<\/a>A wolf rests above the Toklat River in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Good lesson: Don’t be a smart aleck to a bus driver, especially if you want to get let off at a non-designated stop or picked up late by the last large green tourist shuttle leaving the park for the night.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
That was my first trip to Denali in 2010.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The park had promised grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou and Dall sheep.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
And time and again, it has delivered.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
It’s even thrown in a lynx, an owl, peregrine falcon, golden eagle…If you count the critters gathered at one of my favorite coffee spots just a mile away from an easy trail then you are looking at over 40 mammal species, 170 bird species, 14 fish species and, I am told, one amphibian, but I have never had the pleasure of greeting the wood frog.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
I swear there is a marmot from Perseverance Trail that travels up to Denali the same time I do.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
On one visit, then-park spokesperson Kris Fister told me the park’s controlled access is more controlling visitors than its abundant wildlife.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“So much of what we do is called ‘wildlife management’ but a lot of it is really people management, which is what a lot of our wildlife techs are doing,” she said.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Education of visitors is key because they don’t realize animals in the park are focused on food, stressing out because winter is approaching or worrying about finding a mate. If visitors get in the way of that, not only are they potentially putting themselves at risk, but they are also impacting that animal.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>A brown bear forages in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Buses are how visitors primarily see the park, since the road is closed to most private vehicles during the main summer season past mile 15.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
However, due to a particularly worrisome slide area, a portion of the road — roughly half — was cut off from bus traffic and will remain so through the summer of 2026 for road improvements.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
It can be overwhelming to pick the first steps among the vast park with few maintained trails, yet for me each forage is a favorite destination for different reasons. I could count on the Dall sheep above Savage River to proudly display their curled horns; caribou to crest a ridge line near Teklanika River; moose to shine their racks in the sun amid the brush; brown bears to dig roots from Igloo Mountain to Thorofare Pass; and the magnet of “the big one” attracting them all in full view from Eielson to Wonder Lake.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Even in the summer it can snow and I have experienced that, too.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Count me as lucky because I’ve seen the mountain every trip.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Before the landslide the park had a scientific Vehicle Management Plan to establish the number of vehicles allowed past the 15-mile post.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Scientific data for this number was gathered by monitoring wildlife, placing radio collars on bears and sheep that potentially would be on the roads, and looking at multiple indicators in terms of impacts on resource and vegetation.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Social science was also studied to determine what visitors expected of their park experience: establish what visitors do in the park, where they are and how to space them in the “view shed” with the least impact to park inhabitants.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Yet with all this traffic, human and otherwise, it is easy to escape from your mundane daily existence when you enter the park. All it takes is the willingness to step off the road.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>Caribou rest on a ridge in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
My first adventure was to park at the Savage River Ranger Station at mile 15 and explore the mellow two-mile Savage River Loop on both sides of the river, then attack the more strenuous (by southern tourist standards) Savage Alpine Trail that overlooked the parking area.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Before the road closure I would either leave a car here or jump off a bus somewhere along the road farther out. Visitors can exit buses anywhere in the park, as long as wildlife has not been sighted within a mile of that stop.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
My yearly warm-up hike was to greet the rangers at the Savage station and walk two miles along the road to a social trail that leads up Primrose Ridge to Mount Margaret. From there, my adventures have included ridge routes back to Savage River with Dall Sheep in curious pursuit, or a full-day excursion in the high altitude to Sanctuary River, a bushwhack to the road, careful to avoid brown bears, and either a thumb ride to my car or a 10-plus mile jog to beat darkness.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
One year I jogged from mile 92 at Wonder Lake back, celebrating the park’s centennial. My head lamp illuminated the eyes of the beasties in the dark and in turn my eyes were illuminated by various road maintenance crews as the park is always in flux.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
For me, buses were transportation to access terrain farther in the park and valleys into the backcountry. Camping passes could be purchased as well, and after safety films with rangers, a week without cell service among mosquitoes can be quite heavenly.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>A photographer breaks Denali National Park and Preserve regulations on approaching a bull moose inside of 25 yards. (Klas Stolpe)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Denali is primarily trailless. While this may be daunting to some it is equally enticing to others (like me).<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
On my trips it was forbidden to leave the road during a stretch between Polychrome Pass and Sable Pass, an area considered a multi-animal thoroughfare and a brown bear expressway. The Sable Pass signpost has nails protruding full of brown bear hair that remind you this scratching point is off-limits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
For the National Park Service a major challenge is managing people along the 15-mile span of road where private vehicles can go, especially late August when moose are in their rutting season.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“Moose jams,” a bumper-to-bumper spread of vehicles on both sides of the road, is constant during the rut season. Although it is forbidden during this time to leave the road to take photos, many “professional” and amateur camera haulers still put themselves at risk in the brush or line the road between a cow escaping a bull or a bull pursuing said cow.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Historically, human habitation inside the Denali region is over 11,000 years old. Athabaskan people’s presence in the region dates back roughly 1,800 years while principal groups in the park area in the last 500 years include the Koyukon, Tanana and Dena’ina people.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Conservationist Charles Alexander Sheldon presented a plan to members of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1906 to preserve the region as a park. The political climate then was unfavorable but approaching the Alaskan delegate in Congress, James Wickersham, in 1915 proved successful and in 1917 — 11 years after the bill’s conception — President Woodrow Wilson signed Mount McKinley National Park into creation. In 1921 President Warren Harding stopped at the park’s namesake hotel during his “golden spike” tour of the Alaska Railroad marking its completion at Nenana. The park road was completed in 1938 but road access to the park entrance was not until 1957 when the Denali Highway opened. In 1971 the completion of the George Parks Highway doubled visitors as access from Anchorage and Fairbanks was connected.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>A pika rests in Denali National Park and Preserve. (Klas Stolpe)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
In 1976 President Jimmy Carter designated the park as an international biosphere reserve, focusing on ecosystem and natural resource conservation and in 1980 Mount McKinley National Park, Denali National Monument and Denali Preserve were incorporated to establish DNP&P.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
At that time the Alaska state Board of Geographic Names called the mountain “Denali,” but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names did not.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
In 2015 I was a month behind President Barack Obama’s trip to the park after the renaming of the mountain to its Athabascan verbiage “Denali” by the U.S. Department of the Interior.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
At the park gift shop — Hey! I was searching for bear spray! — was a children’s popup book about Denali National Park and Preserve and in it a young girl boards a bus and travels into the park.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
On each page she sees a different animal.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
The final page unfolded to Mount McKinley and while that name — I assume printing costs and author contracts or whatever did not allow time to restock with the new moniker — while that name was different the experience of getting to a point to view Denali was not.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
And it will not be.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t