On our second full day in Alaska we rode on a Denali Park shuttle bus for many hours throughout the park. As I mentioned in the day 1 recap, you are not allowed to drive throughout most of the park and you have to use the shuttle bus system to get around. With our camping reservation at Teklanika we were able to get a special bus pass that would allow us to have unlimited rides. Most of the time we were on a space available basis (which never was a problem), but we were able to make one guaranteed seat reservation for the first full day we had in the park. So on this day we caught our reserved shuttle around 7:15am for the ride all the way out to Wonder Lake.

We wouldn’t arrive at Wonder Lake until 12:30, meaning that we would be on this bus for over five hours. It isn’t that far of a drive, but the speed limit is 35 MPH and there are many planned an unplanned stops along the way. The unplanned stops happen when anyone on the bus spots some wildlife. These sightings and the beautiful scenery helped to pass the time very easily. In order of appearance, we saw a grizzly bear, dall sheep, caribou, a fox, and a pack of wolves. Also there were numbers of golden eagles, northern harrier, ptarmigan, and other birds.

In addition to all the wildlife, we also continued to see amazing colors throughout the park. Fall was really in full swing and the red, yellow, and orange colors were amazing. On top of it all, we got to see most of Mt. McKinley. The mountain, as it’s called inside the park, is often hidden in clouds.  But when we made it out to Stony Hill we had a nearly a cloud-free view. According to the bus driver 80% of the mountain was visible, which was good enough to count as a day when the mountain could be viewed.  He also said that the mountain is only visible 20% of the time, so we were pretty lucky.

By the time we made it out to Wonder Lake, more clouds had rolled in and hid much more of the mountain. I had planned to take a hike for good viewing of the mountain out near Wonder Lake, but since it was hidden we decided to continue on our original bus back to the Eielson Visitor Center for some hiking there. We hiked down to the McKinley River bed from the visitor center, which proved to offer some great views of the entire valley along with the Alaska Range. Once we were finished with the hike we caught another bus back to the campground to wind down the night.  It was an amazing day!

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