Ranger-Guided Discovery Hike into Polychrome Mts.

Sally and I stayed in Denali National Park for ten days. Denali is different from other national parks from the standpoint that there are very few trails, and the Park Service encourages people to hike off trail. The Park is so vast that it has been decided that the natural beauty of the park can be preserved better if trails are not created, and people are encouraged to wander in different areas. Studies have shown that for the tundra in Denali, less then 20 steps in the same spot will allow the vegetation and soil to recover, maintaining the naturalness of the area. When hiking with a ranger, we were encouraged to spread out and not step in the same spots.

Being a little uncomfortable about hiking off into the wilderness on our own, and also being unfamiliar with the nature of the area, we signed up for a ranger-guided hike in the Polychrome area of Denali. This is an area of scree covered mountains which have an artistic array of colors from the various colors in the rocks.  Scree, by the way, is loose rock.  To get there we had to ride the bus for 68 miles one way and meet our ranger. The experience gave us a lot of confidence in finding nice hikes on our own, but also made us appreciate the commentary of a very knowledgeable ranger on our surrounds and how to appreciate and deal with those surroundings. 

This is our hiking group and the area that we were hiking in.  Sally was the oldest woman there and guess who was the oldest man??

We had hiked in scree before, but never in difficult trailless scree.  We should have known early on that this would be a different kind of hike when we came across this caribou that was in the dried up riverbed that we wanted to go along.  The Ranger said that we should not stress out the animal.  If it uses its energy to flee from us, and then has to flee from a wolf, it may not have the energy to escape.  Consequently we hiked well up above the animal on the side of the scree slope.

Look at the worst side, and that is where we were hiking.  We were traversing the sides of these slopes.  At one point one of the young men hiking with us started slipping down, and could not move further.  He started to hyperventilate.  The man was not prepared, as he only had on running shoes and not boots so could not get a boot edge into the slope which was dry and hard.  He also did not have hiking (trekking) poles.  The ranger had to come back, give him his poles, and talk him through each step that he took.  It was a little scary as it was a long way down.   We were hiking up to the ridge in the upper left of the picture.

This is the ridge we were going up to, and some of the scree we hiked in.  I did not take pictures of us hiking in it because it was a little too serious.

Now ridge hiking is a lot of fun as the views are wonderful, and the walking is easy.  We could not wait to get up there.

As we got near our ridge this is what we saw:  a Dall Sheep who was eating flowers on the ridge.  He came over to investigate what all of the racket was about.  We thought he would quietly move on and keep grazing, but he did not.

He kept a watch on us, so what did we do?  Well, instead of getting to the top of the ridge, we stayed about 50 yards below him on the side of the scree slope and went around him.  He followed us for a ways to make sure that we stayed down there.  We finally headed down the mountain side.

Bill and Sally with our Ranger Ross

A Dall Sheep up close from the bus.

Not only are the mountains beautiful, the vegetation and lichens paint the landscape wonderfully.