The awesome beauty of Alaska along with its vastness is hard to convey. There are few roads once you get out of Fairbanks and Anchorage, which is why there are so many pilots. We covered only a small area:
From the National Park Service:
Denali is six million acres of wild land, bisected by one ribbon of road. Travelers along it see the relatively low-elevation taiga forest give way to high alpine tundra and snowy mountains, culminating in North America's tallest peak, 20,310' Denali. Wild animals large and small roam unfenced lands, living as they have for ages. Solitude, tranquility and wilderness await.
What do they mean by wild animals? They mean grizzly bear, moose, caribou, Dall sheep (bighorn relative) and wolves, along with fox, lynx, pica, ground squirrels and snowshoe hare. We saw them all except wolves, a rare sighting in summer, and lynx (who make it their business not to be seen).
It takes a while to get to Denali from the east coast, and it’s not like other parks in that it’s set up for preservation (but as our indigenous lecturer noted, preserved for whom, protected from what? To a large extent, protected from us.)
Even the name controversy invokes awareness of privilege:
“Mount McKinley National Park” officially prevailed after its legislation was signed into law on February 26, 1917.
Despite the official decision to use “Mount McKinley” as the name of the peak and the national park, the debate did not die. It proved difficult to supplant words and meanings that endured for generations among Athabaskan groups living in close proximity to the mountain. Athabaskan words for the mountain translate to “the tall one” or “mountain-big” (perhaps Riggs did not know the Native words were descriptive). “McKinley” was incompatible with the Athabaskan worldview because they rarely name places after people.
The Athabaskans and other tribes have been living in the area for, oh, I dunno, 10,000 years and had opinions of their own (my guided group had input from Athabaskan natives.) The experience was like no other I’ve had, but it did put the PBS cartoon Molly of Denali in perspective.
See, Alaska is melting. The sea ice is gone and the glaciers are receding. The following short video was taken from Kenai Fjords, also part of the trip, with a view of a tidewater glacier from the water. It’s the normal calving (breaking off of pieces) you see in summer:
A dramatic example is the Exit Glacier in Kenai, which has signposts on the trail marked by year showing how far the glacier has receded.
Check out the 2005 pic from ADN:
When you’ve lived off the land and see it changed like this, the effect is profound. More subtly, early summer means early nesting, flowers blooming out of sync before animal life adjusts and putting all of that at risk of snap freezes that can disrupt eggs and feeding habits. The week before we arrived, Anchorage hit 92, which is an anomaly for now but a portent of what is to come. By the way, contrast that with the minus 60 F that will routinely occur in Denali in mid-winter, and you can appreciate the stress put on all the life forms there.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m the only one who has ever been here, I’m late to the game (though i saw receding glaciers in Iceland as well). But seeing it with your own eyes is something else entirely and brings home why climate change is such an important issue.
So, consider this a combo of personal climate change awareness, respect for indigenous people, a shout out to the Parks Service, and an amazing vacation in an awesome and vast wilderness setting (with a stop in Wasilla) by land and by sea.
It’s good to be home and apply what I learned there to what I see here. I hope I can convey the same to you.
Cheers.