I began making an intentional effort to go to sleep earlier because my tired feeling kept growing, so I made a time investment in more slumber. Occasionally I would get very drowsy on the motorcycle and even nod off. I always fought it by grunting, breathing deep, and concentrating sleepy-style, but it almost always ended with me nodding off. Survival instincts overrode hedonism and poor driving practices; a quart of adrenaline would spurt out when I realized what I was doing. Survival instincts and rolling off cliffs did not jive together. Good. I got the most painful fire hydrant supply of adrenaline this day when something in me realized that I was drifting into the lane of an opposing eighteen wheeler.
The motorcycle itself actually vibrated me to sleep. Not lulled, but vibrated. I seemed to be followed by the Vibration Monster. My body had been numbed at times by the four cylinder Suzuki buzz. That was to be expected. But even the lounge table on the ferry four days later was vibrating from the ship’s huge engines and propellers. Unexpected, but I was getting generally accustomed to it all. Maybe there was a spot on a mountain in Colorado that did not vibrate. It probably had earthquakes, though.
Having not yet decided on our plan of attack, Dad and I talked around in circles about what to do and where to go. We finally decided to not decide, and instead to let it flow; we’d decide when we got to wherever. Though somewhat inconvenient, Denali had a respectable set of strict rules designed to limit traffic and therefore prevent migration of wary wildlife away from the roads.
A park bus made scheduled runs into and out of the park, all originating from the entrance at Riley Creek. Starting the very next day, runs would have gone through the whole length of the solitary park road. But that day the busses only wound half-length to Toklat. No problem with us since we would not have had time to go much further. It’s a slow bus on a slow road. And we were required to clear out of our campsite, which posed a timing problem.
A ranger told us that we could park at an overlook and ride the bus from there. We waited for the bus. Then the bus came and the driver told us that we could not park there. Goodbye. We drove back to the only available parking spots, at Riley Creek. Again inconvenient, but I actually wished that more parks were as restrictive so as to preserve the relative purity of the landscape.
Denali was graced with another non-touristy feature: no hiking trails. Hiking and backpacking was allowed throughout the park via a restricted number of permits, except in wildlife sensitive areas where young were being raised or where there were known grizzly bears. But hikers made their own trail wherever a map, topography, and vegetation allowed. That’s the way I liked it, though I had never actually done true long range bush whacking by that point. The beauty and wildlife ranked this as a prime returning spot for backpacking and backcountry camping. Years later, my brother and I did just that and had many more stories to tell from the experience.
We picked up tickets for the 10:30 bus, and piled on with a group of tourists stringing binoculars and Instamatics around their necks. Manmade albatrosses, I supposed. Aubrey, our driver and P.A. guide, immediately assaulted us with his personality. Brown pants, brown denim jacket, brown cowboy hat, and brown cowboy boots. All very monochromatic dark brown. He demonstrated his friendliness in a few sentences, his humor in a few jokes, and his stern insistence on following The Rules in more than a few sentences, all drawn out and solemn for effect so that they would sink into our thick heads. He finished his introduction with a loud attempt at getting us excited again to lighten the atmosphere.
Though he began as an overbearing elementary school teacher, and he had more jokes that had obviously been exhaled many times before, he turned out to be well-intentioned about his job and responsibilities. Although very serious about the whole deal, Aubrey turned out to be a good guy. He always stopped for wildlife when someone yelled the rule-phrase that he liked for its simplicity: “Stop, Aubrey!” And he wanted everyone to enjoy themselves. Smoking a cigarette with his knee bent and boot on the bus at an overlook, he told us the obligatory personal bear story. Little did I know that years later I would have my own grizzly story there, when I would be head-on charged to within just a few feet by a huge grizzly going after me and my aromatic pot of chicken noodle soup.
The paved road changed to a dirt and gravel road winding around and over the perimeter of Denali’s mountains and passes. The open bushy permafrost, scattered with trees and rocky creeks, gave fine viewing for large wildlife. The lower elevation and occasional trees separated it from what elsewhere was officially called tundra, though there were shared characteristics in this ecosystem.
The wildlife did not trip into our laps, and they were still hidden well, lying low in bushes or standing in groves of trees. But the number of roving eyes onboard “The Battlestar” provided for many “Stop, Aubrey!” opportunities. “The Battlestar” was Aubrey’s nickname for the amphibious looking, military angled bus.
That morning I told Dad how I had always wanted to see a grizzly bear in the wild. There were supposedly good chances of seeing them in Sable Pass, so my original suggestion of getting off the bus early to hike along the Teklanika River took a prominent place in our minds. However, the suggestion eventually passed completely out of our minds because of the variety and number of wildlife sightings we were experiencing from the road.
I wanted to see grizzlies. I saw ten: a sow and three cubs, a sow and two cubs, a sow and one cub, and a boar. One sow was protecting a moose it killed two days earlier and had buried for between-meals keeping. We saw more herds of caribou, with each separated as either male or female groups, and even saw likely the same herd we had seen the night before by the river. Dall sheep looked like small patches of snow until they moved across the slopes on dental floss thin legs; they became clearer, dotting the mountains. I hoped the fellow passengers with clicking Instamatics enjoyed dots; they would be lucky if the Dall sheep were allotted one grain of film. But then other sheep came down and even surrounded The Battlestar. Several moose and a golden eagle rounded out the collection.
Grizzly sow and cubs (lower right corner) in vast Denali
Dall sheep in Denali
Later giddying up to get going, we mounted our steeds after making the return trip from Toklat. We headed south for Anchorage. I nodded off here and there, and eventually had to stop because the constant wind dried my eyes out to the point that I couldn’t open one of them again. Monocular, flat, no depth perception driving wasn’t advisable.
Reinvigorated after the stop, I took notice of the effects from the low northern sun. The forested hills and cloud-islands sky were in pastel yet intensely lit blues, greens, yellows, browns, and light reds, all separated with little continuum between them.
Passing from that vista into the outskirts of Anchorage was a back-home reminder. A stinking industrial fog hovered over the road as our welcome arch, and the buildings and businesses quickly multiplied. No family outposts there, only McDonalds. The Alaskan form of hurry was in the air and evident in the running streams of vehicles.
Searching the entire town for a room, and finding “No Vacancy” everywhere for some mysterious reason, we kept heading south late into the evening. Our goal for the next day had been the Kenai Peninsula; we got there a day early.
The late night trip was worth the effort: rounded mountains rose directly out of the water’s edge. Dense, dark clouds loomed as one huge mass above. Foggy gray covered the peaks, hiding whatever was back in the spaces between mountains. Ending the evening as the only tenants at the Scottish Inn of Bird Creek, we had a road trip dinner of chips, candy bar, and soda, topped off with sleep for dessert.