HIKES

Skipping some of the more mundane days, we hiked to Horseshoe Lake. There we got an up close and personal look at the beaver dams and the beaver lodge. We didn't get to see the beaver though. In that same area we saw lots of burls. Notice the one in the picture that has a lot of them up its trunk. The pine cones are really small here. That's my little finger in the photo next to one.

Each night in the campground amphitheater a ranger would provide a talk/discussion on various topics. Some rangers are better than others at presentation, but they were all informative and we learned something at each one. At the Visitor Center, there were a few ranger led hikes. We took the one that circled around to the original park entrance where a fellow named Marino had a roadhouse and brothel in the early days. She was into flowers and gave the people in the group a different picture of a flower to identify during the walk. As they were found, she would stop and discuss the flower and how it is important to the park. An interesting one was the dwarf dogwood you can see in the picture. Since we had lived in North Carolina we had seen lots of dogwoods. These plants were only a few inches high and the bloom wasn't more than 1" across...but did resemble dogwood blossom.

The campground was pretty nice, and affordable at $10 a night with Eloise's Golden Age card. None of the sites have any hook-ups of course. We were told by somebody before we arrived that there were plenty of empty sites, so no need to make reservations. When we went to check in at about noon, all sites were gone. Because of the RV parks outside of the park, we had to drive quite a ways to get past the pull-outs that didn't say "no overnight parking".

We now leave Denali, and on our way south on highway 3 we stopped to take a last picture of Mt McKinley. You still can't see all of the mountain's 20,320 feet, but it's as good as we got!

GARY SEZ: I may have said before that we didn't come to Alaska to save money, but golly gee I almost feel violated. $8.50 bought two one scoop ice cream cones outside the gates. Inside the gate, at the small mercantile store, they sold us a loaf of bread for $5.99. We bought a bottle of water up at the visitor center for $2. Then later I paid $4.79 for a HALF gallon of milk. This park is on a major corridor between the two largest cities in Alaska. Shipping costs should be more than normal, but that can't be the sole reason for the prices. It seems to me that the concession is out of control! Aramark is the concessionaire, and they have a strangle hold on everything here. They run the shuttles, the stores and the outlets, and run the excursion buses operating out of the wilderness access center. I'm all for out-sourcing where another can do a better job, but somebody needs to pay attention to what's going on in our really precious National Park!!