We wake up to heavy fog this morning, very cloudy. We were hoping to see Mt. McKinley today, but we’re not optimistic now, not with this weather.

You don’t stay in one place for very long with a cruise itinerary. That’s tough in a place like this. We could stay a week. But this morning we will depart for Denali National Park. Denali is Mt. McKinley, and that can be a little confusing until you treat the words as synonyms.  Locals call it Denali, or just The Mountain.

Not many tourists get to see it because at 20,320 feet, it’s often in the clouds. Looks like we will be some of those tourists. We sit in the lounge area of the lodge having coffee and waiting for our motor coach to board, looking out at snow capped mountains that are large enough. But we’ve heard what’s behind them, in the clouds. So we glance up now and then to see if anything is poking through.

Then it happens. The clouds break, and there it is. We are 40 miles away from it, but it towers over the mountains we were looking at before the clouds parted. It is massive, an awesome sight. Everybody runs outside, cameras in hand, paparazzi for nature. We almost miss our bus.

A glimpse of Denali from the Lodge.

The trip to Denali National Park takes a few hours, and it’s a beautiful drive, farther North into the Alaskan country. We only go through one tiny town en route. Skirting along the tree line as we go up a valley that was carved out by a glacier, the trees change from aspen and birch to fir and evergreens almost at once.

We reach the lodge and find that it is just as nice as the previous one, although different. The previous lodge was very secluded, tucked up on a hill in the woods, but this one is next to a river on one side and a road on the other, and a little tourist town has sprung up on the other side of the road, selling anything from t-shirts to Subway $5 footlongs, for 10 bucks. Things are expensive out here.

It’s lunch time, so we grab some pizza before going on a complimentary tour of the National Park. The pizza is ok, but not as good as Uncle Joe’s. The tour is excellent though. This park is roughly the size of Massachusetts. It’s big. We are driven on a bus by one of the park rangers, a local lady who lives in Alaska year round.

Everybody wants to know what it’s like to live here year round. She says her house recently got power, and she’s noticed how loud refrigerators are. Her house has no running water. She says most houses in this remote part of Alaska don’t, because keeping the water in the pipes from freezing is too much work if you don’t have power. Most of the locals are off the grid. This place is not for the weak.

We see a caribou eating and wandering through the low brush as as we ride along in the tour bus, and we follow it for a while up the valley as it meanders along not far from the road. It gets pretty close to us.

Back at the lodge in the early evening, we decide to go light on dinner. We walk across the street to look around, and see what our options are over there. We see a box of strawberry mini-wheat breakfast cereal in the convenience store, one box, $11. There’s a nice little coffee shop that has pre-made sandwiches that are only about twice as expensive as they should be, so we grab a few of those and go back to have a nice picnic in one of the lodge’s big lounge areas.

About these Lodges

Think ski lodge but without the skis, and with more old people wandering around. They are run by the Princess cruise line but you don’t have to be on a cruise to stay here. Alaskans might come stay just because it’s really the only hotel for miles around.

Princess closes them up completely in the off season. This whole little town shuts down, and they turn off the stop lights. The park ranger tells us locals drive right through it without even slowing down.

The view from the back of the lodge, on the river side.