Denali Bus Trip

Denali is a secret and the people here want to keep it that way. At first that irked me. After all, Denali is a national park, it belongs to all of us but then I was reminded that access to a lot of national parks is very limited. Yellowstone, Glacier, other parks have just a single road going through them like Denali. The difference is that you can’t drive your car into Denali. You have to take an official bus.

I am a bus brat. Either I feel like I’m nine or a hundred. Neither one is good. When I am on the bus, all I want to do is get off the bus or sleep. Or kick the seat in front of me which is infantile so I never do that when my husband is around.

The Denali people gave us little snack boxes full of inventive healthy snacks. Kale chips and a river of nuts, a sea of sunflower seeds. It was to be what would pass for lunch on this 8 hour excursion. I wanted a roast beef sandwich. And I don’t even like roast beef. Just juvenile rebellion.

The point of the bus trip was to see the inside of Denali and to see wildlife. We did both. Denali’s interior can’t be described; amateur photos hint at what is there. Forgive me, people, for I have sinned to have even raised my iPhone in such a place much less snapped a picture. But I did.

We saw a lone grizzly bear from probably a half mile away; the entire population of the bus came over to one side to elbow their way to the windows, making many of us worry we’d fall clean off the cliff. The bear was a single solitary creature in an expanse of nature that couldn’t even be measured. That’s how much space he thought he needed. He was huge and moving so slowly, you’d have thought he owned the place.

A bull moose with an enormous rack raised his head when we stopped. He was just yards from the side of the road where the buses following us had also stopped. We squealed about him like we’d never seen a wild animal before. I felt like I was with a truckload of people who’d been raised in a farmhouse in eastern Kansas, that’s how agape we were.

We saw more grizzly bears. We saw sheep – tiny white dots on the sides of mountains. We saw a flock of ptarmigan, birds that look like big fat grouse. They turn white in the winter but they’d just started that now. I could see white creeping up their legs.

We saw wolf prints on the shoulder of the road.

I was amazed with everyone else when we saw these creatures but then I became nine again and had had enough. Life on the bus seemed endless, sustained only by the remaining pack of sunflower seeds and our small supply of water diminished by my having screwed the cap on wrong when I left our water bottle on the seat and the bottle having leaked where I later sat, making my new black pants wet from the crotch all the way up to the waistband.

I tried to react with the maturity the environment demanded so I didn’t whine or cry or blame my husband, though it was my reflex to do all three. Instead, I acted as if a totally wet ass was nothing new to me. Nothing to see here, folks. Look at the bears. And we went home to our little motel on the river and I dried my pants with the motel’s hairdryer until it broke and would blow no more.