Denali National Park: The Basics

Denali National Park is one of the Park Service’s most remote parks.  There is just one road into and out of the park – it’s 92 miles long and mostly gravel.  During the summer season you can drive your own vehicle into the park up to Mile 15 (Savage River) and then you have to turn around unless you have a special pass.  Most of the travel within this park is done by shuttle bus, on foot, or on a bicycle.  They make it enough of a challenge to actually get into the park that throughout our stay we joked that it is the “park that does not want you here”.

As Denali newbies, planning our first trip here was a bit overwhelming logistically.  This park is just very different from the other National Parks we’ve visited, where you can drive on all the roads but can only hike on set trails – here in Denali you can’t really drive yourself much of anywhere but you can hike wherever you want.  We wanted to make the most of our short 5-day trip, and there’s a lot we needed to know in order to come up with the best plan.  I thought I’d write one post on some of the key aspects of our planning, in case anyone who hasn’t been here wants a sort of first-hand account of what to do (and what not to do).

CAMPING

Denali has several campgrounds, but only three that you can drive a vehicle to: Riley Creek (at the park entrance), Savage River (Mile 15), and Teklanika (Mile 29 – this requires a special road pass to get to it).  None of Denali’s campgrounds have RV hookups, so we would be using the generator to keep the battery topped up.  If you are tent camping, the sky is the limit here – you can choose to camp in one of the established campgrounds, or get a back country permit and camp nearly anywhere as long as you can’t be seen from the road.  We found that Denali has limits on some things (where you can drive, for example) and almost no rules about other things (where you can camp, where you can hike, etc).  It’s an interesting place.

Our Original Plan: I had originally booked five nights at the Riley Creek campground, which is right near the entrance and other facilities (showers, small grocery store, restaurants).  Staying at Riley Creek would have meant that we could enter and leave the park as we wished, but to go any further into the park than mile 15 would require riding a shuttle bus.  I had booked us a one-day shuttle trip to Wonder Lake (Mile 85), but that was pricey at $46 per person. 

Our improved plan got us to Wonder Lake and gave us two additional days of bus travel at a fraction of the cost

But while we were at Yellowstone, we happened to camp next to a photographer who’d been coming to Denali for the past 50 years. He advised us to change our plans if at all possible – he said the best way to see the park was to camp further inside the park instead of just near the entrance.  He promised us it would save us time and money.  We listened to his pointers and the very next day called to change our reservations.  (For a very small fee, like $8, we were able to make a bunch of changes that actually saved us money and helped us get much more out of our limited time in Denali.)

Our Improved Plan:  We would spend the first night at the park entrance at Riley Creek campground, getting familiar with the park programs and planning out what we wanted to do.  We would then spend three nights at Teklanika campground, 29 miles into the park.  In order to camp at Teklanika, you have to stay a minimum of three nights.  You are allowed to drive your vehicle there (but no further), and once you are there you can’t drive it out again until the day you leave.  Teklanika is a little cheaper per night ($16 vs $22), but more rustic than Riley Creek – there are pit toilets (brand new and very clean) and potable water but that’s it – no showers, shops, or restaurants.  After three days there we would drive ourselves back to the entrance area for our final night at Riley Creek.  This plan worked very well for us – staying an hour inside the park meant shorter bus rides and more access to the park’s interior.

The Teklanika River is a great example of a braided river -- the many bars separate it into multiple streams

TRANSPORTATION

Buses at Polychrome Pass – the shuttle buses are green, tour buses are tan

Unlike other national parks, you can’t really drive yourself around Denali.  Unless you want to limit yourself to the first 15 miles of the road (and miss out on some of the best parts of the park), you will need to either take a tour or a shuttle bus.  We decided not to book a tour; the cheaper shuttle buses drive the exact same route and see the same wildlife and views (shuttle drivers do stop for wildlife and often get on the microphone to talk about the park). 

We discovered that our improved plan would allow us to purchase a Tek Pass because we were staying in Teklanika.  This pass would allow us unlimited shuttle rides for the duration of our stay at the Teklanika campground.  The bonus was that this pass was actually cheaper (at $34 per person) than the one-day shuttle tickets I’d reserved.  And overall by staying at Teklanika (Tek), we had saved ourselves a lot of time as well – it’s slow going on the park road, so a shuttle leaving the visitor center at 7am gets to Tek an hour later and arrives in the evening an hour earlier.  So we would spend less time getting around as well.  The drawback is that you can’t ride the bus any further toward the main visitor center than Tek campground at mile 29.  So you are kind of “stuck” inside the park…but what a place to get stuck in!

THE BUSES AND THE ROAD

Look closely and you’ll see a bus on the road about halfway up the mountain

Patience is key when riding the shuttles on the park road.  The gravel road is narrow and winds its way up several mountain passes, so shuttle drivers have to take it pretty slow.  The posted speed limits are around 25 or 30 mph and the buses stop frequently for scheduled rest stops/bathroom breaks as well as unscheduled stops for wildlife viewing and dropping off/picking up hikers.  All told, it takes almost six hours to travel the 85 miles from the visitor center all the way to Wonder Lake.  So it’s important to understand the bus schedule and give some thought to your route for the day.  We almost learned that the hard way on our first bus trip.  We had enough time to get out to Wonder Lake (it has some of the closest views of Mt. McKinley), but we would have arrived there too late to catch the last bus back and would’ve been stranded.  Luckily we had checked the schedule, so we stopped at Eielson Visitor Center (Mile 66) that day instead. 

By the way, I keep talking about Wonder Lake as though it is the end of the road – it’s not.  There’s another stop after it – Kantishna, at Mile 90 – but we just didn’t go that far so I can really only measure relative time/distance by how long it took us to get to Wonder Lake.

Wonder Lake on an overcast day – there are supposedly tall mountains back behind me somewhere

Another important thing to know is that there aren’t any concessions anywhere in the park other than at the park entrance.  So when riding the shuttle bus you need to bring lunch, snacks, drinks, camera batteries (or film if you’re old-school) – basically whatever you think you’ll need for the day.  Drinking water/fountains are available at some rest stops for water bottle refills but unless you want to eat willow bark, bring something to eat.

Scheduled stops usually last about 10 minutes so that everyone has a chance to get off the bus and use the restroom or stretch their legs.  Unscheduled stops for picking up or dropping off hikers are usually brief.  (The nice thing is that the bus will let you off anywhere along the road that strikes your fancy.  When you’re ready to go back, just flag down the next passing green bus and they’ll pick you up.)  Unscheduled stops for wildlife viewing can last a long time if the animal is doing something interesting.  We tried in vain to find the “best” seats on the bus and they don’t exist.  Invariably, we would sit on the south side and the cool animals would be on the north side or vice versa.  (You do want to sit on the south-facing side if you like taking scenic photos – I would say that all the wide vistas are in that direction.  But it’s hard to get nice shots of scenery from a moving bus.)

The view from Polychrome Pass.  The bus driver kindly stopped briefly for this shot.

HIKING

Denali is a backcountry hiker’s paradise.  When we got here we were completely surprised to find out that there weren’t many maintained trails.  There are a few near the park entrance, and at some of the stops along the road, but for the most part all the best hiking areas have no trails.  For people like us, who have always followed the rules to “stay on the trails”, this was overwhelming at first.  There are no visitor maps with suggested routes, other than the few established trails near the visitor centers.  And when we asked, “Where is a good place to hike?”, we got vague answers from the rangers like “Oh, the area on either side of Polychrome Pass is nice”.  That’s great, but it didn’t quite answer our questions – where exactly do we get off the bus?  Is there something special (a viewpoint, a waterfall) that we should hike to?  No matter who we asked, we really couldn’t get any answers.  It seems that the park staff aren’t supposed to encourage people to hike in any one specific area.  They want you to “discover” the park on your own.

Savage River – one of the few hikes we did on a maintained trail

Why?  Well, the park officials don’t want to encourage people to take the same path over and over again.  We couldn’t understand why until we finally took a bus out to the tundra and saw the vast area with no trees.  If they put in hiking trails criss-crossing every which way, it would not only be too intrusive for the animals and plants, but it would also pretty much spoil the views and diminish the impact of seeing so much pristine wilderness.  We did find an excellent book (not sold in the park, obviously) that gave us some good starting points with some key details about elevation gain and difficulty of terrain, etc.  And once we got out on our own we got over that feeling of uncertainty pretty quickly and enjoyed our time stomping through the wilderness.

Our first hike “off-trail” – we got ourselves up here, now how do we get back down?

ACTIVITIES

In addition to camping, hiking, and riding the bus there are tons of other great things to do in the park!  It took a bit of schedule maneuvering to fit everything in that we wanted to do during our five days here.  Some of those things included:

• Ranger Talks:  these were every night at 7:30 at our campgrounds – we got the schedule/topics ahead of time at the visitor center on our first day so we could figure out which ones we wanted to go to.
• Discovery Hike:  this is a hike with a ranger – there are two hikes each day (a moderate and a strenuous one) in different areas of the backcountry and they both start early in the morning.  We needed to pick a day and sign up in advance at the main visitor center or Eielson visitor center (they only take 11 people on each hike).  This hike also requires a bus ticket since these are backcountry hikes, but since we had a Tek pass the bus just picked us up at our campground.
• Eielson Visitor Center Hike:  there are two ranger-led hikes that leave from the Eielson visitor center at Mile 66: a strenuous hike that leaves at noon, and an easy “stroll” that leaves at 1pm.  The noon hike requires you to sign up since they can only take 11 people, but the 1pm hike didn’t require signup and had no limits on the number of hikers
• Sled Dog Demonstration:  During the winter, the rangers get around by dogsled (I know – pretty cool, right?).  The dogs are kenneled here year round though, and you can go pet them any time.  But they actually have a demonstration program that they do three times daily (at 10am, 2pm, and 4pm) that we wanted to check out.  Plus, we’d been told that one of the dogs had a litter of ten-week-old puppies.  Who can resist that?
• See Mt. McKinley:  we include this in “the plan” because even on a clear day the mountain isn’t visible from everywhere in the park.  We wanted to try to leave enough flexibility in our schedule that if we had a “good” clear day we could get ourselves on a bus to a place where we could get some spectacular photos.  Things didn’t quite go our way on this one.  Maybe next time!

QUESTIONS?

What we found very helpful was that we ran into a couple of other people who had already been here and were willing to share their “inside” knowledge and answer our questions from their own experience.  So I’m going to try to pay that forward – if you are trying to plan a trip to Denali and have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments below.  I’m no Denali expert by any means but I’ll do my best to answer it!