A view of Denali as seen from near the end of the Denali National Park and Preserve park road. (Klas Stolpe)

A view of Denali as seen from near the end of the Denali National Park and Preserve park road. (Klas Stolpe)

Pure Sole: Denali has always answered

Call it what you will, Denali or Mount McKinley, it still rises majestically toward the heavens.

I have been among the hundreds of thousands of visitors who annually set foot into Denali National Park and Preserve.

Granted, I have not stepped in all six million acres, but the footsteps I have taken led to a better me.

And every step was shadowed by “The Great One” or “The High One.”

ADVERTISEMENT
0 seconds of 0 secondsVolume 0%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
00:00
00:00
 

The first time a bus driver told me that less than 30% of visitors see “Mount McKinley” I replied, “Oh, just as its namesake never did.”

A wolf rests above the Toklat River in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

A wolf rests above the Toklat River in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

Good lesson: Don’t be a smart aleck to a bus driver, especially if you want to get let off at a non-designated stop or picked up late by the last large green tourist shuttle leaving the park for the night.

That was my first trip to Denali in 2010.

The park had promised grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou and Dall sheep.

And time and again, it has delivered.

It’s even thrown in a lynx, an owl, peregrine falcon, golden eagle…If you count the critters gathered at one of my favorite coffee spots just a mile away from an easy trail then you are looking at over 40 mammal species, 170 bird species, 14 fish species and, I am told, one amphibian, but I have never had the pleasure of greeting the wood frog.

I swear there is a marmot from Perseverance Trail that travels up to Denali the same time I do.

On one visit, then-park spokesperson Kris Fister told me the park’s controlled access is more controlling visitors 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,” she said.

Education of visitors is key because they don’t realize animals in the park are focused on food, stressing out because winter is approaching or 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.

A brown bear forages in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

A brown bear forages in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

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

However, due to a particularly worrisome slide area, a portion of the road — roughly half — was cut off from bus traffic and will remain so through the summer of 2026 for road improvements.

It can be overwhelming to pick the first steps among the vast park with few maintained trails, yet for me each forage is a favorite destination for different reasons. 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 amid the brush; brown bears to dig roots from Igloo Mountain to Thorofare Pass; and the magnet of “the big one” attracting them all in full view from Eielson to Wonder Lake.

Even in the summer it can snow and I have experienced that, too.

Count me as lucky because I’ve seen the mountain every trip.

Before the landslide the park had a scientific Vehicle Management Plan to establish the number of vehicles allowed past the 15-mile post.

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: establish what visitors do in the park, where they are and how to space them in the “view shed” with the least impact to park inhabitants.

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.

Caribou rest on a ridge in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

Caribou rest on a ridge in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

My first adventure was to park at the Savage River Ranger Station at mile 15 and explore the mellow two-mile Savage River Loop on both sides of the river, then attack the more strenuous (by southern tourist standards) Savage Alpine Trail that overlooked the parking area.

Before the road closure I would either leave a car here or jump off a bus somewhere along the road farther out. Visitors can exit buses anywhere in the park, as long as wildlife has not been sighted within a mile of that stop.

My yearly warm-up hike was 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 Margaret. From there, my adventures have included ridge routes back to Savage River with Dall Sheep in curious pursuit, or a full-day excursion in the high altitude to Sanctuary River, a bushwhack to the road, careful to avoid brown bears, and either a thumb ride to my car or a 10-plus mile jog to beat darkness.

One year I jogged from mile 92 at Wonder Lake back, celebrating the park’s centennial. My head lamp illuminated the eyes of the beasties in the dark and in turn my eyes were illuminated by various road maintenance crews as the park is always in flux.

For me, buses were transportation to access terrain farther in the park and valleys into the backcountry. Camping passes could be purchased as well, and after safety films with rangers, a week without cell service among mosquitoes can be quite heavenly.

A photographer breaks Denali National Park and Preserve regulations on approaching a bull moose inside of 25 yards. (Klas Stolpe)

A photographer breaks Denali National Park and Preserve regulations on approaching a bull moose inside of 25 yards. (Klas Stolpe)

Denali is primarily trailless. While this may be daunting to some it is equally enticing to others (like me).

On my trips it was 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 signpost has nails protruding full of brown bear hair that remind you this scratching point is off-limits.

For the National 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.

Historically, human habitation inside the Denali region is over 11,000 years old. Athabaskan people’s presence in the region dates back roughly 1,800 years while principal groups in the park area in the last 500 years include the Koyukon, Tanana and Dena’ina people.

Conservationist Charles Alexander Sheldon presented a plan to members of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1906 to preserve the region as a park. The political climate then was unfavorable but approaching the Alaskan delegate in Congress, James Wickersham, in 1915 proved successful and in 1917 — 11 years after the bill’s conception — President Woodrow Wilson signed Mount McKinley National Park into creation. In 1921 President Warren Harding stopped at the park’s namesake hotel during his “golden spike” tour of the Alaska Railroad marking its completion at Nenana. The park road was completed in 1938 but road access to the park entrance was not until 1957 when the Denali Highway opened. In 1971 the completion of the George Parks Highway doubled visitors as access from Anchorage and Fairbanks was connected.

A pika rests in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

A pika rests in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

In 1976 President Jimmy Carter designated the park as an international biosphere reserve, focusing on ecosystem and natural resource conservation and in 1980 Mount McKinley National Park, Denali National Monument and Denali Preserve were incorporated to establish DNP&P.

At that time the Alaska state Board of Geographic Names called the mountain “Denali,” but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names did not.

In 2015 I was a month behind President Barack Obama’s trip to the park after the renaming of the mountain to its Athabascan verbiage “Denali” by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

At the park gift shop — Hey! I was searching for bear spray! — was a children’s popup book about Denali National Park and Preserve and in it a young girl boards a bus and travels into the park.

On each page she sees a different animal.

The final page unfolded to Mount McKinley and while that name — I assume printing costs and author contracts or whatever did not allow time to restock with the new moniker — while that name was different the experience of getting to a point to view Denali was not.

And it will not be.

The author finds a ridge in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

The author finds a ridge in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

That is the beauty of nature.

Call something what you will but just sit a moment, day or night away from where you come from, away from your busy schedule, and let a mountain, or a stream, the ocean, the night sky or whatever welcomes your presence…let it call to you and listen to what it says.

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.

A sign in Denali National Park and Preserve warns visitors not to leave the road during a stretch between Polychrome Pass and Sable Pass. (Klas Stolpe)

A sign in Denali National Park and Preserve warns visitors not to leave the road during a stretch between Polychrome Pass and Sable Pass. (Klas Stolpe)

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

President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to revert the name Denali to Mount McKinley.

I am not political. I love my country. I am not going to go all Christopher McCandless and drive my AMC Pacer Wagon off to Lake Wentitika and settle in protest/support if I agree with the name or not.

I hope to hike there again soon.

But to me the heavyweight champion of the National Park System, weighing in at 13.2 million acres, with a vast square footage of Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park and the country of Switzerland combined, your “wonder from another mother,” the “park with more bark,” the one, the only, Alaska’s grandpappy of greatness…Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

And don’t even think about messing with the name “Wrangell!”

• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stole@juneauempire.com.

A willow ptarmigan in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

A willow ptarmigan in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

Denali rises in the distance behind Wonder Lake in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

Denali rises in the distance behind Wonder Lake in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)

More in Sports

Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé sophomore Jed Davis officiates a match as sophomore Jaxin Jim, senior Colton Cummins and freshman Carson Kautz coach elementary school age wrestlers. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
Pure Sole: I could have been a wrestler

I could have been a wrestler. Well, if I had the help… Continue reading

The Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé Nordic Ski team at the 2025 ASAA/First National Bank Alaska Nordic Ski State Championships at Fairbanks Birch Hill Recreation Area. (Photo courtesy JDHS Nordic Ski team)
Lamb gives JDHS cross-country ski team historic finish at state tournament

Senior is first Crimson Bear to place during Nordic tournament; JDHS girls win Academic Award.

This boreal owl has captured a vole. (Photo by Linda Shaw)
On the Trails: Three small owls

We have three small owls that share a lot of characteristics. They… Continue reading

Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior Ahmir Parker (2) attempts a steal as Monroe senior Jett McCullough (4) dribbles behind his back during the Crimson Bears’ 71-55 loss to the Rams on Saturday in the George Houston Gymnasium. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
Crimson Bears battle, but are butted by Rams

JDHS falls to Monroe Catholic for the second night in a row

Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior Addison Wilson (10) is defended by Monroe sophomore Leila Church as Monroe coach Travis Cortez gives directions during the Crimson Bears’ 40-33 loss to the Rams on Saturday in the George Houston Gymnasium. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
JDHS girls fall to Monroe 40-33 on Saturday

Crimson Bears lose in physical contest to visiting Rams.

The Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior Pedrin Saceda-Hurt leads the Crimson Bears onto the court Friday before their 76-55 loss to the Monroe Rams. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior swimmers Pacific Ricke and Lucia Chapell signed national letters of intent to become student-athletes at Bates College and Colorado College, respectively, Thursday at Augustus Brown Pool. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
Chapell, Ricke sign to swim at Colorado and Bates

From Haines to Juneau, fast friends follow futures in the pool.

Juneau Ski Club’s coach Kevin Stell, Elaine Duvall, Marin Lowell, coach Brock Tabor and McKinley Burgess-Fitzpatrick pose Friday at the Alyeska Cup races in Girdwood. (Photo courtesy JSC)
Juneau Ski Club takes 14 athletes to Alyeska

Andrews, Stell highlight four top five JSC finishes

In this 2014 photo Thunder Mountain High School senior Ben Jahn (32) and Juneau-Douglas senior Kevin Guimmayen (10) shake hands before their game. Guimmayen passed from leukemia in 2017. Funds from Saturday’s game will go to help Cancer Connection and childhood cancer awareness. Friday’s game will support mental health through Take A Timeout To Talk supported by Find Your Fire and Juneau Suicide Prevention Coalition. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Empire)
Weekend home basketball welcomes Monroe

Series will feature mental health and cancer awareness.

Most Read