The Roof of the Continent

I returned from church on Sunday afternoon to find Tyler, one of my roommates, and Emily, another intern at the forecast office, on their way out to Tyler's newly-purchased, 1990 Subaru Loyale which he found on Craig's List the other day. Being almost 20 years old and from Alaska, it has nearly 200,000 miles on it, a heavily cracked windshield, and it sounds...suspicious...when the engine is started up. Nevertheless, Tyler announced that since Sunday was such a clear afternoon, they were going to pick up Charly (another intern) and drive up to see if they could see Mount McKinley. One of the first things we were told when we came up here was that you have less than a 10% chance of actually seeing Mount McKinley while you are up here, since the weather in that area is almost always cloudy and the mountain remains obscured. Indeed, some of the interns who were up here last year (like Emily) still had not seen McKinley, even though they had tried many times. But, today was looking excellent. They had hoped that I would be interested in going and driving because Jordan, another one of my roommates, and Shannon (yet another intern) (there are a lot of interns) also wanted to go, but there was no room in Tyler's car. I was happy to go along, and thus we gassed up my car and headed out.
Once you get north to the Wasilla-Palmer area north of Anchorage, the road divides into the Glenn Highway heading east (this was the road that Joe and I came in on when we first drove up here) and the Parks Highway heading north and west, which goes through Denali National Park (where Mount McKinley is) and up to Fairbanks. The actual entrance to Denali National Park is some 3.5 hours driving north of Anchorage, with Fairbanks nearly 6 hours north of Anchorage. However, Mout McKinley is so big that you can get excellent views of it (providing that the weather is good) from many miles south of the acual park entrance, particularly in areas north of a town called Talkeetna. (You may recall that my second big hike was in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer--the town of Talkeetna is on the western edge of these mountains in the Susitna River Valley between the Talkeetna Range and the Alaska Range.) (If you haven't noticed by now, I rather like using parentheses...) Contrary to popular belief, though the Parks Highway does go by Denai National Park, that's not the reason it's called the Parks Highway. The road is named after George Parks who was a former governor of Alaska in the early 1900s. However, when trying to keep your Alaskan highways straight, the name makes it easy to remember where this one goes. As seen above, north of Wasilla the road goes into a big forest with lots of aspen, poplar and black spruce stands. Also seen above is the back of Tyler's 1990 Subaru Loyale...
After driving for an hour and a half or so, we arrived in the town of Talkeetna, popular tourist jumping-off point for excursions into Denali. Talkeetna is locatetd at the end of a 15-mile long spur road off the Parks Highway, so it's a decent little detour. We were under the impression that this was a fully functioning town with grocery stores and everything. This was not the case. Talkeetna, while probably at one time serving some other kind of economy, is now completely a tourist town, billing itself as "authentically Alaskan". The "town" was clogged with tourists walking around and had little to no parking available. We ended up parking in the post office parking lot (it was Sunday so the post office was closed) to see if we might inquire somewhere about McKinley viewpoints. A few blocks of gravel streets were cluttered with gift shop after gift shop after gift shop. There were a few bed and breakfasts and a couple of interesting looking restaurants as well. I kind of wanted to join these tourists and walk around a bit (perhaps grab some lunch at one of the quainter restaurants seeing as I had come straight from church and still hadn't eaten yet...) but the popular consensus was to press on up the Parks Highway to see if we could get a good McKinley view. Talkeetna itself if in a river valley and, while there are somewhat vague views of the mountain in the distance, not many viewing opportunities exist within the town. The nearby river offers a place for float planes to dock, though, and many flight-seeing tours of McKinley take off from here. Talkeetna is mentioned in many of the guidebooks I've read as an excellent place to stop, well worth the effort to come and explore. For that reason I wish I had had more time to look around (and to eat). However, our ten minutes in town had to do. On a side note, I have heard said before that the town of Cicely in the TV show Northern Exposure was loosely based on this town, as far as this being the closest any Alaskan town comes to what is depicted in that show. I didn't think it looked that similar...far too touristy.
We got back on the Parks Highway and continued north. We could catch occasional glimpses of McKinley through the trees or poking above the tree tops. Another half an hour or so north of the Talkeetna spur road and we passed a sign saying that we were "Entering an Alaskan Scenic Byway". This is one thing I have learned driving in Alaska: by any other standards of any other one of the lower 48 states, basically every road you will drive on in Alaska is "scenic". There is no question or doubt...it's always "scenic". So, when Alaska decides to post a sign saying "This route is a Scenic Byway", I have learned that what is about to happen is VERY scenic. EXTREMELY scenic. Difficult to drive because you just want to stare kind of scenic. We had this experience coming into Alaska when we entered the Matanuska River Valley on the Glenn Highway. We passed a sign saying, "Entering an Alaskan Scenic Byway", laughed because everything was scenic, went around a corner, and...wow. They're not kidding. Here it was exacly the same. We went around a corner and there was a side street going up a hill that was called "McKinley View Drive". Tyler, ever alert, decided that this street name must have come from somewhere and we drove to the top of the hill on that road.
We found McKinley. Quite the spectacular view. Many, many photos were taken. Though, for some reason, I couldn't get the contrast quite right with my camera. I've tried editing my photos with Photoshop (using my very limited knowledge of the program) and I just think that the mountain always turned out too washed-out against the background. It was definitely more vivid in real life. But anyhow, then after taking photos I remembered that I had my Milepost guidebook which we had used when we were driving the Alaska Highway into Alaska. The book also details all the highways within Alaska, so, upon getting it out, I discovered that two miles down the road was an official Alaska State Parks turnout for "Denali View South". We decided to go there and continue our photo taking.
The viewpoint lived up to its name. A short path led to another viewpoint at the top of the hill. There were a fair number of people there, including many families with small children. It was interesting to watch their reactions. There were three or four young boys and girls, ranging between 6 and 10 years old, I'd guess, who were incredibly fascinated by the whole thing--reading all the signs, taking photos of each individual peak while writing down all the names of the ridges, telling their parents all about what they just read on the signs. Then there were the ten or twelve other young kids who you could tell couldn't care less about the big rock sitting in the distance and were bored out of their mind. Anyhow, Mount McKinley...
There is considerable debate over what to call the mountain. Officially the US Geologic Survey retains the name Mount McKinley, but the local native term for the mounain, Denali, (meaning "the great one") is the name of the park surrounding the mountain and often what the mountain itself is called. I find myself alternating between the two for some reason. I guess I'm just as undecided as the rest of the world. The main peak is some 20,320 feet in elevation and is the highest point in North America. The mountain itself has one of the greatest prominences (in very simple terms, the height difference between it and the next highest mountain on the same landmass--an odd way of saying it sticks out a whole lot instead of being buried in a mountain range) in the world. It also apparently has more mass than Mount Everest. It is definitely one great big rock. The peak and its flanks are so massive that the entire weather pattern of the Alaskan interior is extremely chaotic because of this mountain. At over 20,000 feet it penetrates into the upper-level jet streams and it alone can be responsible for triggering short waves and other instabilities in the flow that lead to significant storm systems down the line. (I've tried running my numerical weather model around the mountain...it usually ends up making the model crash after a few minutes...).
The mountain is snow-covered year round. Signs at the viewpoint tell of the names of the different sub-peaks and whatnot. There are also many accounts of attempts to climb the mountain, including how the first person to claim to have climbed it actually didn't and passed off a cropped photo of him standing on a much lesser mountain nearby as proof of his "ascent of McKinley". Lots of good history there.
I decided to take a picture of my car with McKinley in the background for effect. Tyler decided that he wanted to get some attractive photographs of his new old car to use when he makes his own post on Craig's List at the end of the summer to try and sell it to someone else. He figured that Mount McKinley in the background would be pretty darn good as well. Though, personally, I can't help but think that any Alaskan is going to see a picture of a car in front of a mountain and not think twice about it...

Anyhow, after taking several pictures, we headed back down the Parks Highway toward Anchorage. We stopped and got gas on the way (my car had only used up a third of a tank so far, the 1990 Subaru Loyale had used up 3/4 of its tank...). We also stopped for dinner at 7 PM (my first time eating since that morning) at a Chili's in Wasilla, just north of Anchorage. Wasilla, as many of you may remember, is the hometown of Sarah Palin. While we have not encountered Sarah Palin yet up here (I believe that she has been on the east coast this week giving speeches), all of my roommates and I are looking out for any signs she may be coming to Anchorage soon so we can take picures and see her speak. There are some here who do not agree entirely with her, but...it's Sarah Palin. We just want to be able to have seen her.

So that was our McKinley trip. More adventures to follow...