2010 - July 11 (Day 26) Bus tour in Denali National Park

Today was another cold rainy one. The good news is that we took the 132 mile (round trip) bus tour into the park and we saw what the locals refer to as the "big five." We saw grizzly bear, moose, caribou, dall sheep, and wolf. And I've got the pictures to prove it, although a couple of them are from a pretty long way off. We caught the courtesy (free) shuttle to the Wilderness Access Center this morning at 6:50. At 7:30, we got on the tour bus and returned at 3:30pm.

When Dave Daugherty, a boyhood friend from Mattoon, IL who now lives in Florida, read in the blog that we were headed for Denali, he emailed me and said that Monte Carpenter is a tour bus driver in the park and that I should give him a call at the phone number Dave sent. THere are about 150 tour buses operated by the company who has the tour franchise in the park. Guess who our bus driver was. Yup, you guessed it!

I was in the middle of changing the oil in the car this evening and Jim and Bonnie, our friends from Minnesota drove up. They're camped at a commercial campground about eleven miles north of us, but they knew we were going to be camped at one of the three campgrounds in Denali, so they came looking for us. Last night they not only camped in the same campground where we camped two nights ago, they camped in exactly the same campsite! This is getting a little weird. We have a date for breakfast in the morning.

Tomorrow after breakfast, we're going to a sled dog demonstration and the Murie Science and Learning Center. After that, if it's not raining, we'll take a hike.