Sharp's Travels

We were up early and went over to Subway for breakfast & coffee. While we were there we bought sub-sandwiches for our lunch to take along on our Denali Park excursion today. The park consists of 6 million acres.

We met Spike at his van to carpool over to the entrance of the park at 9am. Our bus left at 9:45am for our 6 hr trip into the park as far as Toklat at mile 53. It was raining and overcast. We did not see Mt. McKinley because the clouds hung low over the mountains. Mt. McKinley is 20,320 ft. high, the tallest mountain in North America. If a person sees Mt. McKinley they need to count themselves lucky. Clouds bump up against the peak all summer long, so Mt. McKinley is completely visible only around 20% of the time.

We made 2 bathroom stops and at each stop the guys would get out and wash the bus windows so we could see out, but within 5 to 10 minutes they were mud covered and you could hardly see anything.

When we were about midway in our trip we spotted some Dall sheep way up on the mountain side. They were just little white dots to us. Someone in the back of the bus spotted an eagle and that was about the extent of the animals we saw in the park.

Up at the top at Toklat we were at an elevation of 3, 090 ft. We only spent about 15 minutes there. We looked through their book store and display area.

The trip down was more of the same, muddy windows and a few more sheep.

We were back at the 5th wheel by 4:15. There aren’t many pictures for the day due to all the rain.

For pictures of the day see album: Denali Park 7-18-08