Yesterday I spent the day hiking the Savage River from Denali Park road (at milepost 15) to about two miles downstream. At the road the river was very braided and on the gravel bars there were many baby ptarmigan and seagulls. They were packed real tight, large families on the bars, and many babies and adul
ts on the trails near the river bank. I figured this would lead
to many predators in the area, but according to the bus driver and the park ranger at the Savage River station they have all gone to higher ground to get out of the heat.This has been the big story of the past week or so. The temperature has been really high for this area. It has been in the low 80s lately. A guy I met on the east side of the Savage River trail who had lived in Alaska for over 20 years (and has spent a lot of time in Denali National Park) says this is the hottest he has ever seen it.
After hiking down the Savage River for a couple of miles I turned back to go climb Mt. Margaret before heading out for the day. Unfortunately part way up Mt. Marget my camera's battery died. For this reason, there aren't many pics up high, but this gives me a reason to climb it again. I did see three Dall sheep up near the top and on the ridge line. Besides the sheep, ptarmigan, and baby gulls, I saw some hoary marmots, many types of birds (lots of camp robbers), and a cool little pika that would have been cool to get a picture of.
The scenery along the river was nice. Lots of interesting rock formations. Hopefully some can be climbed with a top rope set. We'll see!
I got back in time for dinner and had a pretty good night all in all!
I demand higher resolution pictures. I want to use these for desktop backgrounds but they aren't big enough. Bigger Dave, BIGGER!
ReplyDeleteYou're being sarcastic right?
ReplyDeleteI feel like these are too huge, but I want big resolution for myself and am far too lazy to save lower resolution for the blog. So what you see is what you get!
Sarcastic? Me?
ReplyDeleteActually I'm not, I need at least 1920x1200 pictures, these are 1600x1200. The bigger the better. My camera at its max quality takes pictures at about 3250x2450 for example. You can always scale them down if you want, but scaling up low resolution pictures never looks good.
I'll make them larger. I upped the quality a while back (from fine to superfine aka vague to supervague), but didn't notice the difference much. Maybe taking larger sized images at superfine will help it out.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of camera do you have?
ReplyDeleteI have a Canon Powershot SD900 and I turned the setting down due to the fact that bandwidth here stinks and it takes a couple of minutes (literally) to upload a 1-3 MB file. I have it larger for some of these and some I have not uploaded, but typically try to lower the size for uploads to the site.
ReplyDelete