It was a very long day, four hours on the train to Denali, a hour for lunch and a seven hour bus tour through Denali National Park. The trip was amazing.

We got on the train at Fairbanks, a luxury car attached to a regular Alaska Rail train. The top level was an observation car and below a dining car like they used to be. China and silver and crystal – the food was great too.

The train wound through the mountains along the Chena river. The scenery was unbelievable, snow covered mountains, bridges over deep gorges.There were rafts on the river and we even saw a family of moose and a gigantic beaver lodge — no beavers though.

We got to Denali about noon and had lunch. Denali covers six million acres, larger than some states, so even with a seven-hour tour we could see very much. There are no paved roads and the scenery was much more rugged , at times the bus was at the edge of a 1000-foot drop. But for the first five hours or so the wildlife was nowhere to be found. But the last hour we saw it all. Doll sheep high on a mountain, moose, caribou foxes and the squirrels they hunt, and, most elusive of all, a massive grizzly bear. We even saw a ptarmigan, the Alaska state bird.

What we didn’t see was Mount McKinley. You wouldn’t think that the highest mountain in North America could hide bt it does. We were told that only thirty percent of the people who go to the park actually see the mount and smoke from the mo2re than 200 forst fires burning in the area didn’t help.

We were among the 30 percent but that didn’t happen until the next day. On the road from Denali to Anchorage. We stopped at the Alaska veterans memorial just outside Talkeetna. The mountain appeared through the clouds but unless you knew exactly what to look for, you’d never know it was rhere. We stopped for lunch in Talkeetna and experienced an earthquake that measured 5.8 on the Richter scale. Alaska, it seems, has more earthquakes than any other state.