Day 1 in Denali

This is so weird. We are now in Denali and our first adventure was checking in. We pulled into the Mercantile where campground check-in is and their computers were down. We were told to turn left at the stop sign and go to the Bus Depot for camper check-in.

We went to the stop sign and turned left, this took us back through the Mercantile parking lot. A 2^nd stop sign was the left.

After driving down a gravel road(under construction) we found the Bus Depot and 30 minutes later were checked in. Told to take any campsite with the letter A. More confusion, we assumed(never should do that) she meant in the A loop. There is no A loop, only Wolf, Caribou and Bear. We drove down one and each site post had the letter A, B, C, or D. Now we understood!!!!

We drove all the loops and settled on our campsite. This campground is heavily wooded and word is there are Moose wandering around and to stay away from the Moose with 2 calves, she doesn’t like the human population too much. Several times she has chased people down the road. Luckily Moose don’t see well, run very fast or turn so you can get out of her way fairly easily by zig-zagging. We hopefully won’t need to test this.

There is one road in Denali and cars are only permitted on the first 16 miles. The weather appeared to be fairly good and we had planned to drive up the road a ways this afternoon. We were getting ready to go when we heard thunder, end of this excursion.

We looked at the information we were given and will go to the dog sled demo tomorrow. Denali is the only National Park patrolled by dog sled in the winter. Once we are finished with that we will make a trip into Healy for our meat and Tom needs to repair our emergency brake cable for the car. 
 

We haven’t had too many broken items so far: no window chips or breaks, one of our extra mirrors support broke(Tom fixed), a soda can exploded in the refrigerator(I now have a very clean refrigerator) and messed up the refrigerator and leaked out all over the floor, a ½ gal milk container fell over(it was in the door, very rough roads) and now all that area is very clean. Our biggest problem has been the towed car, the emergency brake cable snapped(we don’t know why), must have caught on something when turning and one of our safety cables is messed up. All easily fixable.