Episode 2: Alaska Trip Days 2 and 3: July 2019 -- Includes Visit to Denali National Park

Alright, hi everybody. This is Randall F. Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, but today I am playing the Two-Hour Traveler, and what I want to do is give you part 2 of my video slideshow up to Alaska from last summer. As a reminder, yesterday I did the video on my trip down to Whittier to see the glacier cruise. What I'm gonna do on this video is days 2 and 3 of this trip, where I actually went from Anchorage up to Denali and stopped and visited a few points in between, and then spent day 3, most of the day, in Denali National Park. And so with that, like I said, here was the first full day, and I came down to Whittier. I'll leave a link about the video for this adventure at the end of this video. And what I'd like to do now is jump to day 2. Now, what I did on day 2 is I just basically made a long drive from Anchorage all the way up to position myself for Denali for day 3. And, um, so what I did is I just headed north, basically northeast out of town, because that's the only way you can head out. Then I cut over here through the towns of Wasilla and Houston and Willow. Did not see Sarah when I drove through. And then headed north. And— oops, I went too far forward. Let's get back here. And I stopped a couple times on the way. It was sort of a wander day. I wasn't really with an intention. I just knew I wanted to get myself positioned for the next day in Denali. The weather forecast was for sort of rain that day. And I will tell you that to get here from Anchorage all the way up here to Denali was about a 3.5-hour, 4-hour drive. So, you know, and it's huge. We'll talk about that more in a minute, but what I wanted to show you was that I did stop a couple times that morning as I was on my way out. I saw this Mirror Lake Park, and you can see it just has a little exit right here off the main highway, and as I'm driving by, I saw this beautiful little lake that was tucked there, and then I saw this little park, and I pulled in and found a place to rent kayaks. And then a little bit further up the road, once I did the kayak rental, which was pretty cool, you'll see in a minute, I also found this little, little walking area called Reflection Lake, which is right here sort of where the Kirk River and the Matanuska River reach, you know, meet up before coming down here toward Anchorage. And it was just a little, you know, maybe a little over maybe a mile and a half walk walk around the lake, but it had a couple raised platforms so that you could see more wildlife. And so, let's go ahead and take a look at my trip up toward Denali. I will tell you, I did an Airbnb and stayed at a little lodge. It had a shared bathroom and shower, and, but it had the view out the back door. You could actually see Denali, the mountain, off in the distance about 30 miles away. Uh, just the spaces out here were crazy huge. So let's take a look at day 2. Okay, here we are to get the kayak.

Safety first!

Guess that's what qualifies as a driveway in Alaska. Clear ball deep. Pretty good shot at this one. It flew right down over my kayak about 20 feet away, grabbed a fish right in front of my kayak. These were the loons, a whole family with a new hatchling. They cruised right up by me, didn't even care I was there. That was another kind of fishing bird. I think it might have been an osprey. Okay, now we're at the next place. This is the other place where you can do walkabout. Notice it was high summer, lots of flowers, lots of shrubbery and scenery. Oh, this is great, little side— it was in the middle of nowhere. It was a coffee little stand and it was like 30 miles from everywhere. She's just sitting out there, uh, sitting out there, uh, serving coffee. I thought that was awesome. We had to stop and grab an iced tea.

Yeah.

Okay, now this is, I believe, the South Outlook toward Denali. So that's the mountain off in the distance. Notice once again, really hazy, so it was hard to get a good clear shot. But, um, you could see both North Peak and South Peak and the mountains off in the distance. I think we're about 30, 40 miles away, but you could still just tell— huge. This was cool. This was at the roadside bend, so you could actually take a look at all the different peaks and the heights. So I tried to grab a shot of it so you can see. Like I said, you know, Denali, the big one, 20,000 feet. South Peak, North Peak, almost 20,000 feet. Largest in North America. I just wish it wouldn't have been so hazy. And there is my little one-bedroom lodge for 80 bucks. Loved it. All right, and when I got up there to— it was Denali State Park that I got to that first night. I positioned myself for Denali National Park the next day, and they, they butt right into each other. They're, they're right next to each other. I actually, once I got checked into the little lodge, I saw that there was a part of the state park that you could get to pretty quickly which had a lake access, and so I just wanted to get out and get a little time on the lakeshore before heading in to get some sleep and ready for the next day. This was the little river that was right next to, uh, right next to the lodge. This was the view off the back porch of the lodge over toward Denali and the other mountains. And the following morning before Denali, they had their little coffee and snack bar right here. It was awesome. I would totally recommend going back to that place again. You know, like I said, I can't even remember exactly what little town, but it was right as you got into the Nolli State Park and they have a little lodge on the side of the road. So, all right, let's go to day 3 here. Now, to let you know, obviously these maps I got from Google. This map I got from the National Park website. You can actually get a full-size download from this from the National Park website. So let's sort of talk about what happened here. Like I said, I was down here somewhere in this area at the Little Lodge. And you can see they have the south viewpoint where you can see the mountains off this way, and then also the north viewpoint that was up here. And I went in, I believe that was the lake that I went to visit while I was staying at the lodge somewhere down this way. So you can sort of see what was right here. But then what happened was that following morning after breakfast, I made the drive up and it was probably still a good hour to get from where I was in Denali State Park up here to the visitor center. Sort of nice, there was actually a decent little— I can't remember if it was here in Cantwell, but a decent little gas station which had a nice amount of food. You got to think about that up here because there's wide open spaces and as you can see, then you come up here and you kind come in at the Denali Visitor Center. You're only allowed to take your car, I believe, the first like 15 miles. Yes, yes, private vehicles after 15 miles, you need like special passes and permits to go past 15 miles. So what most people do is they buy a bus ticket. And you can get a round trip bus ticket and it was like, I don't know, $30, $40, something like that, I think. You park at the visitor center, you hop on the bus, and then you have a guided tour that takes you all the way through. And I bought the one that went all the way out to Toklat River, so 53 miles. It was a 6.5-hour trip on the bus, but I would recommend doing it no other way. Safety in numbers. You're on a bus with people. The scenery was beautiful. If we saw wildlife, we'd stop pretty much every time. Bus driver was super knowledgeable. He actually is a school bus driver at one of the local schools. And the weirdest thing, he was from Lansing, Michigan. I'm here in East Lansing, and he was asking, where's everybody from? And I go, you know, people are saying you know, wherever they were coming from. I said, "Michigan." He goes, "What part?" And I go, "Oh, Lansing." He goes, "Oh yeah, I graduated from Everett." So, you know, small world stuff like that. I love when stuff like that happens. You're gonna see quite a bit of wildlife. I think I saw 4 or 5 moose inside the park here that day, as well as several other animals. Saw a family of foxes, which was super cool, right on the side of the road. So, let's go ahead and let's dive into Denali and take a good look around. That was the first moose inside the park. And this was even before I was on the bus, as you can see. This was actually the drive into Denali that morning.

It was so pretty, just the mountains and the giant open areas. Just like that. Awesome. So, Rachel's Pool, you can stop off side. It was a deep gorge.

I ran into some people from McGill, and one of the researchers actually drove this truck all the way from Montreal. They found loose snow here with Sure, this was a beaver. Some of these mountains could be their own weather. This was, uh, getting a little bit closer to the entry of the park.

It was just stunning.

Big giant jutting rock, forming clouds above.

Here we are.

Now at the front entry, this is like literally just barely inside near the visitor center. I walked down, you can come down and see this river. I was waiting to get my bus and I had a little bit of time. Here's the bus. And another moose.

This one— this one might have had a calf. This shows a little bit more about the trail. A lot of the river basin looks like this. Pretty amazing. That is a tearrop. See Santa anytime.

Ah, I knew they were out there. Those were the mountain goats again. Dall's sheep, I believe, is what they're called. And interesting story. This is the reason Denali National Park was founded. It wasn't because of Mount McKinley, which became Mount Denali. It was because of these sheep. They found that the hunters were taking them out and they might go extinct. So they created a natural preserve. And actually Denali is one of the— I believe was the first national park that was created primarily to be a wildlife preserve, not because of the natural scenery and beauty. Although clearly it's both ways. Just a whole lot of scenery like this. Notice not too many trees or anything. There was some trees down near the front of the park, but once you got into the middle part of the park, you could tell that you were in a bit of a different climate area, and you could tell it was more almost like tundra or taiga. Than, you know, what I was seeing down more near Anchorage, which was honestly not that different from what I see here in Michigan. As you can see, you're getting up to some altitude a little bit here too. This was at an overlook, so you could see the whole basin down below, and I believe that's the Toklat River right over there to the right, and that's the river basin. But we were several hundred feet up. As you can see, the low clouds off in the distance sort of made it a little hard to see the biggest of the mountains off in the distance. While I was in the park, I don't think I actually ever saw Denali, or at least I couldn't see the top of it. This gives you a little more feel of perspective as to how high we were. That's the bus and that's the river way down below. Now, this is at the Toklat River stop, which was the final stop on the way out. Had some birds here. Once again, some more Dall sheep. Hard to see, but they were up there. What was neat is we had about, I think, 20 minutes or so, and so I was able to actually get down and do a little bit of rockhounding. Sort of was walking around taking a look at some of the rocks down in the water basin. The river never fills this up, they told me. They said that this is— when it was formed, it was formed by the receding glacier. And then now the river channel from the glacier is, you know, here and a little bit over here. But this is never filled with water, they said. They said that there's not enough water flow to ever fill it up. Yeah, but here's, you know, I was having a good old time just checking out some of the cool rocks that were down here. Hello, rockhounds would enjoy that greatly. Didn't really take any home though because I don't think you're allowed to, you know, national parks. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to leave only— what is it? Leave only footsteps, take only pictures. Something like that. It was sure fun to take a look. This is beautiful. Little inlet with a little trickling, babbling waterfall. Ah, here we go, fox. So apparently it was a mother with kids, and she was living right close to the main road, and they said most buses as they went through would have a sighting with her. Very fortunate to see that. It's funny, this was the only day I had to wear a jacket. I had to literally drive 250 miles north of Anchorage in order to find fallish type weather. It was about 55 that day inside the park with a good stiff frees. But, you know, broken clouds, beautiful, just beautiful. Absolutely recommend getting out there if you ever get a chance. Oh, another moose up close. Oh, that one was real close, right out the window. By the way, you were allowed to open the window on the bus to take a picture, but you were not allowed to put any part of your body out through the window. And I think that was wise. That's a fairly large animal. This was my proof shot. Anybody questions, I was there.

Alright.

This is on my way heading back toward Anchorage. Another look over toward Denali. And here we are flying out. This was leaving the city, so you can get a good look at Downtown Anchorage here. Stayed actually in hotels downtown 2 nights and they were nice. It was fine. Found some decent little restaurants, you know, didn't really feel that different from most other mid-sized towns in the United States except for the fact that they said you had to always be watching for moose and bear even in the city limit. And here's the flight out. The flight out and the flight in was just so pretty. It's just hard to explain how just stunningly gorgeous this terrain and this area of the country is. Wow. And this was neat because that is a pretty large glacier right there. That you could see up in between a couple of the mountains from the air. There's the head of the glacier.

Pretty cool.

Hey, I think I'm done. There was my flight pass. So I'm gonna finish this thing up. Let's go here. One of the things I wanted to share with you is that this place is huge. So Anchorage is basically right down in here, okay? Over here is Whittier and up here, about here is Denali. That was about a 4-hour drive. So it's similar. I live in East Lansing, Michigan. To get from Anchorage up to Denali is similar to getting to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Cincinnati, Ohio. And that's all I was able to cover in those 3 days with a rental car. And look at how much more Alaska there is to see. You know, and I didn't even get close to the Inside Passage and Juneau or anything like that. I want to do that on another trip. I didn't get up to the Brooks Range, anything like that. So, I mean, there is so much more to see. Didn't even make it up to Fairbanks, which is up somewhere around here, I believe. You know, so obviously a place I want to get back to. I considered this a bit of a scouting mission, and I cannot wait to take my wife and daughters on a future trip at some point once we get past the craziness of the coronavirus. So with that, I want to thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed this little virtual tour of Alaska. If you'd like to find out more about what I do in my day job, uh, you can go out to my website randalldean.com and learn a little bit more about my online streaming and webinar programs. Uh, you can also look at my YouTube channel. If you like this video, I recommend you subscribe. I'm going to try to make more of these little travel tip slideshows and videos on some of the other places I've had the opportunity to visit. Um, you know, some people accuse me that part of my effort to be out speaking at all these conferences and events is just to help fix my hiking and traveling addiction. But if you like this, you can go check out some of my other videos that might show you how to better manage your email, your Outlook, your Google Suite, your other items. And if you'd like to get some productivity PDF tip sheets, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line. Subject line. And with that, I am going to say we are done.