OK, so you are wondering what happened to Sunday, June 8^TH... Or, maybe you are not wondering, but I'll tell you anyway. We had a little picnic. Just something for the staff and friends of Wolf Song of Alaska. It was quite a lot of fun. However, it meant that Jeanette and I did not go out anywhere except a quick trip down to Thunderbird Falls. Um, and some leftover ice cream for Sidra ;-)

The falls are really cool, but we did not go the regular way, we went down this little known private path which is really steep and slippery in places. I managed to go way out on this rock and overlook the falls. You can really see the changes in season here. I was just out at the falls in January. It looked very different then...

Alaska, at least in South Central Alaska, is quite lush and green in late spring & summer. More precipitation falls as rain in the summer and of course it is light all day and night so the plants grow like crazy.

In this last Thunderbird Falls photo I had fun with a long exposure. Although it was getting dark with overcast skies, I set the ISO to 50 and at f22 the exposure was 1 sec. I had been hiking with my tripod so stability was no problem. It made for a ghostly photo ;-)

Finally, June 9th and we are off to Denali National Park and Preserve. Or is it Mt. McKinley Park? There is a bit of a story there. The mountain for which the park is named, has several names, but the two most used names these days are Denali and Mt. McKinley. Denali is the Athabaskan name for the mountain. The Athabaskan Indians were the ones who hunted and migrated through the area for thousands of years and Denali means The High One or The Great One. It was a sacred mountain to these people and it was avoided for the most part. However, when miners began exploring the area for gold back in the early 1900's as the story goes, there was an argument weather the US currency should be the silver or the gold standard. Senator McKinley, who was a candidate for the presidency, was an advocate for the gold standard. The mountain was named in his honor. Well, McKinley never did visit the mountain, or Alaska for that matter, so naming the park and the mountain after this president later became somewhat controversial. However, you know how names stick, so the federal government, which is the governing body of the US National Park System, calls the mountain Mt. McKinley and the park, Denali National Park. However, some years ago, the State of Alaska changed the name of the mountain to Denali and calls the park McKinley Park. Confused yet?

Well, regardless of what this place is called, we drove up from the South and of course it was cloudy so we could not see the mountain. Well, not to worry, we got into the park at 4:00 PM and visitation was light enough that the 6:00 PM Polychrome bus still had room. It actually had plenty of room. It was nearly empty. Visitation to Alaska is way down and you could tell -- many of the buses were near empty. Bad for the park, but nice for those who like a lot of room on the bus. The green buses are basically designed to transport people into the park. The road is about 100 miles long, but you can only drive your car in the first 14 miles. The rest requires special permits which are not easy to get. This really helps keep traffic to a minimum, keeps people out of trouble, keeps traffic down which is nice.

The buses also stop at all wildlife sightings. They will even stop the bus if you want to just take a picture. The windows open so there is a nice clear shot. It is a great system. You can even get off the bus and take the next one. The only problem there is that they won't let you off until you are a mile away from a wolf or a bear -- this helps minimize human / animal problems, but would be really bad for a photographer hoping to get a shot...

We never saw any wolves. However, we did see several other animals including Grizzly bears, lots of caribou and dalls sheep. There are also red foxes, coyotes, wolves, lynx, wolverines, moose, beavers, Arctic hares, Arctic ground squirrels and the like in the park, but outside the bears, we did not see any other predators. We did get to see the mountain too - it was about 70 miles from us, but it was just barely visible through the haze and clouds. We heard that there were big fires over in Siberia and the smoke had meandered over to Alaska. It was hazy so that is as good an excuse as any for all the polluted looking air up here.

Polychrome is so named for the many colored mountains. Much of Denali is a desert, or close to it. From Taiga, to Tundra, there is only an average of 15 inches of water a year, much of which falls as rain in the summer. They get relatively little snow, but of course it is so cold that what they get never melts so it seems snowy in the winter.

The bus ride to Polychrome and back was about 5½ hours. It was pretty productive too. We saw Caribou, Bears, dalls sheep and lots of mountains. I had my 500mm f4 lens with me, and a doubler which really helped in taking photos out those bus windows.

We got back to the Visitor Center at 11:30 PM or so, which was about 45 minutes before sunset in these parts, but it was overcast and gloomy so we headed off to our hotel room and pretty much crashed...