A Wild Ride

In as much as we saw many animals today on our tour bus trip. Let's start at the begining. We were driving out of the campground on our way to the bus when we saw the Loose Moose. She's been hanging around for a while scaring the rangers because she's a little aggresive. She kicked a lady in the head and the lady lost an ear in the incident. I'm guessing she got too close. Here she is laying in the brush.

Once we got on the bus, the first thing we saw was a momma moose with her calf. She was walking down the middle of the road, and my picture is out the front window of the bus.

We saw a number of birds which we did not get any pictures of; Willow Ptarmigan, golden eagles, arctic falcon.There were a number of birders in our bus, so they really went wild. Apparently the falcon is rarely seen. We saw a herd of thirteen Dahl Sheep, but the picture is not that good since they were way, way far away on the mountain. Plus they were moving around a lot.

From there to the Eielson Visitor center at mile 65.9, we didn't see much more wildlife.:-(. The weather was not really in our favor either. We did get a glimpse of Denali through the clouds, but if you didn't know what you were looking at, you wouldn't know what you're looking at. This is the north peak, which is shorter than the south peak, which is 3 miles from there.

We took a short hike while at the visitor center. It was really windy and cold, so we called it our popsicle hike. It was climbing the whole way though so we got a little workout.

We hopped onto another bus for the trip back. We didn't ride the same bus line as Marsha did, no tv or boxed lunch. We rode the shuttle bus, which runs every 30 minutes, and you can get off and on whenever you want. So, we're driving back when we ran into a grizzly walking down the road. It's important to note there are about 350 grizzly bears in a park of 6,000,000 acres. The chances of seeing one are slim at best. This guy wouldn't get off the road, and the bus is not supposed to pass until they are off the road. So we followed him for a while. Once he did get off, it was to grap a ground squirrel, so of course we couldn't leave then either.

We finally got to see some caribou up close too.

WOW! We finally got back and were so excited we had the chance to see so much wildlife. As we were driving back to camp, we found Loose Moose again. She loves our campground.

After a day like today, we opened one of our two remaining LouieD's. What a day!!

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