We won the lottery!! Well, I guess I should clarify that we won the 'Road Lottery'. It's a lottery that, if you win, allows you to drive on a road. While that may not sound very exciting, this road is a seldom-traveled road through the Denali National Park, where normally only buses are allowed to travel while jam-packed with tourists. When you "win the road lottery", it means you can drive your own car through, at your own pace and therefore have better odds of getting up close and personal with some of Denali's cool wildlife, like this bear, who casually strolled in front of our car.
This is a pic of the first bear we saw. Kind of far away, but we got to watch while it scared up a pair of nesting birds and then proceeded to raid their nest.
We saw lots of caribou. Most of the cows had migrated out of the valleys we were in, but the bulls remained, and they were magnificent.
Just massive antlers.
Hard to capture with a camera, but these bulls were huge, and had obviously been eating well.
An older bull, traveling with a younger bull, walked down from a hill onto the road in front of us, and proceeded to casually stroll towards us before heading back off the road to browse.
We spent a good half hour watching them browse, just yards away from the car.
Farther down the road, we saw three other bears. Bears #2 and #3 looked big, but the rest of our bear pics are of bear #4, because he was nice enough to walk right up to our car.
As he walked up to the car, he pretended like he was ignoring us. but we're pretty sure he was getting close on purpose.
After he crossed the road and started back towards our car, a park ranger drove up and honked until the bear wandered off. Not happy to have the bear scared off, but we still got some very close pictures of the bear.
Dall Sheep.
And of course you have to snap a picture or two of moose (but we can see them everywhere at home).
Snowshoe hare, keeping a lookout for bears.
We traveled 66 miles along the park road, and turned around at Mt. Eielson. Here a couple of park rangers watch a bear slowly walk away from the turnaround point.
While in Denali, might as well stop and get some senior pictures of Landon.
A unique opportunity to get your senior pictures done in the middle of Denali National Park.
He'll get more senior pictures later, but these might end up being our favorite.
The lodges around the park are closed this year, due to COVID, and I'm hoping they are not being too optimistic that they'll be back open next year. We can all hope.
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