June 30, 2008

This morning our tour bus for the Denali National Park arrived before 8 AM, and Papa and I had to drag Gigi out of bed, still in her pajamas to load her on the bus!

She would have stayed asleep, but we had to put her into her travel car seat...driver's rules.

We stopped at another hotel to pick up passengers from the Holland America cruise line.  They all wore name tags.  It was pretty funny.  There was a two year old toddler with that group.

Soon after we entered into the actual park, we spotted a bear on the road.  Since Gigi was strapped into her car seat, she couldn't really see the bear.  Fortunately, the bus was equipped with screens that showed the video that the driver took with her camera.  We had a screen right above our seat, so she could see the wildlife.

In the center of this picture is Denali (Mt. McKinley).  It's white.  You can see the peaks above the clouds.

Here are a couple of snow hares on the side of the road.  

I'm not sure what this raven is eating.  

Here is a caribou.  We actually saw quite a lot of them.

Here we are at one of the rest stops.  At each stop, Papa and I took Gigi for a quick walk around the grounds to stretch her legs.  This tour was supposed to last 7 to 9 hours!  We are actually in an alpine region right now.

One of our bus mates took this picture for us.  The weather was beautiful!

Here's another bear we saw.  I think we saw about five or six bears.  This one is a brown bear (grizzly), although it is blond-colored.  Brown bears have a bump between their shoulders that black bears do not have.

During our nine hour trip (yes, it lasted that long), Gigi and I took a nap.  Papa thinks it's funny that we usually end up sleeping in the same position.

There is only one road into the park, so you need to follow it back to get out of the park.  On our way in we passed this fox den on this hill.  We did see an adult fox, but on our way back the pups were out.

There are three red fox pups in this picture.  It was great to get a chance to see them.

The last animal on our last to spot was a moose, and low and behold, we saw a moose!  We actually saw two of them.  Here is one of them.

Papa took this picture of Gigi watching her DVD rather than looking at the moose outside.  I said that she cannot really see out of the window to the ground when she's strapped up in her car seat.  Gigi was an INCREDIBLY good girl on the entire nine hour trip.  She didn't cry or fuss at all.  This trip was pretty boring for her, especially since she had to stay in her car seat, but it was great for the rest of us to see all of the wildlife.