July 9 - Denali set to reopen tomorrow; cool weather with rain

The Riley fire is 90% contained and Denali National Park will reopen at 4:30 am Wednesday July 10th.  In retrospect, this means Denali was closed for 11 days in the heart of the vacation season.  I'm so sorry for the folks that this was on their life list...50th state...63rd national park...vacation of a lifetime, but I hope they will come back to experience Alaska and Denali.  For the latest, here's a link to Alaska Wildland Fire (this is the most comprehensive info) and National Park Service Denali website.  NPS changed the amount of area burned to over 400 acres. 
I took these pictures on Monday.  While these look like innocent, puffy clouds hugging the hillside,  they are actually smoke.  It was a rainy day, and the moisture was reaching these hot spots, causing this steam.  
Talking with a ranger who was staffing the checkpoint on the park road, he said that getting these last hot spots extinguished was one of the hard parts of the fire fighters jobs.  But I did see them loaded onto train cars that were taking them to the fire site.  Sure beats having to walk 2 miles to get there!  

This is very steep terrain with thick brushy areas that could still have hot spots in them.  So that's what the firefighters are working on now - extinguishing the last of the hot spots.  

Tours and train activity will return to normal tomorrow, just in time for our days off!  Yeah!! So we're going to try hiking Savage River and Sanctuary Creek areas again.  


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