We were up early for breakfast before meeting the Denali National Park tour bus at 6:15 am! We headed to the park and were the 4th bus to enter for the day. We had a fantastic tour guide! He shared so much information on the park, plants, animals, etc. We saw moose soon after entering the park! Then we saw some caribou lying in a clearing. Also saw Dall sheep way up on the mountain and a grizzly sow and her cub! Our guide kept telling us that if we stop at one of the view points and he tells us to quickly get back on the bus, we needed to do it! That would mean there was a grizzly bear in the area! Yeah, right….as if that would happen!
Well…..we stopped at a visitor center/restroom stop and were looking at the displays with 2 other buses. People were everywhere. As I headed to the visitor’s center I notice
d people on their tip toes looking into the distance. I stopped to see what they were looking at and in the distance saw a grizzly bear!! I headed into the center to get Bob and the camera only to return back outside with them to hear bus drivers calmly saying “Get on the buses NOW!” YIKES! The grizzly was running towards the visitor center! So we all headed to the buses! Our bus was the last to leave the parking lot. When we got to the main road, the tour went to the right…but our driver saw the bear on the left. So he went left! Wow! We went down the road and stopped with the bear about 150 feet from the road. We sat in the bus and watched the bear dig some holes and continue towards us. It eventually crossed the road about 25 feet in front of us and continued on its way! Our bus did a turn around and we continued our tour!We had a box lunch. We then saw a couple wolves in the distance and Mt. McKinley from several more viewpoints. It was so beautiful with no clouds in the sky. We made it 62 miles into the park and turned around for the return trip. We stopped at the bear visitor center so everyone could see the displays that we “ran” from last time! Our guide was such a neat guy! The total trip was just over 7 hours. Back to the entrance where we had some time to look at more displays and waited for the train to take us to Fairbanks. The train arrived at 4:00 pm and we loaded into the 2nd car – Gold Class. It was a double deck, domed car which had a viewing platform on the back and a dining room below. The first part of the trip was along a river gorge where there were rafters going down the rapids. It was fun to look down and watch them as they floated through. We had a voucher for anything in the dining room for our dinner! We arrived in Fairbanks at 7:30 pm and transferred to our hotel. Another very nice hotel room at the Alpine Lodge. We will spend two nights here.
Mt. McKinley (Denali) from mile 62 in park. This is where we turned around and headed out.
This is the highway bridge going over the canyon that our train went up.
Our dome car from Denali to Fairbanks. It was a great view of the canyon that we went up.
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