YTJ's Travels: Hatcher Pass to Denali Highway (Day 3)

Thursday, June 6

After another relaxing morning, we pulled out the water filter and filled our water bottle with some cool river water and back tracked the rest of the way down Hatcher Pass Road. Once we got to the Highway, we stopped at the XPR-SSO stand. This woman knew how to make a good strong americano! Seriously one of the best I've ever had!

We rolled up the highway taking our time to look around, but are still kicking ourselves for not stopping for a proper picture of Denali. With these blue bird skies, we missed out on an amazing photo op thinking that we'd have the chance once we got to the national park. What we did get was the picture below from a snomobile park in Trapper Creek:

We continued on to Denali National Park, it was beautiful there-

-we really wished we had time to get out and hike and explore, but we really didn't, so we stopped for a few photos, saw what we could, and headed to the evening destination: the Denali Highway. It had been closed due to washouts from recent flooding, but we asked at the post office (where the boys saw the moose below), and it opened that very morning, so we were good to go!

Here we saw some of the most spectacular scenary of our entire trip. It was quiet. It was beautiful. We ran across more wildlife that people, and this made a very happy family.