Cycling the Denali National Park Road
Denali National Park is a 6 million acre preserve centered on Denali, the 3rd most prominent mountain in the world. It’s truly wild, there are only a handful of small managed trails and one road in the park. You can hike into the Denali back country and experience a world seemingly uncorrupted by people; large animals roam freely and there are no campsites or other infrastructure beyond the road.
Or so I’m told — I didn’t actually hike into the back country, I went on a 4 day bikepacking trip along the park road with my friend Marji. It was the kind of riding I live for: stormy weather, huge climbs, landscape like nothing you’ve ever seen.
The Road
The park road is 92 miles long and generally closed to private vehicles after mile 15, after that the only traffic comes from the bus system and ranger vehicles. Hikers and bikers are free to use the road and can flag down a bus in either direction whenever they want.
The bus system is a blessing and a curse. Early on in the park they are nearly every 20 min and give the road a bit of a safari/jurassic park vibe. The great thing about the buses is that if you can augment your bike trip if you don’t want to ride the full 180 miles in and out. For the big mountain passes we bussed over them the first time and then cycled them on the way back.
By the time you reach the last 3rd of the road buses drop down to maybe one an hour and you get the road to yourself a lot more.
Another useful thing about the buses is they are way better at finding animals than you are, so if you come up on a bus stopped you know you better bust out the camera. We would flag down oncoming bus drivers ever once in a while to ask if there were any bears around we should be worried about.
Landscape
My favorite thing about landscape from the park road is just how far you could see, always. Much of the road is tundra instead of forrest so without huge trees blocking our view we rarely lost our 20 mile view. It makes you feel very small.
Weather changed on a dime in the park from ice cold wind and rain to direct sunshine. You could usually see various rain dumps around the park off in the distance. By the grace of god it was never pouring on us while we tried to eat dinner or setup the tent.
I’m a sucker for the views were you can see the park road snaking away into the distance.
This is the view from the hike above the Eielson Visitor center at mile 66. It’s one of the few maintained hiking trails in the park. Most bus tourists turn back after Eielson so after this we mostly had the road to ourselves.
Bears! (and other non-bear animals)
This was the first adventure in my adult life where I didn’t bring a hipster film camera. Instead I lugged out a rented Fuji X-T2 with a massive 560mm f/8 stabilized telephoto lens. Keeping an expensive lens clean, in one piece, and quickly accessible on a dirty bike trip is pretty tricky.
We never saw a bull moose but we saw plenty of cows and calfs. At one point I found myself directly across the road from a mother moose and decided I better back away slowly instead of digging around for the camera.
These Dall sheep walked right out into the road on one of the mountain passes. I totally thought they were goats.
The thing about bears in Denali is you talk about them a lot. In fact you basically never stop worrying about the potential of a bad bear encounter. In reality the park road is very safe and the bears we saw couldn’t care less about us.
The park has very strict rules about food storage and bear encounters that you have to learn to ensure that the bears never learn they can shake down humans for food.
These bears were about 100 meters away.
Most of the animal encounters were 100% better from the bike than on a bus but there was one instance where I’m glad we had some metal around us. The bus driver spotted a family of Grizzlies directly on the side of the road, digging for berries.
The Mountain
If you’ve been to Denali before you probably noticed that we couldn’t see the mountain at all due to clouds. We were told this is pretty common and that it’s only visible every 1 in 10 days in the summer.
To be honest we didn’t really have an understanding of just how big Denali is and what we were missing until our bike trip was over. About 100 miles from the park we noticed something crazy in the rearview mirror…
The mountain is absolutely enormous, I can only imagine what it would have been like to see it from the base on a clear day. Guess I’ll have to go back.
Friends
Marji and I met more other cyclists in the park over 4 days than we ever have on multi week euro tours. I guess when you’re in the middle of nowhere and you see another cyclist you definitely want to stop and chat.
