| Campground: | Savage River Campground, MP 13, Denali Park Road, National Park, AK 99755. |
| Total Distance: | 5641 Miles. |
| Traveled Today: | 121 Miles. |
| Key Highlights: | Denali Park (Green) Transport Bus. Teklanika River Wilderness Hike. |
Alaska does not stop surprising. We know Denali mountain is the tallest peak in North America, and as such – we have imagined Denali National Park as another Alpine-style park with glaciers and snow-packed peaks.
As you can understand, we did not see Denali mountain today again, and the only snow we saw was some last remains of patches of snow that did not melt. The legend claims that you can see the Denai mountain from a few places along the way – but as we wrote yesterday, we don’t believe it anymore. Does mount McKinely exist?
Instead – the part of the national park that is accessible is a huge and vast piece of wilderness land, forests, tundra planes and valise, scree slopes of mountains, and a long dirt road that allows only the NP busses to run on them. It is wild beauty that takes some time to adjust to.
The 2nd thing that is unique in the park is that, as a philosophy of wilderness – there are no trails in the park. So the usual system that educated us to believe the claim that it was wrong to step off the track is not working here.
In Denali, wilderness is believed to have no trails, and it is forbidden to create them – thus, when you walk in the park – you are asked not to walk in a line – as that may make a trail…. So without trails, how do you hike?
We took the green transit bus ($30 / person) – that runs into the park. Unfortunately – due to a landslide last year, the 90+ miles of dirt road is open to the busses only up to mile ~40. At any point, you can tell the bus driver to stop, get off the bus – and start walking into the unknown. Today we drove to the end of the road- to get familiar with the concept, and we jumped off the Tekletika river bed. Hiking into the wilderness – where bears, wolves, and moss are reported to be expected is a strange feeling. We did not see any of these – but we had a great day.