Denali National Park, AK

Dates

Aug 24th - Aug 30th 2008

Service Project

Trail Maintenance

Free Days

Wildlife viewing, dayhiking, photography

Accommodations

Camping in NPS campsite

Trip Rating

Strenuous : hiking to worksites, trail construction:digging, sawing, lifting, hauling, clipping

Leaders

Todd Nelson
Terri Mitchell

Equipment

Designated an International Biosphere Reserve, Denali is truly a park on an Alaskan scale: six million acres - a plot of magnificent land larger than the state of Massachusetts. Across the park's largely treeless expanse, the views are of a scale unknown in the lower 48. Rivers rush wide and milky white with rock pulverized by glaciers. Flower-studded tundra spills away in all directions for tens of miles. Wolves, caribou, Dahl sheep, moose, and grizzly bears roam freely.

If the weather cooperates, Mount McKinley swallows the horizon. At 20,320 feet, McKinley is North America's highest mountain and the crown of the 600-mile-long Alaska Range. The indigenous Athabascan people dubbed the massif "Denali," or the "Great One," and it more than lives up to the name. From base to summit, the mountain's vertical relief is greater than that of Mount Everest. On those rare occasions when its shroud of clouds rolls back, McKinley's grandeur will steal your breath away. However, Denali National Park is more than Mount McKinley. The Alaska Range also includes countless other spectacular mountains and many large glaciers.

The work project will be on the Triple Lakes Trail - an eight-mile reroute that will involve clearing, grubbing, hauling tread gravel by wheelbarrow, installing boardwalk, revegetating, and brushing. We'll put in four full days of trail work, and then have a free day to explore the wonders of Denali. The park has traditionally provided the group with bus passes to view wildlife in the interior of the park. Bring your camera.

**Note: Participants on Alaska trips must have paid for their airfare at least two months before the trip and furnish this information to the leaders. We have discovered that folks who do not have firm travel plans by this time often cancel from the trip, and these trips are hard to fill at the last minute.