The Denali Highway

On leaving Fairbanks we headed South on the Richardson Highway before turning at Paxson onto the Denali Highway. This is a gravel road that travels some 130 miles over a fairly remote highland area – it is not very heavily travelled until hunting season when it is inundated with Alaskans trying to kill anything that moves.

This was definitely our day to see wildlife and we clocked  up a handful of Moose and around 500 Caribou as well as a porcupine and a snowshoe hare. The weather going across the highway wasn’t the greatest with bands of rain going over us.  This meant that the views of the glaciated mountains to the North were mostly concealed although we did get some tantalising glimpses of them.

About halfway across the highway we stopped for the night in a small gravel turnout by a lake. Just next to us was a ridge which when I climbed looked out over a river and a plain of tundra where there was an enormous herd of over 300 caribou (the North American Reindeer).

We did get one mountain view early in the day though.