Denali National Park

I had been planning this trip for awhile. I wanted to visit Mom and Alfred has never been to Denali. He really loves photography and has a great camera, it would be a perfect trip!! We headed up Friday after work. I met Alfred at his office and we started the 3 hour drive from Wasilla. We got to Denali around 630pm. We got all checked in and got our camp spot. He just bought this awesome new tent from REI, so we were pretty excited to set it up! It went up in nothing flat! It made me remember the days of camping with my family for all those years. It used to take hours just to figure out what pole went with what and there was always something missing from the tent bag...lol. My parents would be going nuts before we even got started. They make the tents sooo easy now! All the poles are connected and color-coded (HELLO!!---genius's I tell you ...absolute genius's...lol)!I also brought the areobeds which gave us a bit of trouble blowing up. I fooled with it for awhile before I realized...duh..it has a plug. We walked them up to the bathroom and blew them up with good old fashioned eeelectricity!!! We were going to be some comfy


After we got the tent all set up we had dinner at the Salmon Bake. I was hoping to see Melissa Mitchel (my fave local singer)there, but she was taking forever to get going. I was so sleepy that we skipped it. One lovely camping tradition followed us to Denali...the rain. We got dumped on all night long, but stayed perfectly dry in the fabulous new tent!!
The next morning we got up and made coffee and eggs in the rain. We got all packed to go meet Mom's bus. She picked us up at 10am along with 30 other people and we headed out. Mom did a great job on her tour and of course told everyone that I was her daughter!


We weren't on the road long before we saw a moose. A little while longer in Sable Pass a guy yelled out to look left...so she stopped the bus and we all did. Right away another guy was telling us to look right. Next to the bus was a momma bear with 2 cubs!!

I was so relieved that we didn't get skunked and it was still very early. We watched the cubs playing for about 20 minutes and Alfred got some great shots!! The rest of the day was a steady show of animals. We saw some Dall sheep on Marmot Rock and got great pics of that too! In total we saw 3 adult bears and 5 cubs! It was such a good day even though the weather was pretty crummy! My Mom has a hard job up there! Driving that road is tough and dealing with all the dumb tourist questions. However, she does get to see animals in the wild everyday!


We got back to the campground to discover a mystery!
We all know how I have this lovely tendency of getting robbed right? We had left our bikes chained up and everything looked in order when we arrived back to camp. However, we noticed the action packer box was missing. Right away I thought "Yeah, just my luck..we got robbed". Alfred had some expensive little items in it so I was pretty upset. We didn't notice the piece of paper sitting on the table. I had been too busy sneaking around other peoples' campsites looking for our darn box. I was sure someone close by was the culprit! The note read, "The following items have been seized for placement in the bear safe containers... cooking oil and peanut butter". Hmmmmm??
It went on to say that we are in "Bear Country" and cannot leave those items out. Ummm Duh!! We were in a rush to leave and did forget to put those things back into the truck. We found the bear box and there was our entire crate of missing items. They confiscated the entire box, not just the food?? I think they were hoping no one would claim it. So, we weren't robbed!!

The next morning we planned on hiking and biking for a bit, however, the rain changed our plans. We headed out early hoping for some sunshine back in A-town. Apparently it poured all weekend everywhere.Because there was no sun to be found.We took the most wonderful nap and saw a movie later that night. Toy Story 3 in 3D. This will be a new favorite weekend of mine. I am pretty sure Alfred enjoyed it. I would like to go back in the Fall. However there is so much to do and summer is half over already!! I better get planning the next fun weekend!!