenuous" hike started out really steep from the very beginning...and got steeper. Now I've hiked mountains in the US, Italy, and the Himalayas, and generally a mountain hike is not all that difficult for me. However it seems that when a hike is "moderately strenuous" in Alaska, they're not kidding around. This was probably not the best plan for my recently-broken toe, but the views of the lake and the Chugach mountains from the trail were too good to pass up. Then I got a bike and rode along the lake for a few miles. This was also not exactly flat, as promised, but the trail wound right next to the lake in most parts, so the views were awesome. I also saw some hikers who showed me a porcupine that they had scared up into a tree. Who knew porcupines could climb trees? By the afternoon when I got in my car to head north to Denali, my legs were spent. Alaska wilderness is serious stuff.
The drive north went through more impressive mountains. After camping at the Denali park entrance for night #2, I took a short morning hike (it seems the national park hikes are dumbed down a little for us lower-48ers, so this "moderately difficult hike that I could do maybe in 1-1.5 hrs if I really hurried," per the ranger, took 35 minutes) where I got a preview of some of the views to come on my bus ride into the park, although the actual park views were way better than I ever could have imagined. The hike was through the trees with little glimpses of mountain valleys, but once we got a short ways into the park by bus, we were above treeline so that all around the road was a meadow/tundra with no big trees to block the views of the mountains. The mountains were lush green, or browns, reds, and oranges. Around every switchback turn a new and different view of the huge mountain range would open up. We also stopped to watch a Caribou run across the road, a Dall Sheep up on the hill (this was admittedly a tiny white speck to us un-binoculared folk), a male moose with huge horns drinking from a stream below, a grizzly bear with 2 cubs that were wrestling with one another, and a golden eagle that suddenly swooped out of the sky to capture some unsuspecting prey, followed shortly by a second eagle that came to steal the catch from the first. Pretty cool stuff.
Best of all, however, was my view of Mt McKinley from my campsite. I've heard varying probabilities quoted, but it seems that a visitor's chance of seeing the largest peak in North America range somewhere from 1 in 3 to 1 in 10. Lucky for me, the clouds cleared off the mountain that afternoon, and I was camping at Wonder Lake where my campsite was basically on the side of a hill with an unobstructed view of the Alaska range and Mt McKinley straight ahead. The photo I'm attaching says it all.
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