Polychrome Mountains day hike

Hey everybody! Sorry it has been a while since I last posted an update. My last couple of days off have been occupied by happenings not in the spirit of the blog (bank robberies mostly) and prevented me from getting out into the park (getaways take time). This past Tuesday I did make it into Fairbanks though. I got to hangout with my cousin Kevin and his wife Jessica. We had a good time catching up on all that has occurred in the past few years.
Today I made it out to the Polychrome Mountains. The Polychrome Mountains are about 45 miles into the park and require taking a Park shuttle bus, which is good and bad. Buses are good because the Park Service controlling access to the park has *supposedly* been very good for wildlife, but buses are bad because of the length of time it takes to get to a location. I got on the bus at 9:30am and didn't get to milepost 45 until 12:00pm. The nice thing about riding the bus is that you have someone driving who is knowledgeable of the park. This leaves you free to check out wildlife, which we saw a lot of today. On the ride out we saw a black bear, two grizzly cubs, a grizzly sow, a caribou, several ptarmigan, a northern harrier, and many snowshoe hare. The grizzly cubs were wrestling the whole time up on the side of a hill. It was pretty funny. Their mom didn't seem to care.

After getting off the bus at the Polychrome Overlook, I hiked about 3 hours on a gravel bed and ridge line heading up to some of the glaciers in the Polychrome Mountains. Unfortunately, the wind was howling today. At about 4500-5000 feet, I was near the level of the clouds and was nearly getting knocked off of my feet by the wind. Down in the canyon there were caribou. Taking this picture was fun, because the closer you get to the cliff the windier it gets. See the picture to the right.

I decided to find a comfortable spot (comfortable being an indentation in the tundra that blocked the wind a bit) to hang out at while eating lunch. Right after doing this I was greeted by three caribou that were walking along the ridgeline. They descended along one side of the ridgeline while I descended the other side. It was on this other side that I found a Dall Ram horn. I took some photos of it in Macro mode of my camera that can be seen on the right.
I also found an erratic (a large boulder displaced by a glacier) deposited by the glacier that carved the mountains and gravel river bed that I was hiking along. The boulder looked clean, at least enough to be climbable without too much junk being kicked onto a belayer. I may have to come out later and check this out.

One of the really neat things about this hike was the silt carried down by snow and ice melt. The silt is very smooth and silky, and it also has some very interesting designs in it as the amount of water coming out of the mountains decreases. I had a hard time getting detailed shots of these designs, but at the end of the hike I found some very cool tracks (maybe Lynx?) in the silt.

It was a good day for a hike. Some light rain, some heavy winds, and beautiful scenery pretty much all day. Denali even made a showing, though clouds obscured it’s summit most of the day.