Tuesday 30th

Today we headed out the Denali Park road into the wilderness to Stoney Hill at the Mile 60 marker, this is how they describe locations within the park (mile markers). The weather again was perfect, clear blue sky's. The tour is conducted using converted school buses, we where worried about the seating but that had been replaced by a little more comfortable seats but not by much. The tour goes for approximately 7 1/2 hours.

The object of today was to see at least one each of the bid 4, Moose, Dall Goat, Caribou and Grissley Bear. On the outward leg we saw Moose, Dall Goats and Caribou.

The landscape was a lot more barren than what we imagined, with treeless ridges and brown landscape. One thing we learnt was tha caribou and reindeer shed their antlers each year so the ones you see on this caribou where grown this year.

We passed over a few rivers but they all had very little water in them.

There where some sections where the leaves on the trees had begun to turn which added some colour to the landscape.

As we ventured out we got some incredible views of Mt Denali from the opposite side to what we say the previous day's at Mt McKinlay Wilderness Lodge.

We also passed the highest ridge along the road, the roads are fairly narrow and there where some sections at Polychrome Pass where we had to pull over into a turnout to let other buses pass in the opposite direction. There must have been in excess of 30 buses out there today.

The highlight of the day was seeing a Grizzly Bear on our way back, we began to think we would not see one.

We also saw this cheeky squirrel just standing on the side of the road.

We did see s few more Caribou on the way back.

Tonight we went on a tour to the Husky Homestead which is owned by four times Iditarod winner Jeff King, the Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race is a yearly race over 1049 miles from Anchorage to Nome in Alaska.

Jeff gave a talk and then a demonstration on how they commence training the dogs in the summer before the winter snow begins to fall in late September. They substitute a quad bike foe a sled.

Jeff has also developed a treadmill to exercise the dogs. When we arrived we got to hold some 5 week old Alaskan Husky pups, as Jeff explained this is good trading for the pups to get to know human contact, to watch these dogs they just love to run.

The modified treadmill.

This is a racing sled and the gear they wear to keep out the cold at night.