Month: May 2025

Hunting for the Big Five in the taiga and the tundra

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First things first: Trump’s changing of the name from Denali to Mt. McKinley. I can report with confidence you’d never know it in the national park. The park entrance, the visitor’s center, and countless other signs all still say Denali, deriving from the native (Athabaskan) word for “high one.”

The mountain got dubbed “Mt. McKinley” by an East Coast gold-hunter in 1896, but according to my Fodor’s, the vast majority of Alaskans always continued to call it by its original name (which Barack Obama made official in 2015.) I finally found the name Mt. McKinley in one place: the giant relief map in the visitor’s center.

I wouldn’t hold my breath until the rest of the park catches up.

Besides my fruitless search for any sign of the name change, Steve and I spent a big chunk of our time in the national park on safari, scanning for big game. Beavers aren’t among the very biggest, but they’ve made a mark on the landscape. We hiked for three miles near the visitor’s center Sunday morning, and on Horseshoe Lake the rodents’ handiwork was dramatic.

We think this was their lodge.

That afternoon we took a bus tour. I can’t say it showed us the park because this park is the size of Massachusetts. Only one road runs through it, actually half a road since 2021 when a worsening landslide section made the road impassible about 43 miles in. Access beyond that point has been blocked ever since, though a bridge to span the missing bit is nearing completion. It took our bus driver about 6 hours to take us close to the avalanche site and back.

We drove through two kinds of terrain that neither Steve nor I had ever before laid eyes on, even though both rank among the largest biomes on earth. Taiga is a type of forest that has long cold winters and short mild summers. Tundra is similar but treeless. Vast areas of Canada, Russia, Northern Europe, and Alaska consist of the two. 

Now that I’ve seen it, I have to say taiga (for me) ranks among the sorriest woods on the planet.  Only 5 species of trees grow below the tree line, the vast majority white spruce. They look scrawny and sad and tipsy. (When the ground thaws, the trees tend to lean.)

Some of the 5-foot-tall specimens are hundreds of years old, our guide told us. Only a few kinds of shrubs grow beneath the trees. It’s a half-planet away from the lush life-choked equatorial jungles I’ve seen and loved. 

From the bus, the tundra looked equally moribund, though that was illusory, In a month or two, we heard, the thin, thawed topsoil will be carpeted with hundreds of species of tiny wildflowers, woody plants, berries, mosses, lichens and fungi. Still, even in the best of times, Denali’s plant life isn’t enough to sustain many animals, with a few striking exceptions. The Big Five in the park consist of:

Wolves — They blend in with the landscape and run in packs that cover large areas so they’re notoriously hard to spot. Sunday afternoon we didn’t get lucky.

Grizzly (brown) bears — Next to a grassy hillside, someone noticed a tiny dark form up near the ridge line. For a few excited minutes, our driver/guide thought it might be a bear, but then it flew away. Score for the day: one golden eagle; zero bears.

Dall sheep — They’re striking animals up close, but they usually hang out on steep, high slopes.  We spotted several, but I have to confess, the teensy white specks looked nothing like the stuffed Dall sheep in the visitor’s center.

What I saw on the hillside — using my telephoto lens.
What we would have seen had we gotten closer.

Caribou — We had a great day finding these North American reindeer.

Everyone on the bus got very excited about this, our first caribou sighting.
But we saw more and more until we all started getting blasé.

Moose — My moose score remained pathetic for most of the day, then after our bus had dropped off most of the passengers at the visitor’s center and were being ferried back to our hotel, we came upon a local police car stopped with its lights flashing. Our driver hit the brakes. Just off the road in front of us, a female moose was foraging. She glanced up  but kept on munching. I was thrilled.

I haven’t mentioned the biggest score for anyone visiting Denali National Park: seeing the famous mountain. I knew Denali was the tallest mountain in North America, topping out at 20,310 feet. What I did not know is that a good case can be made it’s actually the biggest mountain on earth if you’re considering the vertical rise — the distance between the base and the peak. Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet, but its base lies on a 17,000-foot-high plateau. So its vertical rise is about 12,000 feet. Denali’s base is only about 2000 feet above sea level, and it looms 18,000 more feet above that. That’s actually more impressive to gaze upon. 

IF you can see it! That’s the rub. The “High One” is so high rangers say it creates its own weather system, usually obscuring the views with clouds and fog. When Steve and I went out Saturday afternoon to a point on the road where Denali should have been visible, all we saw was what 70 to 75% of the park’s visitors see: impenetrable gray. 

The next day began clear and sunny, but at the start of our bus ride shortly after noon, the same mysterious clouds obscured the mountain. To my delight, however, they soon began to clear.

At first, we could barely make it out, but that distant form was unmistakably the High One.
Like a stripper removing her veils, the mountain revealed more and more.
Denali has two peaks. The one on the left in the photo above is the true summit. For just a few seconds, we were able to glimpse it.

We left the park the next afternoon on the Alaska Railways train to Anchorage, and the mountain’s fantastic visibility improved.

Not only that, but we saw several more moose running in nearby meadows. I wasn’t quick enough to photograph them, so you have to take my word for it.

The land of the midnight sunlight

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Fairbanks is roughly 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so even on the summer solstice, the sun still sets. During our two nights there, it dipped below the horizon at 11:38 pm and dawned again just before 4 am. What I didn’t realize is how this would throw my sense of time out of whack. At 5:30 pm the first afternoon, I felt like it was noon. When we were heading to bed around 10, the sky outside our window looked like it does around the time I’m making dinner in the summer back home.

This was the Airbnb in which we stayed. It’s one of many log houses scattered around Fairbanks. I took this picture at 5:38 pm.

Even at 1:30 in the morning, when I got up to pee, the world outside was still bright.

It would have looked even brighter, were it not for the cloud cover.

It unnerved me, but the weird novelty was one of several things that made Fairbanks more interesting than it had appeared on our way from the airport to our Airbnb Thursday morning. “It kind of makes Cincinnati look like Paris,” Steve marveled, gazing out on the strip malls; the seedy bungalows; the scattered, unattractive commercial buildings. The thought of the 40- to 50-degree-below zero temperatures common in the winter did not increase its attractiveness.

Three great museum experiences helped change my opinion. The Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center, where we headed first thing Friday morning, quickly impressed me with the clarity of its exhibits. Some described life in Fairbanks throughout the seasons. Others shared fascinating history, both social and natural. One example: local chickadees cache tens of thousands of seeds through the summer, and in the fall their hippocampuses (the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory) increase in size by 30% as they grow new nerve cells. Toward the end of winter, their brains return to their normal size. Another: the hibernating arctic ground squirrels get so cold, sleep is impossible. But every few weeks they start shivering and warm themselves back to a body temperature that enables dreaming. After about 24 hours, they drop back into hibernation again; they use up about 80% of their winter fat reserves repeating this cycle.

In the afternoon, we got a Lyft to the University of Fairbanks’ Museum of the North. There what most impressed me were the magnificent stuffed animals — not just the requisite towering grizzly (Otto) but most of the other mammalian stars of this part of the world.

A snarling wolverine
Walruses and seals
Not the whole animal, but a wonderful moose head.
A bison that was frozen in the tundra about 36,000 years ago

Steve and I also watched an excellent film about the Aurora Borealis and learned that Fairbanks is the place to see it. 

For dinner, we walked to the first Thai restaurant to open in Fairbanks. The food was tasty; the waitresses friendly and welcoming, but most extraordinary (to me) was what this place spawned. Since it opened in 1989, Thai House employees left the mother ship and opened their own sub-arctic eateries. Many were drive-throughs, which the Alaskans loved. Friends and relatives back in Thailand heard about their success and followed in their footsteps. Today Fairbanks reportedly has one of the highest concentration of Thai restaurants in North America, even though the year-round Thai population remains tiny. 

We got another peek into Fairbanks in the winter after dinner, when we strolled to the Fairbanks Ice Museum. It’s housed in a former movie theater…

…where the ticket taker told us business would be picking up in June, as the summer season unfolded in earnest. For this night, we were the only customers. Beyond the former movie screen we found a rack holding heavy parkas. We each donned one, entered the freezing inner quarters, and strolled by a life-size dog sled team carved from ice.

 Beyond them, we took pictures of some of the other creations.

Then I rode down a solid ice slide so fast I was afraid I would smash into Steve, who was photographing this spectacle from the bottom.

I learned that every February and March, ice carvers from around the world stream into Fairbanks to participate in a big competition. At that time of year, the Northern Lights dance in the heavens almost every night. Dog-mushing teams are racing. To my surprise, I feel tempted to come back.

There were wonderful photos of creations from past competitions. I loved this ice maze.

Trains and planes and a few more fauna

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When you hear the word “seaplane,” what comes to mind? Like me, do you think of a small aircraft that takes off and lands on the water? That’s what I envisioned when I booked our flights between Juneau and Skagway on Alaska Seaplanes. I’ve never flown in one and I expected it to be one of the highlights of this trip. But Steve, looking at the Alaska Seaplanes website the other day, noted that the company uses both actual hydroplanes and other small aircraft, and that the ones going to Skagway were the land-launched ones. I felt crushed.

I need not have. Our single-engine 8-passenger Cessna may have lacked flotation pontoons, but other aspects of the trip made up for it.

I loved the anarchic check-in at Juneau’s airport Tuesday morning. When I gave my name to the cheery lady behind the counter, she asked for no identification, nor did she hand us any boarding passes. We could have been Boris Badenov and Natasha masquerading as Jeannette De Wyze and Steve Wolfe; no one would have been the wiser.  She wanted to weigh our minimal baggage (just our backpacks; we’d left our carry-ons in our home-exchange partner’s garage), but she said we could keep the backpacks with us until boarding. Then we’d have to hand them over to be stowed in the plane’s belly. I eavesdropped as the passenger at the next counter was telling his clerk about the 9mm handgun in the suitcase he was checking. She had no problem with the weapon, but when he told her about the loose bullets, she said he’d have to somehow pack them in their original cartons.

That constituted the security screening. No metal detectors. No interrogation about the size of our toiletries, or attention to our drinking bottles, empty or full. I could have carried on a fifth of Jim Beam, undetected. 

We thus had plenty of time to read and write on our iPads. Finally a plump young guy appeared and read off 8 names (our two among them) He checked us off a paper roster, then told us to follow him out onto the rainy airfield.

That’s Steve at the door, climbing in.

He turned out to be our pilot. Actually, he was the entire crew. He mentioned where the life vests were but I instantly forgot, transfixed by the thought of how quickly I would die if my body were plunged into the water anywhere in the region. He continued, pointing out how to operate the fire extinguisher and where the GPS button and the emergency locator transmitter were, instructing us that if we had to land unexpectedly and he was unconscious, one of us should activate them and help would be on the way. Aye-aye captain.

He turned on the engine, drove us to the end of the runway, and we started to move forward. Seconds later, we lifted up into the gray clouds and driving rain.

The skies never cleared completely during the 35 minutes we were in the air, but the rain stopped and I drank in the staggering views from the Cessna’s big windows.

About 30 minutes in, I spotted a little town with several gigantic cruise ships parked at its waterfront. It had to be Skagway, I figured. I could see a runway, but our pilot flew over it and up the valley and for a moment, it looked like he might be planning to slam into the mountainside. Then he banked, turned us around, and descended steeply. Our wheels jounced as they touched the ground, and we rolled toward the terminal.

Seventy-five minutes later, Steve and I were chugging up to the Canadian border on the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad, usually cited as Skagway’s top touristic experience.

Cruise-ship passengers and other package tour-goers filled the seats (along with us) for Wednesday afternoon’s summit excursion. Inaugurated in 1900 in the wake of the hellacious Klondike Gold Rush, the train takes a little over an hour and a half to ascend almost 3000 feet in about 10 miles, passing brutally vertiginous mountains and scary drop-offs (and the obvious evidence of an avalanche that had occurred just three days before).

I enjoyed it, though frankly, the scenery couldn’t compare with the views we’d just enjoyed from 2500 feet aloft. More than anything, the ride made me appreciate what the gold-seekers who slogged up this route before the line was built had endured: inadequately dressed, making the climb over and over as they hauled up load after load to cache the food and other supplies required by the Mounties at the top of the pass. (The Canadian government supposedly worried that without 2000 pounds per person of such provisions the wannabe miners would die of starvation as they made their way to the gold fields near Dawson, another 550 miles further into Canada.)

Before this trip, I knew almost nothing about the Klondike gold rush. Our short time in Skagway fixed that. The whole town is a National Historical Park and the visitor center and several museums do a wonderful job of bringing to life that brief (less than 2-year) period in which a wild, violent, frenzied society sprang into life. We learned that of the 100,000 gold-seekers who came from all over the world, only 400 actually collected a significant amount of the shiny yellow stuff.

At first glance, the town’s Main Street made both Steve and me think of Disneyland — those throngs of tourists shuffling along, clutching bags filled with their gift shop purchases, those colorful olde time buildings. But in Skagway, almost 100 of the buildings are authentic antiques.

Members of the town’s Arctic Brotherhood fraternal society decorated the entire facade of their hall with almost 9000 pieces of flotsam and driftwood.

The cruise-ship passengers were the main fauna (some 10,000 of them on the day of our visit.) But I forgot to mention three other cool creatures we saw during our time in Juneau — and one welcome no-show.

— Bald eagles! I failed to get a good photo of them, but it was startling to see them frolicking in the skies all over town. Kind of like the parrots in my neighborhood back home.

— Ravens! As common as the eagles.  I had fun tossing bits of my sandwich to this cheeky guy on our beach hike the other day.

The views from that beach were also pretty diverting.

— A live King Crab! The one below was in a little tank at the dazzling salmon hatchery we visited after our beach hike. We were blown away by the hatchery’s mission (for the last 50 years): raising millions of embryonic salmon every year till they’re big enough for release into the ocean. That TLC gives them a vastly better chance for survival than salmon who aren’t thus protected. After release, the fish swim the seas for several years and then return to the hatchery to spawn and die.  

What we did NOT see were the hordes of mosquitoes and “white feet” bugs and flies and no see ‘ums and other annoying summer pests for which Alaska is famous.  Apparently they’ll appear in Juneau a bit later this summer. We may meet them yet. We’ve just arrived in Fairbanks for a whirlwind (two-night) stay here. Then we’re on to Denali National Park and Anchorage, the next stops on our grand tour of Seward’s Folly.

Local fauna

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Thursday I saw a porcupine for the first time in the wild. This guy was outside the Mendenhall Glacier visitor’s center, nibbling like crazy on the greenery surrounding him. He looked like he was trying to ignore all the tourists taking pictures. But they were making him nervous.

That night we encountered another stellar denizen of this part of the world: the Alaskan king crab. We didn’t see one of the actual crustaceans (which can have a leg span five feet wide). But their parts are on multiple restaurant menus, priced at $75 to $85 a pound.

Steve and I shared a single leg for dinner Thursday, along with crab bisque and a couple of crab cakes, all extraordinarily delicious.
All around us people had ponied up for bucketloads of legs and were digging in with gusto.

The two of us almost stumbled over another porcupine Saturday morning, when we hiked on what’s left of Alaska’s first road. Known today as the Perseverance Trail, it was built in the late 1880s to serve early miners.

Today parts of the trail retain remnants of those impressive early days.
In other places, they’re long gone.
The path leads through some of the most beautiful forest I’ve ever hiked in.

Salmon berries were only just beginning to flower, which may partly explain why we didn’t see any black bears. God knows there were plenty of signs warning of their presence — and other dangers Sunday when we climbed up Mt. Roberts to the top of the cable car that carries cruise-ship passengers up the almost-vertical mountainside.

Wolves live in those woods, too. But I was told moose prefer other parts of Alaska. It struck me I’ve never seen a live moose anywhere, in neither zoo nor the wild, so I would be most excited to see one of them.

We did eat in downtown Juneau at Bullwinkle’s Pizza Saturday night. Juneauites have been devouring pizza there under images of the cartoon moose for more than 50 years.

The pizza was good, but the restaurant interior was pretty forlorn. We chose it only because Bullwinkle’s is just around the corner from the Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, where the Lionel Hampton Big Band was performing that night. I’d heard that Juneau organizes a music festival every May, and the big band would be performing for the finale that Saturday night. I’d gotten tickets, and Steve and I had decided to take the free pre-concert dance lesson at 6 pm (hence the need for an easy, close dinner.)

We walked in to the hall to find at least a dozen folks already gathered around the teacher, a pretty blonde with a bear paw tattooed on her left shoulder blade. Gamely, she and her assistant demonstrated Lindy and jitterbug moves to the “class.” To me it seemed a wildly ambitious effort; the instructors were racing through a repertoire that Steve and I once learned (sort of) over the course of a couple of years. But soon enough it was time for the dance students to clear the floor so the performance could begin.

Lionel himself has been dead for more than 40 years, but the band is still playing his arrangements; indeed some of the 10 members were in the group when the great vibraphonist was still leading it. The ensemble proved energetic and accomplished, and more-confident dancers soon filled the dance floor.

Steve and I joined them for one number, but it reminded us how far out of practice we are, so mostly we watched. I found myself wondering if the scene would look very different were the band playing at some Kiwanis hall in San Diego. I spotted way more boots on the feet in the Juneau crowd. But mostly they just looked like ordinary American Homo sapiens, having fun.

Scenery

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My worst fear was not being eaten by a grizzly bear. Instead the Apple Weather prediction for our time in Juneau looked so grim — temperatures ranging from barely above freezing to the mid-40s, with rain every day — I worried we might not want to venture outside. What fun would that be?

I need not have fretted. True, we emerged from the airport terminal Wednesday afternoon into a chilly, damp world, but we’ve been more than comfortable moving around in it. My gear choices were good! For this trip, I bought a waterproof Norwegian (Helly Hanson) raincoat, and yesterday I wore it over two lightweight thermal tops and a down jacket. On my legs I had rain pants over thermal long-johns. For footwear I dusted off the hiking shoes in which I trekked on New Zealand’s Routeburn Trail 8 years ago.

It all worked so well I got too warm at one point and had to stow the down jacket in my day pack! (It compresses down into a compact stuff sack.) And the rain proved to be only intermittent, never intensifying to much more than a drizzle; often stopping altogether.

We’re in a wonderful exchange home here, just a 10-minute Uber ride from the airport. The expanse of windows in its living room open onto a big deck with sweeping views of Douglas Island across the Gastineau Channel.

Our trading partners are also letting us use their Honda CRV. We drove it yesterday (Thursday) to Juneau’s #1 touristic attraction for the last 150 years: one of the easiest places in North America to see a glacier up close. It took us barely 15 minutes to reach the Mendenhall Glacier parking lot. We had a delightful time exploring the complex.

This is Mendenhall Lake into which the ice river deposits its calves.
My telephoto lens helped us see the chunks about to break off.
My very first iceberg (tiny but elegant)
Someone transported this one to the beach leading to Nugget Falls.
The waterfall itself was nothing to sneer at.

This is all within the Tongass National Forest — the largest temperate rain forest in the world. The visitor’s center was jammed with cruise-ship passengers, but we met almost no one on the nearby Trail of Time. Its misty pathways led us through a landscape lushly upholstered with mosses and a profusion of other plants.

It felt primordial but to our astonishment, we learned the glacier had covered much of this trail less than 100 years ago. It retreated to leave behind bare rock. All the dense green beauty has developed since then.

This viewpoint provided photos documenting how dramatically the landscape has changed.

After just one day, I felt amazed by Juneau’s scenery. Another feature of that scenery also has been striking. Our hosts in the exchange home left a list of (dumb) tourist questions that they advised (tongue in cheek) against asking. “What elevation are we at?” was one. “Sea level” is the proper answer. (“That water out there, that’s the sea.)

Now that I’m here, I understand why visitors might ask that. The scenery makes me feel I’m deep in some mountain holdfast; dramatic peaks jut skyward in every direction, cut through with deep valleys. For most of my life I’ve only seen scenery like this far, far from the ocean. This place feels different.

At home AND abroad?

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Early next Wednesday morning (May 14), Steve and I will fly north to spend a month in Alaska. I keep reminding myself we will still be in the United States (home!) thus at least theoretically able to fill in for anything we forget to pack. But I’m expecting (hoping) it will feel a bit like being in another country. Abroad.

Neither of us have ever set foot in Alaska before. We decided it was time to make up for that, and several months ago I started my planning by making the same mistake I made last year when planning our travels in the Caribbean: assuming we could get around substantially on ferries. I soon learned that although Alaska at one time had an extensive ferry system, that’s now a shadow of its once glorious self. Some ferries still operate, and in the end, I was able to book passage for us on two, one from Juneau to Gustavus (aka the gateway to Glacier National Park), and another from Sitka to Bellingham. (We’ll spend two nights on that one in a cabin with actual beds.)

I also booked a ferry from Juneau up to Skagway, but then I got an email informing me the Alaska Marine Highway System operators had canceled it. So we will instead fly in a seaplane (another first) up to Skagway and back to Juneau.

Otherwise, we’ll be relying heavily on Alaska Airlines and the Alaska Railroad to get us around. Even with a full month, we still won’t see many parts of the state that sound interesting. This is a HUGE place, I’ve come to appreciate, bigger than Texas, California, and Montana combined.

To my delight, I was able to secure home exchanges with a couple in Juneau and another in Anchorage. We’re counting on those stays to give us some deeper insight into Alaskan life. On the other hand, the weather (at least in Juneau) looks worse than I originally expected. (I took this recent screenshot of Apple Weather just a few weeks ago. The forecasts haven’t improved much since.)

We’re preparing as best as possible, telling ourselves we can always buy more clothes if necessary.

I plan to wear this footwear on the plane. Another first.