Denali National Park: Wildlife and Wildflowers

If you ask, most people are under the impression that the reason behind the creation of Denali National Park is The Mountain – Mount McKinley to be precise.  It would make sense that the government would set aside the land surrounding the nation’s (and continent’s) highest peak, right?

If I had a decent photo of McKinley I’d have put it here.  But this shot of wildflowers will have to substitute instead.

Wrong.  The park’s origins are a little more humble than that – sheep.  Yep, that’s right – sheep.  Specifically Dall Sheep, an alpine-dwelling animal that looks a little like a Bighorn Sheep, but with a slight flare to its horns.  In 1906, Charles Sheldon came here to study these sheep.  Prospectors and other residents found them so tasty that Sheldon was concerned about the species’ survival, so he lobbied for the creation of a park.

It was cool to be able to see the sheep on some of the sheer rock faces in the hills along the road, but to me they were nowhere near as exciting as sightings like this red fox.  He sat there facing the chill wind for a good long while as we all quietly watched him out the bus windows before he trotted away.

We also saw our first caribou this week.  There are about 2,000 living in the park.  Both male and female caribou have antlers, so even the females have an impressive rack.

But animals aren’t the only impressive life forms in the park.  We were surprised by the variety of wildflowers that were in bloom around the park.

Bright blue Forget-me-nots and purple Monk’s Hood

The growing season is short here – just a few months – so the plants do all that they can to attract pollinators like bumblebees and flies.  They put on quite a show.

Flowers are pretty, but we’re not done with the fauna yet.  On Saturday, we set our new record for bear sightings in a single day – twelve!  The only problem was that they were all far, far away from the bus.  We could see them pretty well through the binoculars, but the zoom on our camera just rendered them into fuzzy brown (roughly bear-shaped) blobs.  (On our next trip to Denali, we’ll be sure to bring a better set of binoculars and a better zoom lens/camera.)  However, we got lucky on Sunday with a hungry grizzly who ignored our bus while he foraged for food along the roadside. 

While hiking, we saw plenty of wildflowers but never ran into any animals

We were pretty excited as well to have a bona fide, confirmed wolf sighting.  And this time it wasn’t sprinting off into the trees or anything.  This guy just casually strolled, dog-like, up the road towards us.  Then he trotted right alongside the bus (that was parked, engine off – the bus driver was as excited about this as the rest of us) before making his way into the surrounding foothills.

The hands-down, most memorable sighting came on my birthday.  It was like a gift from Mother Nature, or something.  We had seen a snowshoe hare our first day in the park, and on our Discovery Hike the ranger had pointed out signs of hare activity (incisor marks on willow bark).  She mentioned that one of the primary predators of the snowshoe hare is the lynx, and that if you are looking to spot a lynx you should start by looking where there are snowshoe hares.  We had thought maybe for my birthday we would spend the day around the campground and in the taiga forest near the Teklanika River, looking for a lynx that had been reported there.  But instead, we decided to take the shuttle bus into the park since it would be our last day with the Tek Pass.  Wouldn’t you know it – the very first animal we saw on that bus ride was this:

The lynx was in some bushes within about ten feet from the bus.  No one on the bus made a sound, and we didn’t even open our windows for fear of scaring him off.  We just sat there disbelievingly as he stalked his way out of the brush into a rocky area and spent a couple minutes just looking at the bus.  It was as though he was posing for a photo op.  The bus driver said that in all his years of driving, he’s rarely seen lynx from the road and never so close.  So we may not have seen The Mountain in all its glory, but I’ll take this sighting over seeing Denali any day!