A Trip To Be Remembered

I woke up day before yesterday thinking,
"I do not like camping. This is miserable. Why do people do this, anyway? How did I ever like doing this?"
This made me sad. I've always loved camping. In fact, come to think of it, MOST of my absolute favourite memories growing up were of camping, whether it was camping and hiking with my family in Olympic National Park, camping out at Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Elinor with the youth group, or even camping out on a lake with dear friends from another church we used to attend. What happened?

I'm going to start from the beginning. Mistake #1 - I checked the weather. It predicted rain all weekend. I ignored it. Alaska weather often changes with hardly any notice, and I've missed many a clear night for shooting the Aurora because the weather forecast said it would be cloudy. So I decided I didn't want to miss a beautiful weekend in Denali. For once, the weather forecast was right. We packed our bags, left our little son with a kiss, and drove to Denali National Park.

Denali has a bus system on one road that stretches about 95 miles into the park. We booked a camp site about 30 miles in, and found we had 2 hours to wait for the camper bus to take us there. It was sunny outside. So far, so good. We decided to hike around a small trail at the entrance of the park and try out the giant 70-200 mm lens we'd rented for the occasion, and the 24mm wide angle lens we'd borrowed from a friend. It was an enjoyable little hike with little flowers everywhere, bridges that crossed trickling streams, and an unfortunate abundance of mosquitoes.

As we headed back toward our car to grab the rest of our gear and wait for the bus, the clouds began to gather. They grew darker and darker, the air was humid. Thunder rolled in the distance and we saw the occasional lightning bolt illuminate the grey sky.
"This is an adventure!" I happily exclaimed, "I love thunderstorms!"
Scott enthusiastically agreed and we continued on our way. We made it right in time. Droplets began to fall from the sky, and I stopped and snapped a picture of the beautiful mountains that were now shrouded in mist. The smell of fresh rain greeted us as we ran to our car.

We sat in the car, watching and listening to the storm, talking about how fun this was and how it'll blow over soon. We rearranged some camping gear, and just as it was time to walk to the bus stop, the clouds shifted away and the sun came out again. All was well. 

The bus ride was very pretty, and surprisingly short. We enjoyed some conversation with the bus driver and decided it must be a wonderful job driving along the Park Road all summer. We saw a moose far below near a river at about mile 13. Sanctuary River Campground was in our sights in no time, and we bid the driver our farewells and made our way to our camp site. It was a very pretty little place, about a 15 second walk away from Sanctuary River. After setting up camp (with a tarp underneath our tent of course), a camp meal was in order. Afterwards, we decided to get on the bus again to get farther into the Park, perhaps to Igloo Campground to hike around the mountains there and get some pictures. Missing the first bus, we began to hike along the Park Road toward Igloo and decided to just wave the next bus down when it caught up to us. The storm clouds were gathering again. Rain pattered off and on as we walked, but it was all beautiful. The mountains and clouds made for some very dramatic scenes, I wish I had captured them better.

Finally the bus arrived, again, right on time. As the bus continued its route, the rain came pouring in again. It got to Igloo, and here is where we come to mistake #2 - we foolishly decided to keep on with our plan and get out. We got out. The bus left. We were standing there in the pouring rain, with absolutely nowhere to go. I kept the camera and lens safe under my jacket as we tried to hike underneath some trees and figure out when the next bus would come, all the while shaking our heads at our stupidity. Still, it was an adventure. We managed to find a little cabin with an overhang to sit under, and I began talking about how I genuinely loved this sort of thing. Sure, we were soaked through a little damp! But we found shelter, the rain was beautiful, it was quiet and peaceful and everything smelled good. I was still enjoying this. We got the next bus and made our way to our camp.

Mistake #3 - we didn't bring a change of clothes. Both of us were pretty wet, and our clothes were wet. Fortunately Scott had grabbed his fleece from the car before we left, so he was at least able to change his over-shirt to something dry. But our pants were both soaked. We laid them out to dry and sat in the tent, trying to wait out the downpour. We had thrown the second tarp over the tent, so thankfully, the inside of the tent itself stayed relatively dry, despite the water we managed to bring in with us. As it turns out, it's very hard for anything to get dry when it is in a very humid environment. Especially if the articles in question are made out of cotton. Our clothes pretty much stayed really damp through the next day.

Mistake #4 - we thought we might possibly be going back country so we tried to pack as light as possible. We bought cheap camp pads that hardly padded anything, and the worst mistake...we bought sleeping bags that were super thin fleece and supposedly keep you warm down to 50 degrees. I'm not sure how cold it got that night, but one side of our bodies was very chilly at all times throughout the night. The rain poured pretty much all night. We'd wake up, shift sides, and try to warm up, then fall back asleep. This happened over and over again during that long night. The next morning, when we finally decided to brave the cold even more, we dragged ourselves out of the tent and immediately began packing up. We were miserable. We were still damp, and the wind was biting, piercing right through our clothes. A unanimous decision was made to just leave and go back to the warm car at the park entrance and go home, even though we weren't expected back until 6:00 that evening. Scott checked the bus schedule and informed me that the next bus out of the park wasn't due until 2 hours later. This seemed intolerable. We were still very cold, and now we were all packed up and had nothing to do but wait. I didn't want to hike because I didn't have actual hiking boots, and both of us were sore from sleeping on tree roots all night with hardly any padding. We decided to take the next bus into the park to meet the bus that was headed out at the next rest stop. At that point we didn't care what we had to do, we just wanted to get warm.

Things brightened up a bit as we waited for the bus, the rough wooden bench was directly in the sun (which had finally decided to come out), and we slowly began to thaw out. The bus came, we filed on, and headed further into the park. Just before we got to our stop, a lynx jumped out right in the middle of the Park Road! The bus screeched to a halt and everyone stared and snapped pictures. My camera and lens were still packed in my bag, I didn't get to it on time. This was such an exciting event, and we had finally warmed up in the bus, that we decided to go on further into the park instead of heading home. This was NOT a mistake. I am SO glad we did. It turned out to be a beautiful day and I got lots of pictures that really don't do it justice. Thankfully, the rest of the day turned out wonderfully, it made up for the bad part of the trip.

I still love camping. And next time we will be prepared.