The Polychrome Mountains

My favorite stop on the bus trip into Denali Park was the Polychrome overlook.  The picture here is one of the many spectacular views from this overlook stop along the dirt road which winds through the park.

Not easy to see in the photo is a large rock down along the river plane which is known as a "glacial erratic".  We were told that it stood 120 feet high above the ground.  It didn't look that big from 5 or so miles away.   Erratics are large boulders which dropped out of melting glaciers at random points along their retreat path.  They are often seen in places where one would ask "How did that thing ever get here!".  The answer would be that it didn't come from outer space but simply was left behind by a melting ice river which transported it here from some other place.

The Polychrome overlook is about 50 miles down the access road into the park.   Access to the park is carefully controlled and private vehicles are stopped at a check point beyond which only special permitted vehicles are allowed to proceed.  Our tour bus was such a vehicle.  During winter months when roads are generally impassable due to snow, the park is routinely patrolled by rangers on dog sleds who travel on the frozen rivers in the park.  Winter is travel time in Alaska.  The ground becomes an excellent hard foundation and bodies of water mostly eliminate the need for bridges and turn into the highway system until the spring thaw.  

From the bus we viewed Dall sheep, moose, caribou, bears, and a fox who seemed relatively oblivious of the people near by.  When animals were spotted, the bus would stop and provide the opportunity to take pictures.  Unless one were equipped with at least a 700 power zoom camera, the photographic results would look similar to photographs of ants on the street shot from the top of the Empire State Building.

Overall, the bus trip into the park was a trip to spectacular scenery but not especially great for large pictures of wildlife.  My pictures of any consequence of Alaskan wild life which I took are mostly those taken in refuges behind fences.  Real wildlife photographers camp out for days with monster lens and expensive cameras to get the kind of  great pictures like those seen seen in the National Geographic Magazine.