Definitely not a Disney kind of night.

Mama and baby moose were back in the yard around 11pm last night for a visit and feeding session. At 1am, there was a loud noise in the backyard and Devany jumped up in time to see a grizzly bear race past the house after the moose. We could hear what we thought was the calf—but might well have been the mom—bleating loudly in the thick woods across the road from our place for about one-half hour. It was a terrible sound. I’m not about to hike in there this morning to see if one of them became part of the food chain. Sometimes Nature is hard.

It's baby time.

We’ve been patiently waiting for the first newborn moose calves to show up in the yard, and tonight we finally got our first one of the year. It’s always an absolute pleasure to watch these young ones.

First trip back to Denali for 2019

Just back from our first trip of 2019 to Denali National Park, our favorite place on earth. We camped for 4 nights at the Teklanika campground inside the park and used the shuttle buses to access the park. We mountain biked or hiked almost all of the road to the Eielson Visitor Center during our stay. The weather was gorgeous when we arrived on Thursday afternoon, so we threw the bikes on a late shuttle bus and rode to Toklat. Denali herself was out and waiting to say welcome back to us up in Sable Pass.

Interesting weather for the rest of this trip. We had gorgeous sunny skies, drizzle, snowflakes and even a pretty vigorous thunderstorm on Friday night. All in all we biked around 75 miles over the 4 days—most of that downhill, and we hiked around 10 miles on Saturday when it was raining all day.

So come along for the ride. As usual, there will be way too many pictures. Click on the images for full-screen and the captions will tell the story.