Quack Pack 2

We had a few more things we wanted to do in the park, so we stayed for another full day. First, we heard that the dogs were extra friendly in the mornings before the first demo because they hadn't had to deal with people all day long. So we went in right as they opened at 9 to give some more pets and get the kennel's stamp, which we didn't get last time because we had forgotten our passport.   We purchased our National Parks Passport when we went to Haleakala in July and are looking for stamps whenever we are in a national park. We thought there would be a specific spot for stamps from each park. Instead, there are just several pages for the stamps from each region. We also didn’t realize that a lot of parks have multiple stamps, so that leaves us the fun of trying to find all the stamps and figure out where they all are.   There were 7 total stamps for Denali. One was down in Talkeetna, and when we went to the visitor center there we forgot to bring the passport ...

The first 15 miles of the park are paved and are accessible in private vehicles. After that you need to get a bus ticket to get further into the park. There is only one road into a park about the size of the state of Massachusetts. There are two types of buses going into the park and they each have various stopping and turn around points. We elected to take the non-narrated bus to the Eielson Visitor center at mile 66 on the park road, which is about a four hour trip each way. Even though it wasn't actually a tour bus, our driver, Anna, was super informative and talked a bit about the different animals and answered questions people had throughout the trip.    You can choose to get on and off the bus whenever you want if you want to hike around for a bit in the middle of the wilderness. In order to get back on, you just need to flag down any other bus going in the right direction. We didn’t end up doing that this time but we want to come back sometime and do a multi-day back co...

We drove down towards Denali National Park after leaving Fairbanks. The drive down was amazing. Alaska has some massive mountain ranges but it is surprisingly flat in-between in many places. If you get up onto even a small ridge you can often for many miles giving some stunning views.   We arrived at the park fairly late on Sunday night, so not much was open to explore. All of the RV accessible campsites were full through at least Wednesday so we ended up leaving the park and staying at a pull out about 2 miles North of the park entrance.   On Monday morning we headed back into the park. We wanted to go on a quick ranger lead hike that left from the visitor center. It was about 2 hours and was a pleasant stroll.     They also have day long “Discovery Hikes” that are off trail backcountry hikes that rangers lead that are more strenuous. We didn’t end up taking one of those this time, but it sounds like a lot of fun and is on our list if we ever come back. The main b...

We headed out toward Prudhoe bay Friday night but we weren’t fully committed to making it all the way up there. We had heard very mixed reviews about wether the trip was actually worthwhile, and there was reports of snow on the pass. Unfortunately as we started out the highway in that direction, the RV started to making a strange new noise. When pushing down past a certain point on the throttle, it sounded like the engine was over-revving, or that there was a lot of air rushing around. It was most notable when the engine shifted down a gear to try to pick up speed.   The noise was strangely inconsistent and even went away entirely from time to time. We didn't want to risk being on the Dalton highway with this issue but we really didn’t want to go back to our Walmart in Fairbanks, so we decided to head up the Chena Hot Springs, only 50 miles from Fairbanks.  One of our websites said that there was a free campsite up the road to the hotsprings but it must have been out of date. ...