May 29-30 - Hiking trails near us and flightseeing to Denali

WOW!! We packed a lot into our first 2 days off!!  There are 2 awesome hiking trails within walking distance (LOL) of where we live - Oxbow and Triple Lakes. Denali Park Village (where we work) is directly across the Nenana River from Denali National Park. So getting to some good trails is easy.  First, Susan and I did Oxbow Trail. The Nenana River forms the eastern boundary of Denali NP and has created this long curving oxbow.  

This is a very flat trail; the most dangerous part was walking across the bridge over the Nenana as trucks and cars whiz by at 60+ MPH!  The trail is ~ 2 miles and has great views of the Nenana River.  

 

This is what it looks like on All Trails.

 

This trail is technically still under construction by NPS; i.e., it's not open. But everyone knows about it so they'll hike over there. NPS has completed this overlook.  Well done!

 The view from the overlook.  

As we continued hiking, I felt so sorry for this tree...covered in burls.  What an irritation this black spruce is trying to deal with.  

And we found a furry little red squirrel, working already on his winter cache.

In the afternoon, we hiked Triple Lakes Trail with some new friends, Kurt (on the left who works with Susan) and Jan (on the right that we met on the shuttle down from Fairbanks).  Triple Lakes Trail is a 9.5 mile one way trail from Denali Park Village to the Visitor Center in the park.  However, we did only 2 of the 3 lakes - 4.5 miles round trip.  A leisurely 3 hour hike that included lunch by Lake 2 (seriously, that's the name!  No imagination whatsoever!!)  That's the Nenana River and some mountains of the Alaska Range in the background.

And found several of these beautiful Prairie Pasqueflower (never seen these before). 

The next day we explored around our old stomping grounds - Princess Wilderness Lodge where we worked in 2018.  Really good pizza at Lynx Creek Pizza, just like we remembered.  

We had been scheduled to fly a flightseeing tour with Denali Air in the morning, but got bumped.  Not a surprise...it happens all the time...it's just disappointing.  However, in the afternoon, they called and said they had room for one person.  So we decided I should go (or at least that's the way I remember it 😄).

Amazingly, Denali (the highest point in North America at 20,310') has incredible vertical rise.  We took off from the airstrip at 2000' above sea level and climbed to over 15,000' to get a look at "the high one."  (Denali is the native Athabascan word for the high one.)  

This was our first look at Denali, out the front windscreen.

This mountain is massive.  In terms of prominence, Denali is the tallest mountain in the world.  Wait...what?!?!  The base of Denali is at 2,000' and it rises to 20.000', an 18,000' rise.  Mt. Everest, which is without a doubt the tallest mountain in the world, has it's base at 17,000' and rises to 29,000', a 12,000' rise.  (Some claim Mauna Loa is the tallest from base to mountain top, but much of that is under water.)  

The north peak of Denali (at the time called Mt. McKinley) was the first climbed in 1910, but that is the lower of the 2 peaks (19,470').  The south peak was finally conquered in 1913. And the Muldrow Glacier (below) comes off Denali for 39 miles!  NPS considers Muldrow a surging glacier because it is growing in length at a rapid pace.  The rest of the 40+ named glaciers are receding due to climate change.

Back on the ground, a handshake with Pilot Matt. Susan is up next!