Denali National Park, AK

Dates

Aug 26th - Sep 1st 2012

Service Project

Trail construction

Free Days

Wildlife viewing, hiking, photography

Accommodations

Tent camping in designated site

Trip Rating

Strenuous : Daily hikes to worksite, digging, bending, lifting, hauling, clipping

Leaders

Deborah Northcutt
Bill Sheppard

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.

When visible, 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," (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 includes countless other spectacular mountains and many large glaciers.

Our service project will be on the Savage River area about 13 miles from the Visitors Center, and will involve new trail construction on the Savage Overlook Trail. We'll camp in an administrative campsite at Savage River and day hike into the wilderness and work area daily. 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. This is a spectacular time of year to be in Alaska; te colors are changing and the bugs are gone! Bring your camera.

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

Check out more photos from last year's Denali project in our gallery.