Day 6 • Denali National Park • 117 mi

Denali National Park and Preserve is a strange beast. Composed of around 6M acres (1.5% of Alaska's land area), the park has a single 92 mile road entering from the east, three established RV/tent campsites, and no established long distance back or front country trails—all hiking is cross-country.

Further, you can't drive past mile 13 of the road.

Here are your options for seeing Denali National Park:

• 6 hr round-trip shuttle bus
• 8 hr round-trip shuttle bus
• 11 hr round-trip shuttle bus

End of list. All buses are out-and-back along the same road. Get off anytime you'd like; there'll be another bus along soon.

Worth it? Yes.

Remember how I said you couldn't drive the whole road? Turns out you probably don't want to:

No guard rails anywhere, and much worse turns than this. Shuttle drivers get a month of training every year before they can drive. Our driver, when she's not up here, is a heavy equipment operator in Antarctica.

Bunches of wildlife, though. This is what a grizzly looks like at 200mm:

A little less impressive, eh?

Today's wildlife count ended up at 1 grizzly, 6 or 7 caribou, 2 golden eagles, 2 ravens, an arctic ground squirrel, and a nice young bull moose.

We're staying in Teklanika Campground, which at 29mi is farther than you can normally drive. But if you play your cards right, you can get a pass to drive in further than everyone else. It also helped that it was the only reservation still available when I got around to making them.

Also, if you call the helpful reservation hotline and ask about "tech-LACK-nick-ah campground", they will helpfully mention "tech-lah-NEE-kah campground" four times in the next three sentences.

Total mileage: 14mi plus 103mi in car and bus
Trip mileage: 715mi