Denali (Mt. McKinley)

And we also stopped to get us something to eat. Boy, was it good after a long, cold, wet day.

Before we got to the coach we took pictures of these kids rafting down the river.

Here we are going to our coach. We took a picture as we were going by. We were parked at McKinley RV Park at Healy.We have been gone all day and so we're going out of the park.

Going away from the park and a totally different scenery.

More different mountains.

The sun was trying to come out through the clouds and it made the mountains show the different colors on them.

This is the same rock and its a lot bigger than what it looks.

This was a tall hugh rock. There's a girl sitting there by the white in the front. Lots of people were climbing it at different places and levels. It was too high for me.

This are more caribou that were grazing up on top of a mountain.

This was the best shot of a Mama bear that I got. She had 2 baby bears but they were always hiding in the bushes or were too far. We also saw a fox, some wolves and almost at the end of our trip, we also saw a lynx. That was surprising cause you don't see them too often. The only bad thing is I didn't get a picture of any of them, some were too far or too fast.

These people were way up in the mountain. They were hiking up there and were little bitty specks before I brought them in with my lense. That mountain was high so I know they have done a lot of walking.

This was just beautiful so I stuck myself in front of it to see if I would look beautiful too, but it didn't work.

Another river running down in the valley.

Beautiful valleys with streams running through them. Pretty cloudy skies.

We even saw this little critter. I think this might be a pika. A pika is a mouselike member of the hare family.

And dall sheep horns.

I haven't seen a moose yet, but I have seen moose antlers.

Here we are at Eielson Visitor Center. It was 66 miles from where we started. It was gravel roads, up the hills and down the hills and very winding. From here we were supposed to have a very good view of the mountain but as you can see, we couldn't see 10 ft. in front of us. Denali, or Mt. McKinley is only visible around 20% of the time because clouds bump up against the peak all summer long. Mt. McKinley is 20,320 feet tall or almost 4 miles high. Pretty amazing.

Passengers trying to clean the windows on this bus. Tommy didn't take the bus trip with me. It was just too cold for him and he had heard horror stories about the mosquitos at the park and it was like an 8 hour trip. He said he wasn't going to take that kind of punishment. He decided he'd take me to the park and pick me up after 8 hours. We were at an RV park 11 miles from the National Park. He also was wanting to wash the coach and the car. We've had to do that several times and the vehicles are still always dirty. We can't keep them clean.

These are Dall Sheep way up on a mountain. They were just little white specks and this was the best I could do.

Another shot of the caribou.

Our first animals that we say were caribou.

Finally our bus came in and picked us up. It was all dirty. It was a nasty day, sprinkling and cool. We couldn't take good pictures because the windows kept getting all the road film. Sometimes when we would stop, passengers would try to clean the windows, only thing was there were many buses at the park doing the same thing, so the windows were getting cleaned up with muddy water.

Today we are going to Denali National Park in a big green bus. Denali National Park was created in 1917 and has grown over 6 million acres. We are all lined up and ready to board, except that our bus didn't pick us up on time. It was late by about 45 minutes.