July 2nd and 4th, 2012: Looking for the Mountain

July 2nd and 4^Th, 2012: Looking for the Mountain

People here say that only about thirty percent of those who visit Denali National Park actually get to see the Mountain. They seem to always refer to it as the Mountain, sometimes Denali, and never as Mount McKinley. They ask you if you saw the Mountain come out, as it’s so large it makes its own weather and so is seldom seen.

So we steeled ourselves to not seeing the Mountain. After all it had been raining for days and cloudy and cold…….We boarded the Wonder Lake Bus and took images as the bus driver would say, “Now if the Mountain came out it would be right there in that notch”. In fact I was going to call this blog, if you could see the Mountain, but then the Mountain surprised us all and came out.

It was like a burlesque fan dancer as the Mountain teased us with a wall here, the South peak there and almost all its parts, but never all at once. Clouds would part for a bit and we could make out its majesty, and for that we were thankful.

As we crossed Polychrome Pass, where we crossed our fingers as we passed another bus on Poison Point,(A notorious hairpin where it’s said only one drop would kill you which refers to what would happen if the bus dropped over the edge of the unguarded turn), the Mountain danced and covered itself with a fan of clouds disappearing from sight. We never saw it again.

So we still felt lucky, after all we did see the Mountain. To celebrate the Fourth of July we decided to return to Savage River and look for more Ptarmigan or possibly caribou. As we drove I looked up from the tundra and exclaimed, “Oh f*^K, Denali came out”, and there it was in all its glory. Renita laughed at me and asked if I knew what I had said.

The North and South peak both cleared, along with the Wickersham Wall and Mudlows Glacier. It was all there, even though it was fifty miles away. It’s not a graceful and beautiful mountain as the Grand Teton, but instead a massive giant that dominates everything below it.

Covered with glacial ice and snow, the crevasse fields were evident even at that distance. The Mountain looked as dangerous as its reputation and it has already killed six climbers this season. So we took image after image and sadly none of our images did any justice to what we saw, and that’s ok.

After all the Mountain came out and we were lucky enough to see it……Clear skies.

note the first image was taken just north of the Savage River Campground at a distance of fifty miles and two and four were taken from about thirty miles away near Polychrome Pass. Hence the differing appearance from different angles. The third image is a brief glimpse of the summit from Eilsen Ranger station.