Denali National Park: Riley Creek, Alaska - August 2nd to 3rd, 2022
This is the first of three posts on our stay inside Denali National Park. It covers our first two nights in the park when we camped in Riley Creek Campground near the park entrance.
On Tuesday, we drove from Fairbanks to Denali National Park. It is about a two hour drive. It was rather cloudy and foggy during our drive, so we didn’t have much of a view. We stopped in Healy to top off our gas tank, because we would be spending the next eleven nights inside the park.
We checked in at the Riley Creek Mercantile. Our reservations were for two nights in Riley Creek Campground, three nights in Teklanika River Campground (a.k.a. Tek), back at Riley Creek for two nights, then three nights in Savage River Campground, and finally one more night in Riley Creek. Why all the moving around? Well, Riley Creek is where the amenities are, dump station, potable water fill, showers, and laundry. Three nights is our comfortable limit before having to dump and fill water. Plus, moving more often will keep our lithium batteries charged.
There is only one road in the park. It is 92 miles long. However, in 2021, the Pretty Rocks Landslide took out 100 yards of the road at mile 45, so the road is closed starting at mile 43. It is expected to remain closed through 2023 and longer as they build a bridge over the landslide. Normally, the general public can only drive out to Savage River, at mile 15. If you have a campground reservation at Teklanika River Campground at mile 29, then you can drive your vehicle to Tek on your arrival date and drive your vehicle back out on your departure date. You are expected to leave your vehicle at the campground on the days in-between. There is a three night minimum stay at Tek.
The only way to go past mile 29 is on a shuttle or tour bus. The Tundra Wilderness Tour bus has a bus driver that is a naturalist who narrates the tour. The park shuttle bus is not narrated. When staying at Teklanika River Campground, you can purchase what is called a Tek Pass. This allows you to hop on and off the East Fork Transit bus, as space allows. On the first day of your Tek Pass, you have a reserved seat on the transit bus at a specified time.
Both Riley Creek Campground and Savage River Campground have two types of sites, A and B. Sites A are for campers between 30 and 40 feet in length while B sites are for campers less than 30 feet. The two types of sites are mixed among each other. You are not assigned a site. Instead, you drive around and pick out an open site of your type and hang your tag on the post to claim it. Check out and check in time is 11 am, so if you want to have your pick of open sites, arrive close to 11 am. We were there around noon and had plenty of sites to choose from.
After checking in, picking out our site and eating lunch, we hopped on the Riley Creek Shuttle bus over to the Denali Visitor Center. There are three free shuttle buses within the park, the Riley Creek Shuttle bus, the Savage River Shuttle bus, and the Dog Demo Shuttle bus.
We were hoping we could sign up for a Discovery Hike the following day. You have to sign up in person at the visitor center one or two days before. When we got there, the next two days were already booked full. We’ll have to wait until we get back from our stay at Teklanika River Campground to see if we can get a reservation for later. Reservations open at 8 am forty eight hours in advance. The Discovery Hike is a ranger led all day hike not on marked trails. The hike itself is free, but you pay $60 per person for the bus ride to get to the start of the hike. It varies where they decide to start the hike from.
The best whether conditions for our stay in Denali looked like the following two days, Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday is when we drive out to the Tek Campground and take our East Fork Transit bus ride in the afternoon. Since we couldn’t get a spot on a Discovery Hike for Wednesday, we wanted to see if there was a Tundra Wilderness Tour available. But those reservations need to be made either at the Bus Depot or back at the Riley Creek Mercantile. So we hopped back on the Riley Creek Shuttle back to the Riley Creek Mercantile.
We were in luck. There was an opening on the 1:40 pm tour, but it leaves from the Denali Bluffs Hotel outside the park. That means we’ll have to pack up our Red Tail Lodge and drive there instead of walking or riding a shuttle bus. But it’s only about a ten minute drive. We’ll take it!
Now that we had our plans for the next couple of days set, we hit the showers. We had not had a shower in over a week. The showers took tokens, $4.50 for 10 minutes. However, we forgot to ask how long the water would last per token. We are used to most coin/token showers to last anywhere from 4 to 6 minutes, never 10 minutes. So we both rushed through our showers to make sure we had time to rinse all the soap and shampoo off before the water turned off. Then it seemed like the shower lasted forever. Ann even gave up and turned the shower off manually before her time was up.
After dinner, we took a little walk. The McKinley Station Trail ran right by the campground. We followed it down to Riley Creek, where the Triple Lakes Trail branched off, crossing the creek over a bridge. It was a nice little peaceful stroll through the woods.
Since we had leftovers for dinner and didn’t really cook, Ann decided to cook up our meal for Wednesday night. It would be close to 7:30 pm before we returned from the Tundra Wilderness Tour, so being able to just reheat dinner in the microwave sounded better than trying to cook something that late in the day.
Our bus tour was not until Wednesday afternoon, so we decided to catch the 10 am sled dog demonstration in the morning. There is no public parking at the dog kennels. You must either take a shuttle bus from the visitor center or walk over. It is about 1.5 miles from the visitor center to the dog kennels. During peak season, there are three demonstrations per day. The buses depart the visitor center about 40 minutes ahead of the demo time. The kennels open up about 30 minutes before the demo, allowing people to walk through the dog yard and see the animals.
We drove our Red Tail Lodge (our camper van) over to the visitor center in plenty of time to get on the first bus. They had four dog demo buses on Wednesday morning the day we were there. Being on the first bus allowed us the full half an hour to see the dogs. You could reach over the ropes and pet some of them.
The demo consisted of harnessing five dogs up to a wheeled cart and having them pull it once around a track. As soon as the rangers entered the yard to get the five dogs, they all knew what was coming and got all excited. When they harnessed up the dogs, they looked like they could hardly contain themselves and obviously wanted to run.
One of the rangers explained the history of the dog kennel in the park, what type of work the canine rangers do in the park, and what the different roles of the dog team were. It was pretty interesting. This year was the kennel’s 100 year anniversary. The litter of pups this year were named after the original dogs from 100 years ago.
After returning to the visitor center on the shuttle bus, we drove over to the Riley Creek Day Use Area to have an early lunch. There are a couple of picnic shelters there. However, we discovered that if you follow the path down to Riley Creek, there is one picnic table along the bank with nicer views.
We headed up to the Denali Bluffs Hotel early. After checking in at the front desk to make sure we had the right location and verified our van was parked in an appropriate place, we bought a couple of drinks from the hotel cafe and sat on the back porch of the hotel to enjoy the view.
Our tour bus was mostly filled with a single tour group. There were only five of us on the bus who were not a part of the tour group. We believe the group was staying at the hotel. That explains why we needed to pick up the bus at the hotel. We were probably filling the spots of a few of cancellations.
The bus tour lasted about five and a half hours. Our bus driver provided us with all kinds of wonderful information about the history of the park, the plants and animals, and the geology of the area. One of the neat features was monitors that flipped down from overhead every few seats. Our driver had a pretty good zoom camera that she could feed into the monitors. This was very helpful when we stopped for an animal sighting. She would zoom in and out to help us figure out where to look for the animal.
Once we got passed Savage River, past the end of the pavement, we started to see some wildlife. Most of what we saw were caribou. A couple of them were right on the road and one walked right beside us. Other critters we saw were arctic ground squirrels and a golden eagle. Our driver spotted a few Dall sheep way off in the distance that were really hard to tell they were even sheep. The arctic ground squirrels look a lot like prairie dogs. However, the arctic ground squirrel hibernates eight months out of the year. They are able to allow their body temperatures to drop down to 27 degrees. By spring they have lost a lot of weight and some brain connections. However, by the end of summer, they put the weight back on and repair their brains.
Even though it was pretty clear weather, we did not get any glimpses of Mount Denali. We couldn’t even tell where we were supposed to see it. There were clouds off in the distance that obstructed our view. But, overall, we were very pleased with our tour. The scenery gets better the further we got from the park entrance. We could only imagine how spectacular the closed half of the park road must be.
The first two days inside Denali National Park were full of adventure. We were excited to see what the next nine days would have in store for us.
Check out our related video: Denali National Park: Riley Creek, Alaska
(Ann)