A Beautiful Drive to Denali

On Wednesday we picked up our rental car and headed out on the 4.5 hr drive from Anchorage to Denali. We actually took 7 hrs because we enjoyed stopping to drink in the scenery so much. As far as wildlife goes, we saw tons of common ravens and heard their crazy calls. We also saw many black billed magpies. They were so pretty with their mix of black, white and blue. It was hard to ID small birds from the road. We DID manage to see a rock ptarmigan though. He was standing in the middle of the road and didn't move even when we swerved to avoid him! As the cars behind us swerved, he still refused to move. Let's hope the silly bird made it.

Here are some highlights:
This is the only way we saw a moose. ;-) These signs were all along the raod from Wasilla on.


All the town signs farther up north were hand detailed, but this one cracked us up. Talkeetna is a base camp for climbing Denali. The "tna" on the end of words means "river."
We could not see Mt. McKinley because of the cloud cover, as is usually the case, but the scenery in Denali State Park outside the national park is spectacular. This was Hurricane Gulch and caught us entirely off guard. We stopped and Ron ran back onto the bridge to get this shot. Good job honey!Much closer to Denali, we came upon this valley. The purple flower is fireweed. The absolute silence, fresh pine air and larger than life scenery was so overwhelmingly beautiful.It was so odd to have daylight until 11pm and then to not have any total darkness at all, but it sure allowed us to enjoy more views! Here's the view from our little cabin.
Think that's enough? Too many photos? Just wait until the actual Park and Seward posts... mwahahahahaha