Denali: New name, same park

There is a children’s popup book about the Denali National Park and Preserve.

In it, a young girl boards a bus to travel into the park and different animals are seen with each turned page. The final page unfolds to Mount McKinley, which, in the lead-up to President Barack Obama’s trip earlier this month, was renamed Denali, its Athabascan name, by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

While the name has changed, the experience of getting to a point to view Denali has not.

There is still a childlike wonder and amazement as a large green bus shuttles you into the park, rattling passengers along the 92-mile road.

 

Managing people

The Denali National Park and Preserve is unusual in its controlled access, doing more to control visitors rather than its abundant wildlife.

“So much of what we do is called ‘wildlife management’ but a lot of it is really people management, which is what a lot of our wildlife techs are doing,” said former Denali spokesperson Kris Fister, who now is the spokesperson for Gates Of The Arctic Preserve.

Part of it is education because visitors don’t realize that these animals are focused on food, stressing out because winter is approaching and worrying about finding a mate. If visitors get in the way of that, not only are they potentially putting themselves at risk but they are also impacting that animal.

Buses are the primary means for most visitors to see the park, since the road is closed to most private vehicles during the main summer season past mile 15.

Denali is unique among national parks in that it does not have an entrance fee. Visitors can explore the visitor’s center, science center, dog sled shows and the first 15 miles through prime wilderness in private vehicles, bicycle or on foot.

Many will drive the Denali National Park Road to the Savage River Ranger Station at mile 15. Here the two-mile-long Savage River Loop follows both sides of the river in a mellow, tourist friendly walk. A more strenuous Savage Alpine Trail overlooks the parking area.

Visitors can also leave their cars here and walk or bike as far into the park as they feel comfortable doing.

My yearly warm-up hike when visiting is to greet the rangers at the Savage station and walk two miles along the road to a social trail that leads up Primrose Ridge to Mount Mary. From there, my adventures have included ridge routes back to Savage River with Dall Sheep in pursuit, or a full day excursion in the high altitude to Sanctuary River with caribou, a bush whack with brown bears to the road and either a thumb ride to my car or a 10-plus mile jog to beat darkness.

Beyond the initial mile 15, most visitors are on shuttle or tour buses. The buses go as far as Wonder Lake 92 miles in, but you can make your trek as long or as short as you want.

Shuttles go to Savage, Toklat, Eielson and Wonder Lake, and $27-$52 buys a ticket somewhere exciting past mile 15.

Shuttle buses are technically the park’s entrance fees and 80 percent of the fare stays in the park for maintenance or improvement projects.

Bus drivers aren’t required to give more than safety talks but many of them are chatty and personable, engaging with visitors and telling stories about themselves; some even help riders spot wildlife, even though that primarily is supposed to be the job of passengers.

For myself, buses are transportation to higher mountains farther in the park and valleys into the backcountry. Camping passes can be purchased as well, and after safety films with rangers, some will find a week without cell service among mosquitoes quite heavenly.

You can see an endless array of wildlife from the bus windows and from wandering the park. Denali is primarily trail-less. While this may be daunting to some it is equally enticing to others (like me).

It forbidden to leave the road during a stretch between Polychrome Pass and Sable Pass, an area considered a multi-animal thoroughfare and a brown bear expressway. The Sable Pass sign post has nails protruding full of brown bear hair that remind you this scratching point is off-limits.

If on a bus remember that, for many, this is their once-in-a-lifetime trip. Be prepared to hear constant chatter about Florida weather, Los Angeles shopping, Texas oil, midland crops and Starbucks coffee — and then an ear piercing “stop the bus” when a small rodent appears or a bird flaps.

Of course larger critters are seen in abundance.

For the Park Service a major challenge is managing people along the 15-mile span of road where private vehicles can go, especially late August when moose are in their rutting season.

“Moose jams,” a bumper-to-bumper spread of vehicles on both sides of the road, is constant during the rut season. Although it is forbidden during this time to leave the road to take photos, many “professional” and amateur camera haulers still put themselves at risk in the brush or line the road between a cow escaping a bull or a bull pursuing said cow. Visitors can exit buses anywhere in the park, as long as wildlife has not been sighted within a mile of that stop.

 

Millions of acres to explore

It was overwhelming to pick the first steps among the 6 million acres with few maintained trails, yet for me each forage became a favorite destination and for different reasons. My first trip to Denali was in 2009.

For example, I could count on the Dall sheep above Savage River to proudly display their curled horns; caribou to crest a ridge line near Teklanika River; moose to shine their racks in the sun under Mount Healy; brown bears to dig roots from Igloo Mountain to Thorofare Pass; and the magnet of Denali Mountain attracting them all in full view from Eielson to Wonder Lake.

Even in the summer it can snow, to the tune of more than a foot in late August of this year. It can change quickly, however, making the need to be prepared important.

Bus drivers often say only 30 percent of visitors to the park see Denali. Count me as lucky, because I’ve seen the mountain every trip.

Most visitors come to Denali during the summer season but there is a road lottery that runs after the buses stop for the year, and the park is experimenting with a bus system in the winter that only goes a short distance into the park. And it’s not like the summer system. The winter trial is currently in the second year of a 3-5 year experiment.

In summer, there’s a 116-vehicle limit restriction per day past the 15-mile post, which includes park administration, maintenance and enforcement vehicles. This is part of the park’s Vehicle Management Plan.

Scientific data for this number was gathered by monitoring wildlife, placing radio collars on bears and sheep that potentially would be on the roads, and looking at multiple indicators in terms of impacts on resource and vegetation.

Social science was also studied to determine what visitors expected of their park experience.

“What we feel through all this gathered information is it is not so much a specific number, but it is what (visitors) do out there and where they are and the spacing,” Fister said. “How many are in any viewshed at any given time? Visitors don’t want to see 30 buses along the road.”

Buses include a 7 a.m. camper bus, an Eielson bus, two Kanteshna experience buses, a regular Kantesha shuttle bus and the day tours that go out to the travel lodges. The Kanteshna Road House and Denali Back Country Lodge can either fly or bus visitors in and out. Camp Denali and North Face Lodge don’t provide day tours but interchange their guests twice a week.

This traffic all plays into the VMP.

The park has tried multi-fuel buses, biofuel and electric, with some hybrids on the roads as well.

“We are always looking at getting the best and safest bus,” Fister said. “We certainly want to make it as comfortable as possible while trying to accommodate visitors’ needs and not have long wait times.”

A typical June park day could have 4,500 visitors. Just driving a bus to Eielson takes 3 1/2 hours. Drivers have to be aware if groups of hikers get off and are out walking around on sunny day. Bus drivers with seniority get first crack at the Wonder Lake end of the road schedule and work only four days a week since those days are so long.

“No other park has similar controlled access,” Fister said. “We have a 92-mile road and the vast majority of that is controlled access, and this is the only way that people can enter the park via vehicle. It is a very unique situation.”

The park service has 125 permanent employees and 250 seasonal during summer.

Yet with all this traffic, human and otherwise, it is easy to escape from your mundane daily existence when you enter the park. All it takes is the willingness to step off the road.

One year, I walked up the East Fork of the Toklat River as a brown bear sow and two cubs chased a herd of caribou my direction.

The cubs would stand up occasionally in the tall brush to view the swirl of hooves before them, each time moving closer to where I ambled.

My nerves knotted when it was apparent the traffic would consume me and I rose to my full height, waving my arms and laughing like a small child.

The bears stopped, the caribou did not, and immediately I was part of something larger than double knotting my shoes and hefting a camera bag on my back.

It was almost a children’s pop up book. The pages greedily turned and critters smiling up.

I felt the wind from 100 caribou, heard the warning call from sow to cubs as they departed, and in the distance peaking from clouds, the mountain that beckoned me here for the first time years ago was again in full view.