Friday June 13, 2008

Sorry it has been so long since the last entry. Access to the internet hear at the ARAMARK compound has become more difficult. Too few access points and too many people using it.

Green-up has begun in the park and things look a lot more like spring.
I finally took a picture of a mother moose and her calf but it's a little fuzzy so if I get another I will replace this one. These pictures were taken in the dusk that occurs after sunset and before sunrise. Actually, at 11:35 pm some of the cloud pictures were actually taken before sunset.






With green-up comes wild flowers. When the internet connection allows it I will upload some wild flower pictures.






Other things have started growing -- witness the beginning of this rack on this bull moose.

Tuesday May 27, 2008

Not too much to share today but the little bit there is was exciting.

Drove into Denali National Park at about 6 pm with Ted, one of my coworkers. We got all the way to Savage River without having seen any animals. One of the tour busses was stopped so we stopped to see what they were looking at. Ted was using the binoculars and I was scanning with the "naked eye". We both saw the herd of caribou about the same time. For some reason I scanned further to the right of the caribou and thought "I think there are some bears coming into the picture." Sure enough, a gaze through the binocs confirmed the presence of a mother bear - or as Ted put it "a big mama" - and two cubs (not newborns) heading toward the caribou. The caribou must have sensed the bears' presence because they all with one accord started heading up the slope of the mountain out the bears' path. The bears just kept ambling toward where the caribou had been not really paying any mind to the herd. The attached pix show the bears and caribou but you may have to enlarge them to get a good view.

Friday May 23, 2008 - Bears

YES! We saw bears - seven of them. We left this morning on a school bus (those are the only buses allowed past mile 15 on the park road) bound for the Toklat River (mile 53). The trip took about 6.5 hours but only cost $21.75 and was well worth the cost in money and time.

Another mystery picture. Can you find the horned owl?

First bears - at the Teklaneeka rest stop.
(OK, they are a little far away but just wait.)

We drove a little further down the road for this better view. The cub is probably a two year old.

The next bear ran across the road ahead of the bus. By the time we got along side it this was the best I could do for a picture.

Ordinarily Dall sheep look like white specks on the side of a mountain to us road bound mortals, but these beauties were close enough that you can actually see that they have curled horns.



Polychrome mountain, we were told, is volcanic (dormant) which accounts for the several different colors in the rocks - iron, copper, basalt etc. The road is cut along the side of the mountain and is just wide enough for a bus to pass another bus without either bumping the upside or falling off the downside. The protocol is that the outbound bus stops as close to the mountain as possible while the inbound bus carefully passes. I'm no geologist, but the rocks on the side of this mountain gave me the feeling that they could sort of slide downward anytime without so much as a "may I". Very pretty, though.


A view of an ancient glacial valley. (Wind was blowing at about 30 knots here.)

Bear number four. I missed a closer picture because the undergrowth was so dense the autofocus was confused. This one was manually focused.


Our "school bus" at Toklat River. The river bed is about 2 miles wide but it never fills with water. Glacial streams carry a lot of silt and the channel keeps filling. When that happens the water just seeks another path and the bed gets wider.


Bears five six and seven. If we had sat there for another hour we might have gotten a closer look.


Marmots sunning themselves.


We saw a few moose on the way out but by then moose seemed a little old hat. I'm looking forward to seeing a mother moose with her twin children.

Thursday May 22, 2998

Still searching for bears and a moose with a new calf. In the meantime the job is going well. The hours we settled with are 10 pm to 6 am 5 days per week. My regular days off are Thursday & Friday. I spend about three hours on a computer every night shutting down the hotel maangement system, extracting daily reports, posting daily charges to hotel guests, then restarting the system. We then transfer some figures from the various reports onto an excel spread sheet and when all is in balance I get to go eat breakfast then go to bed.

The Denali National Park road continues to be my primary source of exploration. Some friends and I just returned from a drive and picked up some new pictures to add to the ones I got day before yesterday on Stampede Road - the same road taken by the guy who died in "Into the Wild".

This was one of two caribou grazing off a Stampede Road the day I was out.

Coming back onto the George Banks Highway I caught a bit of purple in my periferal vision so turned around and investigated. Since I don't yet have a book on Alaska wild flowers I can only share the picture not the identification.

Tonight's sightings included a pair of porcupines but by the time I could get positioned for a picture they were all but hidden by the willow bushes. See if you can find one in this.

Two our party stopped at the dog kennels to walk one of the sled team dogs. We agreed to pick them up at 8:30 and we continued down the park road in search of baby moose and bears. We saw this herd of caribout peacfully grazing and decided that there were probably no bears in the vicinity.

You have seen Savage Rock on this blog before but the sky was so intensly blue tonight I couldn't resist another. This was taken at about 8:10 pm on 5/22/08.

More unidentified wild flowers.

This is a view of the railroad trestle from the park road.

Tomorrow, I'm going on a bus trip 53 miles into the park to Toklak river. There have to be some bears who wan to be photographed.

Friday May 16, 2008 - Denali Alaska

NO BEARS!

But, the rabbits have lost their white fur and the red squirrels are out.

Wednesday, while in Fairbanks, visited the Creamer migratory water fowl sanctuary and caught red headed cranes.


Even though the bears have not cooperated, the maintenance crew has thankfully provided our shared bathroom with running water! The first four days we ahd no water which meant if you had to get up in the middle of the night it was necessary to put on enough clothes so you wouldn't freeze and walk about 100 yards to "The Lone Pine" (the toilet and shower facility - which is heated and indoors - just not my indoor). Then for another week we had running water but it was all cold. Last Tuesday we got HOT WATER. Life is good.

Tomorrow, I think I will try to find bears outside the park.

NOTE: Becky has finished their blog with some excellent pictures hhhalaskatrek.blogspot.com

Thursday May 15, 2008

This is my favorite moose picture so far, even though we have seen several more this guy came within 6 feet of the car, took a good look at me, then knelt down to drink water, then casually walked away.


Denali (or Mt. McKinley if you prefer) is truly a remarkable site and so far I must have 50 pictures of it, none of which adequately depict her majesty but from time to time I'll insert another.

This is a mew gull - quite common around here.<


Just a beautiful scene inside Denali National Park.<

A ptarmigan in the bush.



Entrance sign for the dinner theatre on the grounds of the hotel where I work. It's called Cabin Night and provides a good family style dinner consisting of salad, excellent biscuits, bbq ribs, honey glazed salmon, parslied red-skinned potatoes, corn on the cob, blueberry/blackberry cobbler and a 45 minute musical skit about things happening around 1930 in this area. My roommate is one of the actors/waiters.

Still seeking a bear willing to pose for a photograph, preferrably standing upright with a cub by her side and within good range of a 200 mm lens.
carl

Catching up - May 12, 2008

Ok. It's time to get this blog going. H & B left Anchorage this morning headed for home. I think they saw more wildlife after they left me than we had seen together although the lynx and wolves were pretty exciting. (If you have not already, you need to check out Becky's blog at http://www.hhhalaskatrek.blogspot.com/). If you have already checked it out you may want to go back and look at it again after she has a chance to get back to Hinsdale and work on it more.

I am not writing this on my computer but will manage that tomorrow and will then add some pictures.

So far, my job with ARAMARK at the McKinley Chalet has been mostly training and frustration but I'm sure it will settle down into a routine.

I am doing night audit which entails shutting down the computer system, closing the day, posting all charges for the day, extracting reports etc. The biggest hitch is that we cannot accomplish this if someone fails to log out of their computer prior to leaving for the day. That happened to me last night so tonight we will have two days to post and there will be several annoyed executives since they didn't get their daily reports today. Maybe if they get sufficiently annoyed they will fix the problem.

I have driven into Denali National Park (a 6 million acre protected wilderness with a true jewel within its boundaries - Denali (or as the politicians from the lower 48 call it "Mt. McKinley") many times now and each time there is less snow and more water running. Saturday afternoon I took one of my co-workers into the park for the first time (since I hadn't planned on doing this ahead of time, I failed to have my camera with me) and we were blessed with seeing two grizzly bears, a mother and her two year old cub. They were binocular distance but appeared to be rather large and a beautiful caramel color. Went back yesterday with the camera and they were hiding.

Enough for today. A few of us are going back this evening. Maybe I can add a grizzly picture tomorrow.
Carl