When we finally got all of our stuff done in smoky Fairbanks, we hit the road. We ran through even heavier smoke on the way to Denali, but most of the smoke had cleared by the time we got to the park entrance. Because we couldn’t get a campground reservation in the park until Friday, our plan was to drive the Denali Highway in both directions and boondock there for the three nights before we could get into Denali NP, but since we were driving right by Denali we decided to check out the visitor center while we had time. We asked rangers a couple of questions we had about our upcoming camping reservation, and then hiked about 2.5 miles to the sled dog kennels, where our timing was perfect to see the sled dog demo and meet some of the dogs. We hiked back to the visitor center and took our dogs for a short walk around the area, then stopped at the camp office for one more question, then drove to Cantwell to pick up the Denali Hwy. The first “free” campsite listed on iOverlander turned out to have a $30 fee attached, so we continued east to the next pullout at MP125, which had multiple fire rings and plenty of space to get off the road. One truck camper was already there, but we were able to park down the hill so we don’t *think* we were in his space…and we had our own fire ring which we did’t use.
We spent the whole next day driving through rain and fog on the Denali Highway. We saw two moose, and limited scenery. It finally stopped raining as we neared the end, so we stopped at the lake at Mile 7 and had a gorgeous campsite all to ourselves. We took a walk around the lake, and went inside for dinner. After dinner, we took the dogs out for last time and found that the clouds had cleared and we discovered that we were surrounded by snow covered mountains and glaciers. It was a wonderful surprise!
In the morning, after taking yet more photos of the mountains and glaciers surrounding 7 Mile Lake, we drove the last seven miles of the Denali Highway to Paxson, which appears to be a ghost town. We turned around and headed back east, marveling at the different amazing views around every curve in the road. We knew we were missing pretty scenery the day before, but the beauty was an order of magnitude higher than what we had expected. After a week in Alaska, we’d been a little unimpressed after the beauty of Canada, mostly due to bad roads and the fact that we couldn’t see much thanks to either smoke or clouds and fog. When the rain and fog cleared and took the smoke with it, and we were driving on the generally well maintained Denali Highway, we finally realized that Alaska actually does live up to the hype. We stopped at lots of pull offs for photos, and we stopped for the night at a pull off very near the Brushkana Campground because we saw a hiking trail on the map. The trail was beautiful, winding through meadows and pine forests to the creek. We didn’t see any wildlife, but we saw plenty of animal tracks and a beautiful view no matter which way we looked.
The next morning, we only had about 30 miles back out to Rt. 2, where we would head into Denali to camp at the Teklanika Campground for three nights.
