Denali National Park and its green shuttle busses

The second day of our road trip began early for us, as we had to make our way to Denali National Park until 11.30 at the latest to be on time to board our shuttle bus. Since we hadn’t seen any animals on the previous day and were almost through the scenic parts of the road, we didn’t expect too much of the last bit of road left on the Denali Highway. But just about five minutes after we had started driving again two caribou stood right in the middle of the road. We stopped. They looked at us and then started to walk towards us. They stayed in sight for quite some time, looking at us just as curious as we looked at them. Then another car drove by and they went off into the bushes.

Shortly after that encounter with the caribous we were really surprised to reach the second pavement break - now the road was paved again for the last three miles of the Denali Highway. We had expected to drive for a much longer time to get there. In Cantwell we turned onto the Parks Highway and drove to the Denali National Park. As usual, we took some pictures on our way there.

We reserved our campground for the night, gassed up again and got our tickets for the shuttle bus. As soon as we were in the green shuttle, we took off to our ride into the wilderness of the Denali National Park. On our way to „Toklat“, our last station, we saw a lot of caribou as well as a few dall sheep. We were a bit disappointed, since we really had hoped to see a bear. On the way back we got off the shuttle for a bit, walked along the road, took a lot of pictures, and then caught the next shuttle. When the people on that bus told us that they had been really lucky with wildlife and had seen moose, caribou and dall sheep, but also wolves and bears, we were really jealous.