Alaska Hiking Trip (August)

Summary
OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2005-01-21 18:41:07 UTC-0500
Description


trip_report



Here is a brief trip report on our trip to Alaska which took
place Aug 11-22nd of 2004.



Anchorage: Two of us flew into Anchorage, stopped by
REI (20 mins from airport) to buy gas and went on a short hike to
the Tabletop Mountain (15 mins from REI) which is described in the
Lonely Planet Hiking in Alaska book. Then we picked up two more people
from the airport, spent the night in the campground and drove to Denali
National Park the next morning.



Denali:
The drive from Anchorage is 4-5 hours. Once you get
to the park, go to the Visitor Center right away and if you want a
backcountry permit (required), watch a mandatory 30 minute video and
listen to a mandatory safety talk for another 30 minutes. Then you
get a backcountry permit (free) for desired (or available) zone and
buy a camper-bus ticket ($20/pp) since no cars are allowed in the
park. The bus leaves every two hours so check the schedule as soon
as you get there. All the preparations and a missed bus resulted in
us leaving the Center at 4pm even though we left Anchorage at 7am.
After three hours of Denali Safari (where you get to see grizzlies,
wolves, caribou and moose from a bus), we got off to do the Polychrome
Pass trail from the Lonely Planet book. Hiking in Denali involves
a lot of river crossings and bush walking (whacking), but there is
lots of blueberries and cranberries and you get to see McKinley if
the weather is good.



Wrangell/St.Elias:
Next day we drove up to Anchorage to pick up the
5th person, rented an SUV and started driving to McCarthy (8 hr drive).
The last 3 hrs are on a gravel road. We had reservation for a bush
plane drop off with the Wrangell Mountain Air ($265 pp) to do a hike
from Iceberg lake to the Bremner Mine (also referred to as the Seven
Pass Route on touralaska.com). It was sunny and warm/hot during the
day and 40s during the night, it rained one day. There were no mosquitoes.
The hike involved scree walking, two glacier crossings (even though
the glaciers are flat, crampons were useful), a couple of stream crossings,
and half a day of bush wacking. We had six days to do the hike, but
one can do it in 5 days in good weather if no day trips are taken.
We had topo maps which we printed at the REI Boston store for ($8/map)
and a book (Hiking in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park by Danny W.
Kost). The book was not useful because the maps in there are of poor
quality and route descriptions are inadequate. We used the compass
once and did not take the GPS, but we got lucky with the weather so
we could use the mountains and the map to orient at every rest break.
The trip might take considerably longer if it's foggy and raining
like it was during one day. There is no trees in that area: tundra,
moraine and some brush, so one needs to carry the stove and fuel.
There is plenty of water, although some of it is glacial water with
silt. It was our first time using trekking poles (we had one pole
per person), and they were extremely useful descending the steep scree
slopes (although they are all bent and unusable now). During our hike
the flightseeing plane flew overhead twice and there were no trails
or any signs of people otherwise. We did not encounter any bears,
but there is bear and moose scat and tracks near streams and lots of
berries around so proper food storage is mandatory.
Trip participants: Vlad, Lesha, Lexa, Igor, Masha.



The pictures below are from Iceberg Lake to Bremner Mine hike (taken by Vlad).