Morning was chill in Savage River Campground on Thursday, August 27, but the gripping cold that campground host, Liz, had forecast had not yet arrived. In the tent, we had a more insistent puddle than we’d had the previous morning. It had rained overnight, but in the bright gray morning, there was only occasional drizzle.

We’d started our last canister of backpacker stove fuel the day before, and it was fairly light when I started heating water in the coffee percolator. Damned if it didn’t cut out just as the coffee was done. It was the first time we’d estimated perfectly how much fuel we’d need on a trip.

Packing up over coffee didn’t take long. Our plan was to have breakfast at the park grill while we finished writing our postcards to mail from the Park. We also wanted to visit the Alaska Geographic bookstore and, of course, the Visitor Center.

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After our mishap on Mount Healy, Sean and I salvaged the afternoon of Wednesday, August 26 with a visit to Denali National Park’s sled dog kennels. We arrived at the Park Headquarters parking area shortly before the 2pm dogsledding demonstration.

The use of dogsleds to patrol Denali National Park dates all the way back to Harry Karstens, who became the Park’s first superintendent in 1921 after it was established in 1917. In the winter, Park Rangers go on one-day to six-week long dogsled patrols of the inner two-million acres of designated wilderness, where motorized vehicles are prohibited. The patrols haul supplies, contact winter visitors, and prevent illegal activities like poaching and snowmobiling.

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Tuesday morning, August 25, we awoke to a semi-steady rain, which had begun the night before. We would be departing Wonder Lake Campground under a thick cloud cover that only occasionally allowed the lower ridges of the Alaska Range to peek through.

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Wonder Lake Campground, located at mile 85 of the Denali Park Road and thereby the closest campground to The Mountain, is comprised of twenty-six tent sites mostly arrayed along a gently sloping amphitheater beneath a low ridge. Amid the campsites and stretching beneath the campground into the middle distance is a landscape sparsely studded with tall, thin Black Spruce amid low tundra brush.

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Sunday morning, August 23, we awoke in a puddle. It had rained insistently all night, and at 5:20am, our tent was cold and wet. Sean had been right. We should have just slept in the Jeep, since now we had soaked gear that we had to pack up in order to catch the 7:05am camper bus to Wonder Lake Campground.

I climbed out of the tent in the pre-dawn light. It was cold, but it had stopped raining. I lit the camp stove and started boiling water in the coffee percolator. As cold as it was, somewhere in the 30s, it didn’t approach the 27 degrees we’d woken to at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. But it was damp, and the camp stove promptly grew a layer of hoarfrost and froze to the picnic table.

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Denali National Park and Preserve protects over six million acres (including over two million acres of federally designated wilderness) of boreal forest, tundra, and mountains in central Alaska. It also protects North America’s highest peak, an array of glaciers and braided streams cascading from the mountains, and an intact ecosystem enlivened by Alaska’s iconic large mammals.

The Park was established in 1917 as Mount McKinley National Park, largely to protect the astonishing herds of game, those large mammals, from over-hunting. Closest to the heart of hunter, amateur naturalist, and conservationist Charles Sheldon, who was instrumental in pushing for the Park, was the Dall Sheep, the only white wild sheep. Sheldon, a monied Easterner, was a member of Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell’s Boone and Crockett Club and secured the club’s support in helping guide the bill creating the Park through Congress in the eleven years it would take to win its passage.

Mount McKinley National Park was greatly expanded, and its name changed to Denali National Park (although the mountain’s name did not then change), in 1980 with the passage of the monumental Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which enacted the ultimate distribution of federal public lands in the state. With the passage of ANILCA and its signing into law by President Jimmy Carter in the waning days of his presidency, the Park was expanded from its original two million to its current over six million acres. Some 1.3 million of those acres are Denali National Preserve, where hunting is allowed. Most of the original Park became federal wilderness.

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