Smoke on the water and... well, in the sky, and my nose and lungs

I was hoping for an evening run and hiking Double Mountain tomorrow, but the former is definitely getting canceled and possibly the latter due to heavy smoke in the area. Apparently the wildfire that is the source of this smoke has really been growing with the week's hot weather. This afternoon the smoke has gotten really bad, so no evening run and hiking tomorrow might be a bad idea if visibility is too bad.

Hopefully I'll have some good pics from Savage River tomorrow and with any luck I will also have some good pictures from Double Mountain a peak to the south that I'm hoping to climb. We'll see how it goes!

Savage River and Mt. Margaret

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 adults 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!

Smokey would be pissed!

Well, I decided last night after a particular hazy run to not go into the park today. The weather is great, clear in the upper 70s, but the smoke from wildfires has kept the whole area in a pretty hazy state. Yesterday seemed to be better, but I went for a run around 7pm and the smoke had gotten worse (probably shouldn't have been running).

So instead I went for a short hike on a trail I had not been on and checked out the sled dogs that the Park Service keep. It was fun, but the temperature seemed too hot for the dogs even, as many of them were napping hard or panting like crazy. They are beautiful dogs. I may become a walker for them and take a dog for a walk at least 3 times a week. For how lean and sleek these dogs are they weigh upwards of 80 or 90 pounds. Needless to say this is due to the exceptional amount of muscle mass they maintain from towing sleds around the park and the fact that they like to eat the pea gravel around the site :)

On the way home I saw a few very curious wild hares. They came pretty close, which was fine until I noticed that the last one was armed with eyes that shot lasers. So I got the heck out of there. I stopped at a little coffee shop and did some writing that had been on my mind and drank 3 cups of delicious coffee. With any luck I'll be able to get onto the last whitewater rafting trip of the day. I'll keep my fingers crossed!

Hopefully next week the smoke from nearby wildfires (the rumor mill puts the number of wildfires at around 50!) will have cleared and the Park will provide some beautiful pics!

Long, hazy hike to surrounding peaks

Today after climbing to Mt. Healy in the early morning I hiked some of the peaks connected to it. The ridge hiking was great! Tiring, but great! I saw two Dall sheep, some weird marmot/raccoon looking creature (the colors looked wrong for a hoary marmot), and a ptarmigan (Rock Tarmigan to be exact, Lagopus mutus). The highlight of the day would have to be my taking a wrong turn coming back :P

I missed my line (BIG TIME) coming back and ended up hiking down 200 feet or so before getting my bearings and realizing where my mistake was made. Once I did figure it out, I spent a bit over an hour getting back on track. This hour was spent scrambling through some really sketchy rock fields. Way to go Dave!

Sorry the pictures in the post kind of stink. The weather is beautiful, clear, and warm, but a wildfire is sending some smoke into the area. Overall the hike was good! I did a lot of scrambling of big rocks and cool rocky peaks. I also found that the best trail is the one chosen by the Dall sheep. There were some really fun traversing routes they had covered along big rock formations that were sketchy and fun!

With any luck next Wednesday's post will feature some pics and words from a hike in the park itself, hopefully I won't be eaten by a bear :)

Happy 4th of July!

I don't know if it is the arrival of Independence Day or a wildfire nearby, but it has gotten really hazy hear lately. The weather is great; low to mid 70s, but maybe there is a temperature inversion or something occurring, because the haze seems to be getting thicker by the hour.

Tomorrow I am leaving early to hike some of the peaks connected to the saddle on the backside of Mt. Healy. With any luck, I will have some cool (hopefully non-hazy) photos and not get eaten by any wildlife :)

Tonight is doing chores after some bouldering I did after work. The pictures I posted are some I took monkeying around with the macro setting of my camera. I still have some fine-tuning to learn with it, but some of these shots are kind of cool.

Enjoy!

Sugar Loaf Hike and possibly the best day of the summer!

Well, today was a beautiful one! After getting up at 7am, I took a shuttle up to one of the other properties that Aramark runs up here. In its parking lot is a trail head to the top of Sugar Loaf, which is a little mountain in the Nenana River canyon. This one is on the east side of the Nenana River.

This hike also provided an opportunity to break in the new hiking boots. The trail itself was really steep in some sections (twice right at the beginning and right at the end, see the loose, steep photo to the left), but was overall pretty nice. The bug presence was only noticeable when in the trees and above the tree line there was a nice breeze that kept the bugs down and me cool. I didn't see the wildlife that I did on Mt. Healy, but it was a fun hike.

There were a couple of rock formations that I had seen from below that I checked out and may provide some rock climbing opportunities. It was a bit crumbly, but from some sides a person could scramble up and setting a top rope may be in order. We'll see, I need to find a climber up here with more gear than myself that doesn't mind hiking a bit :)

I spent a good amount of time exploring other ridges too. It was fun to meander and check stuff out, not sticking to a set path. One ridge had these interesting rock formations that looked like fence posts. One 'fence post' had an old weathered set of Buddhist prayer flags set on them. I also found a lot of evidence of Dall sheep, but didn't run into any today, which was probably due to my later start time (~9:40am) than on Healy earlier in the week. Lots of ground squirrels on this side, from about one quarter of the way up to the very top, ground squirrels had burrowed all over around this trail.

The summit provided a killer view of the surrounding mountains. I think that I could see Denali (the big one), but scattered clouds made getting a photo of it difficult. I did get some cool panoramic images up there. I'm still learning how to use that feature of my camera, but the one of Mt. Healy turned out pretty cool!

Climbing down I stuck to the ridge the whole time, which offered a lot of cool scrambling opportunities. The rocks and soil up here are really cool! A bunch of the rock up here had this iridescent quality to them that made them glow. I'm not sure how well the photos capture it. I'm still learning some of the finer points of outdoor photography and my camera. It has been difficult to photograph distant mountains through hazy scattered clouds. Whether this difficulty is a product of the camera's limited zoom capabilities or my lack of skill at tailoring for a given set of conditions, or (more likely) a combination of the two, I'm not sure.

I'm working on scouting and doing my first day hike in the National Park. I am hoping to do a 6-10 hour day hike in the Polychrome Mountain area of the park. If anybody is familiar with this area (cough, cough Uncle Gordon) and has any suggestions I would love to hear them. Right now I am working out of this guide that I got used on Amazon.

http://www.denaliguidebook.com/

So far the book has been pretty great. I will be using this and a Trails Illustrated map of the park to work out all the backcountry hiking I do. It sounds like wildlife is abundant in the park. It should be fun and with any luck I will have more exciting photos, real trials of life type stuff, to share with you all.

Until then, L'chaim!

Bouldering on the Mt. Healy Overlook Trail

Well the day started out beautiful and with about 45 minutes of work left it looked like we were in for some rain. It looked like everywhere around us was getting a bit, which unfortunately dashed my hopes of doing a little bouldering at the rock I had seen on the Mt. Healy Overlook Trail. However, after dinner and checking out some shoe protectant at the gear store near work the weather had improved too much. I had to at least try to get some climbing done!
On the trail out I saw a family of spruce grouse (Dendragapus canadenis). There were about 7 young birds and an adult. The adult would fan out its tail feathers whenever this little tree squirrel would come over near them. It was pretty cool, because the squirrel's presence allowed me to get pretty close to check them out.

I headed out around 8:45pm and got to the rock around 9:30pm. I climbed for around an hour and between knocking the dust off of my skills I also knocked a good bit of dust and dirt off of the rock. The rock wasn’t the cleanest, but it was awesome getting to work and roughing up the hands a little bit. The rock was really slopey with many jagged little edges to the most positive handholds. The best part was that the rock topped out to a smooth, flat top. No handholds, mostly had to trust the feet and balance as well as possible.
Another thing happened tonight, the mosquitoes amassed their forces and mounted their attack. They were out pretty thick. This was definitely the first time since I have been out here that I really needed bug spray. Of course, I forgot the stuff at my room, so I did a lot of slapping and swatting.
Overall it was a good night. It was good getting a little climbing done and I saw two cool things; the grouse family and a collection of bones from something killed a while back. One thing about tonight can be assured, the wild flowers next year up at that rock will grow strong and tall from soil fertilized with the corpses of a million dead mosquitoes!

L'chaim!