Backpacking in Denali Nat'l Park

SummaryNone
OwnerEric Gilbertson
Creation Date2010-06-20 22:27:53 UTC-0400
DescriptionEric and Matthew Gilbertson
5.30.10 to 6.4.10
Denali National Park

Matthew and I had planned to spend 3 weeks climbing Denali with friends Dan, Darren, and Woody, but ended up summiting early and found ourselves with an extra week to kill in Alaska. Dan, Darren, and Woody all decided to fly home early, but Matthew and I decided that since we were already in central Alaska we might as well check out the rest of Denali National Park. And, conveniently we already had a week of repackaged food ready to go along with all the gear we would need for backpacking. Some gear was a little excessive, like the hardcore 4-season trango tent and -40F sleeping bags for tame lowlands summer hiking, but we figured we could deal with the extra weight.

We flew out of Denali base camp on Friday morning and spent one rest day in Talkeetna before catching a train ride on the Alaska Railroad to the official park entrance 5 hours north. The park is pretty unique in that there are basically no trails in the entire multi-million-acre area. There’s one 90-mile road in the park and access is restricted to official NPS buses. Hikers simply hop on the bus and ask the driver to stop when they want to get off to hike. Most of the terrain is taiga or tundra with few trees (because it is so far north), so hiking cross country is relatively easy. The only restriction on where to hike is that backpackers are required to stay in the specific zone that they are issued a permit for. That still doesn’t cause much restriction because the zones are the size of small counties.

We got to the park entrance in the late afternoon and picked up a wilderness permit and a few bear cans to store our 5 days of food. Denali national park is grizzly territory so you have to be really careful to cook far away from your tent (ideally downwind) and store all your food and smellable items in bear-proof containers also far from your tent. Matthew and I had plenty of experience in bear country from a previous biking trip through Alaska so we knew what to do.

That evening we caught a ride on one of the last park buses and got off about 15 miles into the park in zone 26. We didn’t really have to worry about finding a good campsite before dark because it never really gets dark at that time of year in central Alaska. The sun officially set around midnight and rose around 4am, but those 4 hours were really just twilight because the sun was only slightly below the horizon. Zone 26 was mostly waist-tall bushes that were difficult to pass through but once in a while we’d come across an animal trail that would allow us easy passage. After about an hour of hiking we got to the top of a ridge that was just out of sight of the road and set up camp. (One restriction with camping is that you must be out of sight of the road because the area is a designated wilderness). From our campsite we were treated to a rare view of Denali sticking out prominently to the southwest. We could even make out the summit ridge we had traversed a few days earlier and the 20,320 ft south summit, the highest point in North America.

The next morning we rose early to catch a ride on the first bus so we could get deeper into the park. We had chosen to spend 1 night in zone 8 (polychrome glacier) and then two nights in zone 9 before leaving the park. We caught the bus around 8am and took it about 30 miles deeper into the park. On the way the bus stopped to see a mother grizzly and her two cubs eating berries within about 20 ft of the road. The animals up there have become so used to the buses that they aren’t scared away at all, though if a person were to walk along the road that would certainly scare away any wildlife.

The driver dropped us off at a small drainage leading into zone 8 and we started hiking again. The easiest way to travel cross country is definitely along rivers, where you aren’t slowed down by bushes. However, after a few minutes walking we couldn’t find any more good drainages so we set off directly through the tundra. Zone 8 was a bunch of tundra next to the road leading to some 8000ft glaciated peaks on the edge of the Alaska Range. We followed what we assumed to be caribou paths through dwarf willows and tundra grasses until we reached a river drainage at the edge of the mountains. We followed this until the banks became too steep to navigate safely, so we climbed up and started hiking on ridges. By about 1pm we reached a pass that was close to the border of the next zone so we decided to stop early to set up camp and explore some of the area without the heavy packs.

We kept hiking up the ridge and came across what we thought at first were other human tracks across a small snowfield, but later determined must be moose tracks. What would a moose be doing way up there where the only vegetation was lichens? We rounded a corner and Matthew spotted some big brown objects moving around down in the valley that turned out to be three grizzly bears (must have been a mother and two big cubs). We looked at the grizzlies and then just around the corner to our tent and hoped the wind wouldn’t blow our food scent their way.

Our sights were set on a 6000ft summit we had seen from camp, but a rumble of thunder quickly caused us to change plans. Over the past two weeks we had had only one short storm during our climb of Denali’s West Buttress, but now it looked like the Alaskan weather was changing back to normal. Before the rain started we managed to get a peek over one of the passes into zone 9 and it looked pretty incredible. The Toklat River wound up the valley in hundreds of separate fingers that looked like a spider web terminating at several huge, unnamed glaciers.

We headed back down to our tent just as the rain started and jumped inside to ride out the storm. Our 4-season mountaineering tent felt enormous when we didn’t have all the cold weather gear to go inside and could have easily fit 3 or 4 people.

The rain quit around 7pm, giving us time to cook a nice meal of cous cous and dehydrated vegetables. We would soon grow accustomed to this weather pattern in the park of clear morning skies, then rain/hail/snow in the mid afternoon, then cloudy skies the rest of the evening.

The next morning we rose to clear skies and began heading up the valley to the pass overlooking zone 9. The terrain was steep but we found some sheep trails that made the scree traverses a bit less sketchy. After we reached the pass and began descending into zone 9 we saw our first non-grizzly wildlife – a pair of caribou way in the valley. I wish we’d brought binoculars but it kind of works to take a picture at max optical zoom, then view the picture under max digital zoom to get a closer look at the wildlife. This technique indeed confirmed that the creatures we saw were caribou.

We reached the river level without causing the caribou to change their behavior (the rangers would be proud), and headed upstream toward the glaciers. The river bank soon turned into flat, short grass that could almost have been maintained by a lawn mower. It must have been either eaten by the caribou and sheep or the environment was too harsh for it to grow any longer. At lunchtime we stopped next to what we called a dirt cornice where the grass and dirt hang over the edge of the bank just like a hanging snow cornice. It hung over so much in fact that a big marmot decided to make a little home out of the tunnel-like formation.

As we got closer to the glacier we began following another sheep trail and the terrain got a bit sketchier – at one point we were traversing a steep scree slope that was directly over a cliff which dropped into the raging river. Too bad scree axes haven’t been developed yet like the ice axes we had used up on Denali because we sure could have used them.
At one point we looked up across the river and spotted a sight straight out of national geographic magazine – an eagle was flying up off the tundra with what appeared to be a big ground squirrel squirming in its talons. The eagle got up about 100 ft in the air and then dropped the squirrel, apparently to kill it. Before it could follow its quarry down to the ground to finish the job the wind picked up and blew the eagle downriver. We waited for a while but never saw the eagle go back to finish its meal. Had the squirrel actually wriggled loose on its own and miraculously survived? I guess we’ll never know. We continued up the river on our way to the glacier.

We had never really been to the true base of a glacier in the summertime so weren’t exactly sure what it would look like – would it be an abrupt snow wall like you see when a glacier falls into the ocean? Or a gradual transition from ice to snow to scree? We were looking up for the edge of the glacier when we realized we had actually been walking on the glacier for the past quarter mile. All the rocks and scree that looked like solid ground were actually just a meter-deep rock-coating on top of glacial ice. We hadn’t intended to walk unroped on a glacier but any crevasses would obviously be plainly visible since there was no surface snow remaining to form snow bridges.

We kept hiking up until the scree covering changed to pure ice, and pitched our tent on the edge of the scree. This was actually quite difficult, because all the rocks were quite large and sharp and it took some time to level out a spot. As like the previous day we dropped our gear and decided to hike up a ridge to get a better view of the glacier, and this time the bad weather started within about 15 minutes of us leaving camp. It wasn’t rain this time but hail.

We quickly darted back into our tent and rode out this storm just like the previous night. We were tempted to cook dinner in the vestibule of the tent, like we had been able to for the past few weeks up on the west buttress of Denali, but that was not allowed down in grizzly territory where you don’t want to give a curious bear any reason to sniff around your tent. We instead cooked a nice meal of cous cous, sausage, dehydrated onions, and cilantro (cilantro compliments of Dan) and went to sleep on our cobblestone bed of rocks.

As usual it was clear and sunny the next morning and we decided this would be a wildlife-viewing day instead of a mountain-climbing day. We had spotted a big hill down at the confluence of the two forks of the Toklat River and thought this would be a perfect vantage point with views up and down both forks of the river for miles. The only drawback was that this hill was on the opposite side of the river. We were already at the head of one of the tributaries so we crossed an easy snowbridge and effectively halved the size of river we would have to cross lower down. Unfortunately it would have to be an honest crossing down lower since the snow didn’t extend much lower than the base of the glaciers.

We saw a mother caribou and her calf within about 50ft of us on the way down but at this point in the trip caribou were becoming almost like deer to us and we would only be impressed by the rarer animals like wolves or bear. We wouldn’t have to wait long though.

Before long we reached the river and determined that, indeed, we would have to get wet this time. We had watched a safety video at the ranger station before getting our permits that admonished us to wear shoes, rain pants, and rain jackets when crossing rivers; unbuckle all pack belts; cross in pairs with the back person bracing the front person; face upstream; and don’t look at the water while crossing. The rivers there indeed are very cold and very strong and you could get in trouble if you fell in a deep part. But Matthew and I had crossed all kinds of rivers before and decided we didn’t have to follow all those rules exactly. We just took our shoes and shorts off and crossed barefoot in our underwear to stay as dry as possible. The river was about thigh deep and really strong but with the help of a few trekking poles we made it across no problem.

This put us at the base of our campsite hill and in no time we made it up to the top. Man, if I were in a battle defending the glaciers that hill is the location I would choose to take on the enemy. It was right in the middle of three valleys and since there were no trees on the tundra you could see all over the place. We immediately were on the lookout for wildlife and actually spotted our first big object right down where we had crossed the river: it was a huge grizzly bear. We zoomed in on it with our cameras and it looked like it was eating roots or berries at the river edge. Up one valley we saw a few caribou and on the mountainside a herd of about 10 Dall sheep. This indeed was a prime location for our camp.

Down river we saw menacing dark clouds that seemed to be producing rain and suddenly the ground turned white underneath. That couldn’t be snow – it was probably in the 40s F – so it must have been hail. The storm soon reached us – at dinner time as usual – but this time we had found a sheltered rock overhang and cooked in there. The ground was covered in sheep excrement so we figured this location must be well-known to animals in the valley. The storm ended just as we made it back to the tent for the night.

Our final day in the park looked to be an easy stroll down the river bank to the road where we would flag down a bus. We hadn’t been walking more than an hour when we came upon a caribou. This one didn’t run away but instead started trotting around us at a constant radius like it was confused and checking us out. Then it turned around and ran around in the opposite direction still at a constant distance. Finally it seemed to get bored and continued eating grass as we walked away. I guess the animals there only see humans about 3 months of the year, and during that short time human contact is still seldom enough that animals don’t know what to think when they see a backpacker.

By noon our little hike was just about over except for one more obstacle – another river crossing, literally within 100 ft of the road. This time since we were farther down river the water was even deeper and stronger and I decided to sacrifice my shoes to ensure I didn’t fall in. I went across first, getting my shoes wet, and then threw them back across to Matthew so he could also use them.

Safely across we flagged down a bus and headed back to the park entrance. One final national-geographic-worthy wildlife moment on the way was a wolf sighting. The bus stopped on the side of the road and we watched a wolf prowling through the bushes. All of a sudden an enormous brown mass raised itself and we saw a big mother moose and her calf. The wolf lunged forward to attack the calf and the mother responded by lunging at the wolf. One little wolf has no chance against a full-grown moose, so the wolf lept back. However, it kept trying its luck, hoping the mother moose would get careless and the calf might be vulnerable. We waited for 20 minutes watching, and finally the wolf gave up. Next time if that wolf can bring his buddies that moose had better watch out.