Kantishna Experience

8/12/10

Polychrome mountain

Smallest bull moose--best picture

This was our big trip to the end of the paved road in Denali. It was to be a 12 hour day and we'd had a mite of trouble getting the dogs taken care of. We finally talked to Carl, a worker at the RV park and he said he would do it himself with his wife's help or find someone to do it. So we handed him a key and a list of instructions, put the dogs in their big kennels and set out at 06:45 to board our bus. We had to meet up at the Wilderness Access center; where we found Joe and his big green bus, or rather he found us. Each seat had a sack with our snack portions of our meal and seat belts which were required. So we set off to see the park and it's critters. We did very well in that department: a sow grizzley and her 3 cubs, 3 bull moose and 2 cows and 3 calves, numerous wolves including pups, Dall sheep in large numbers and Caribou both bulls and cows with some amazing racks. At one time we saw a couple of wolf pups playing with a walking stick someone had forgotten. It was a game of keep away and lots of fun to watch.


The Moose and the Griz walk where they want with no regard to buses of people in their way.The park is huge with wide vistas; rivers that they call braided as they run in the flat bottoms where they will, and dizzying heights. We felt very fortunate as we had seen the mountain, Denali, and on this bus trip we never saw the whole mountain, just tantilizing glimpses.

Visitor center views at Eielson

The last visitor center in the park is Eielson.

Near the end of the road, at Wonder Lake Ranger Station, we picked up a Park Ranger, Jamie, who told us about the history of the people who came to Kantishna hunting for gold and then stayed on.We stopped at Wonder Lake first before heading to the end of the road and Kantishna. She related the story of one woman in particular, Fannie Quiqley. We visited her last home, and saw the place on the mountain where she and her husband worked their mine.

The ride out was much more relaxed--people slept and it rained. We saw animals and Joe talked about the park and other things. We saw wolves and moose again, but the Dall sheep were dots on the hillsides.
We got back to the trailer about 8:00 pm, and the dogs were very happy to see us. John ended up taking care of the dogs and they were in good shape. We traveled 12 miles south to get some great pizza as we did not want to cook after a long day on a bus!

The Boslers at Wonder Lake