Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
hunt. The first big game hunters were Athabascan Indians who migrated over the Bering
land bridge and who hunted and gathered in Denali for thousands of years prior to Captain
Cook sailing into the Gulf of Alaska.
The park, now larger than Massachusetts, supports thriving populations of (let me take
a deep breath here) wood frogs, Dall sheep, moose, caribou, mountain goat, lynx, six
kinds of weasels including river otters and wolverines, bears brown and black, coyotes,
foxes, wolves, porcupines, muskrats, five kinds of voles, two kinds of lemmings, beavers,
four kinds of squirrels, snowshoe hares, pikas, little brown bats (don't blame me, that's
their official name), and five different kinds of shrews. Whew. And that doesn't include
the birds, ranging from the golden eagle to the rosy finch and numbering on my Denali
National Park official Bird Checklist at 155 separate species.
And then there is the Alaska Range, a line of snow-capped peaks soaring skyward in
eight, fifteen and twenty thousand foot leaps and bounds. Here the North Pacific tectonic
plate meets up with the North American tectonic plate, resulting in the 1300-mile Denali
Fault system, and guess what? Like Denali isn't high enough already, the Denali Fault is
pushing it higher every year.
Meanwhile, back on the bus, before we even stop for lunch we see our first grizzly, flat
out on a snow field, limbs splayed like a starfish, eyes closed and a blissful expression on
his face, letting the snow cool him off from below as the sun beats down from above.
There is color and motion in the brush on the hill above him, and a grizzly sow and two
two-year old cubs stroll into view, pausing to graze here and there. Simon tells us that it is
“continuous springtime at the edge of the patches of snow, where the bears find tender
plants to eat.” There aren't any fat salmon runs in the park so the Denali bear's diet is sev-
enty percent plant and thirty percent protein. “Only twenty-five percent of that is hikers,”
Simon says, deadpan, “so you don't have too much to worry about.”
We stop for lunch at the East Fork of the Toklat River, and I take my lunch down to the
river and watch a seagull chase a caribou off her sandbar. Behind the river bed is the be-
ginning of Polychrome Pass, narrow spiked ridges leading to great basins pin-striped with
avalanches leading to the blue-white peaks of the Range. If ever a geographical formation
deserved its name, this is it, one of Mother Nature's better tie-dye jobs in orange and
green and blue and dark red.
