Alaska Day 3 - The Search for Mt. McKinley

On day 3 we got up and had breakfasts at the buffet in the what I like to call the village.  They had a lot of options and some great food.  The miners cheesy potatoes were delicious, I had to go back for seconds for those.

  After breakfast we all gathered to decided what we were going to do for the remainder of the day.  There are a lot of options, you can go golf, white water rafting, bus tours of McKinley, helicopter rides and much more.  While we were decided we were out front of the lodge and my grandma said she just wanted to see some wild life.  Just then my uncle points and says look there.  There were 2 moose crossing the street.  That was the only moose I saw on the entire trip.  Greg saw other while we were driving but he was the only one to see them.  So I say we only saw 2.

(The moose walking through town)

We decided to get in the van and go to the visitors center to check out bus times for the tour of McKinley.  We found out that the bus rides were long and did not provide food.  When you have a large group of people and everyone has different needs it's difficult to find something everyone can do.  We decided we would just take our own van and drive as far as we could into McKinley.

(Caribou in the middle of the picture)

(The crew out stretching and looking at the caribou)

Along our path we saw a caribou.  It was pretty far away so I didn't get the greatest picture but we saw one.  When we went as far as we could we parked for a while and took a hike on this beautiful trail.  I was hoping we would see more wild life, like a mountain sheep or something but all we saw were these marmots.  They were entertaining while my cousin was feeding one.  We hiked in pretty far and got to see a glacier.  I got some really great pictures along the way.  It was pretty cloudy out though and we never got to see the full height of Mt. McKinely.

(My uncle checking out the water, it was really gray we were guessing because of all the gray rock that was around)

 

(A marmot rolling around on the ground, eeww)

(The glacier)

(the view of the trail we just walked from the top)

(Jaron feeding the gross squirrel type animals)

(You can see some major clouds rolling in)

Jaron, Hunter and I decided to head back while Greg & Cade braved across the icy cold water to get to the glacier.  They walked on it and even drank some of the glacier water.

Just as everyone got back to the van it started to pour but while we were pulling out we saw some more caribou, so we got out in the rain to get some pictures.
When we got back to our hotel the raining had stopped for the moment and we each did our own thing for lunch.  Greg, Jaron, Hunter & I went to the Salmon Bake.  It was really good.  I had the buffalo burger.

After lunch we hung out around the hotel.  The rain started to pick up again and I took the opportunity to practice taking photos of rain.

For dinner we went to the dinner theatre at our hotel.  It was based on the first guys who explored Denali (Mt. McKinley).  It was actually a lot of fun and the food was great!  They had an all you can eat buffet of ribs and salmon.  I didn't get any pictures of the dinner theatre as they weren't allowed but like I said it was great!