Denali: the Great One

There is a great mystery on this journey: that I seem to choose some places to go, and that others call me to come. Alaska called. Before leaving home, I gave little thought to going to Alaska. In the mayhem of leaving, I barely gave thought to where I was going once I pulled out of the driveway.

But almost as soon as we left, Alaska started calling. And every time I looked at the map, the voice seemed to come from Denali, the ‘Great One’ in the Athabascan language. The mountain and its surrounding wilderness create one of the largest preserved areas in the country. The only vast wilderness in Alaska with a road through it. A single road, two lanes at its best, 92 miles long.

Despite that persistent call, the reality of visiting the park almost put me off. To penetrate this wilderness, you spend 8 to 11 hours, depending on how far you go, on a school bus. This had little appeal to me, though I would have done it. But it would have been impossible for George. He is happy to have me go off on my own adventures, but this was a call to go together.

One evening, at our RV park in Seward, I started chatting with our neighbor. We discovered we were from the same part of the world, both full-time travelers. So we had lots to talk about, including the places in Alaska she had already been. She told me they were able to get a pass to drive their car through Denali. Her partner had MS, and would not have been able to deal with a day on the bus.

So we went, and got the pass, good for four days, from a friendly ranger. As we drove in the first day, I got teary, and George told me he had goosebumps. We took full advantage of our gift of time. One day, I planned to hike and see what wildflowers were still around. But, discovering the amazing lichen world in the park, spent most of the afternoon lying on the ground.

One evening and the following morning, we had a quick view of Denali herself. She shimmered in the distance, having emerged from her usual shroud of clouds. On our last day, we just kept driving. We went the entire 92 miles in and back, a nine-hour adventure. At the far end, we discovered a world of bog and muskeg different from the rest of the drive.

Denali, though full of beauty, isn’t the most beautiful or the most intriguing place I’ve seen. People don’t go for that reason. Its lure is the ability to see the wildlife living and roaming freely within a sliver of its five million acres.

The original impulse to create the park was to conserve this wildlife. And there’s plenty of it. We saw caribou, moose, eagles, ptarmigan, and lots of grizzlies. One was digging up roots less than 20 feet away from us. (We were in the truck, needless to say.)

I loved seeing the animals and birds, and the flowers and lichen. But there was something about the land itself that made it hard to take my eyes off it. Denali is a subarctic wilderness, not a showy landscape. There are lots of low shrubs, dark green spruce, small-scale wildflowers and grasses, acres of moss, tons of lichen.

They are all native to their place. With few roads to carry plant invaders, native plants have formed a vast, millennia-old ecosystem supporting the park’s animal, plant, and human life. The Athabascan people, who have a 13,000-year history there, still use the park for subsistence hunting and gathering.

It filled my soul to float through mile on mile of this subtle tapestry of greens, browns, tans, and yellows. Punctuated with rivers and ponds, rimmed with snowy mountains, usually under a moody gray sky. All colors intense in the blue high-latitude light.

It was thrilling to see the mountain itself show up one evening as the sun set on its western flank. Then to glimpse her luminous presence the next morning before the clouds veiled her. To lie on the ground with lichen and see the last of the wildflowers. Have caribou walk by on the road, heading in the opposite direction. To watch a bear at close range.

There is a crucial magic about this. It’s not just about seeing the animals, or the landscape. It’s about knowing that there are places left for life to go on as if humans were not rushing to dominate the rest of the planet. Denali is a place where the heart of the world can beat undisturbed. That is what makes it so important.

Why the call? I have no answer. The calls seldom explain themselves. The landscapes they leave on the heart take time to make their difference. I may never look back and say, “This happened because I was there.” But Denali called, I went, and I am changed.

There are more photos in the Alaska Landscapes gallery and the Alaska Wildflowers gallery.

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