Denali National Park past MILE 15! (Camping at Teklanika River, riding the bus, & off trail hiking)

We're in Denali National Park for the first time ever and we just spent the day exploring part of the first 15 miles of the park which normally is as far as you can go in your own vehicle and then you have to take one of the park buses the rest of the way but we're going to be camping at the Teklanika River Campground at mile 29.1 for the next few nights which gives us special access to continue down the road. We have to go through a quick checkpoint at mile 15 then we should be able to continue on the road which fun fact is all gravel from there. Well we made it to mile 15 and we had assumed that we would get the passes and everything else we needed at the checkpoint station to continue down the road and stay at the campground but it turns out that we needed to get that at the Backcountry Center or the Riley Creek Mercantile which are both located in the front of the park. We really couldn't find much information in the confirmation email about what to do or how to check in. I'm sure I missed something somewhere but hopefully one of y'all can learn from our mistake. It turns out if I had just gone to reservedenali.com and retrieved my reservation I would have seen that we had to go check in there. Whoops. All right we have all of our documentation and passes let's try this again. We're back we did it right this time. Is this a bear proof container? I would say our van is. I hope so. And if not there's food storage lockers. Do you need anything that smells? Do your headlights need to be on? Yes always, always. You guys are good. You guys have a wonderful day. Thank you, we sure will. Thank you for everything. Thanks for your help. Now we know the rules for next time. So they were quizzing us at the gate here at mile 15 about all the rules and everything on driving on the road and at the campground and everything. We'll explain more about that in a second but we did so well on our little quiz they gave us. They gave us these Junior Ranger Badges. Junior Park Ranger Badges. And they gave Kona some dog treats so she's super happy too. We're just about to get to the campground and one of the many things to know about the campground is you have to reserve a site in advance but actually picking your site is first come first serve and there's 53 to choose from. We're getting here about 7 30 on a Friday evening and we don't think we'll have very many to choose from. We're staying at site number 25 and the campground is mostly pretty wooded but what we really like about this site is that we're hoping that we'll get a decent amount of solar to carry us over through the next couple of days. And then also we like that our picnic table and our fire ring are tucked back here so it kind of gives us a little bit of seclusion and a little bit of privacy from the other campsites around. All the sites here are dry. There are no hookups but generators are allowed during specific hours. There's also toilets but no showers so we won't be showering for the next few days unless we want to take a cold shower because our hot water heater takes a lot of power so thankfully this isn't smell-o-vision right? We already smell really. That's Jay. There is a lot to know before staying at this campground but there are two very unique rules that are very important to know beforehand. The first being you must book this campsite for at least three nights. You cannot stay here any less than that. Also once you get here your vehicle is not allowed to leave. You are trapped. Just kidding. Only your vehicle's trapped. You're not trapped. If you'd like to explore the park you can utilize the park's buses which we'll explain more about in the morning. To explore Denali past mile 15 or for us mile 29.1 you have to take one of Denali's buses. They have a couple options this year including a narrated tour shuttle that you stay on the entire time or a more hop-on hop-off hiker bus. For the non-narrated hiker bus it costs $30 for those 16 and older and free for those under 16. One perk of staying at the tech campground is that we get this thing called a tech pass where we pay for the first day and get a specific time slot but then can use this pass to hop on any bus the future days we're here. So we only pay once and we can use the bus for multiple days. This morning we have a 7 10 a.m pickup from the campground and we're going to ride all the way to mile 43 which as we mentioned in our previous video is as far as the road is open this year due to a landslide and our goal is to go on a hike. This ride has been so beautiful. The bus ride was amazing and we even saw two caribou. We got dropped off at the East Fork Bridge which is as far as the bus can go this year due to the landslide that we mentioned earlier. And one really interesting thing about Denali National Park is that in its entire six million acres there are only 35 miles of actual hiking trails and the rest of the park is basically just wilderness that you're able to explore. One very unique thing about the park is that most parks require you to stay on trail. They do not want you going off trail but here at Denali in certain areas you are allowed to do off trail hiking. We're a little intimidated by this though because we've never done off trail hiking before. We don't want to get lost. We're used to following a map. So for today we're doing something a bit easier. Once you get off the bus at the East Fork Bridge you're actually allowed to walk two and a half miles each way on the road until the actual closure. And the views are pretty incredible. So our plan is to walk this road a bit. You can also walk down to the river. So today we're going to stick to something a bit easier and then kind of game plan and find a spot to do some off trail hiking tomorrow hopefully if we're feeling more comfortable. We know walking a road in a place as gorgeous as Denali National Park might sound kind of boring. You're not going to get as many good views as a regular trail but the views along this road might be better than more than half the hikes we've ever done. Like come on these mountains back here are super gorgeous. So if you come to the park don't sleep on coming to the end of the road here and just walking up the road because it is worth it. Multiple people had told us that there was a caribou on the snow patch down there. We finally got to it. He was laying down then he stood up and he just walked off the snow patch. We got so lucky that we actually got to see him. I think there's actually two of them down there and his antlers looked huge. There's the two down there and then there's another one up there. I got Adam these binoculars for his birthday last year specifically for our trip to Alaska and they are paying off big time. Just as we were about to continue on further up the road I spotted two more right here. These are even closer so we can see them even better in the binoculars. We made it to the road closure and from what we can tell the road is completely wiped out. You can kind of see the gray road and then it just completely ends. It is wild to see and our bus driver was telling us that they aren't really making many moves to fix it so it's probably going to be closed for a really long time. Their website right now says through summer of 2023 so if you're visiting here in the next year from filming this video you're likely not going to be able to explore the second half of the park so we're trying to make these videos as informative as we can that way if you are going to visit the park you know exactly what you can do so hopefully you're finding them helpful. We're gonna head back to the campground now so we can get back to Kona and something that's really nice about these is that they come about every 30 minutes so whenever you're ready to go back you don't have to wait around too long and a couple other things to keep in mind with them is that you can only get on the green bus. You can't get on the brown bus because those are the narrated tour ones and they will not pick up any hikers and also if you do decide to hike off trail anywhere along the road you can just come back to the road and just wave a bus down that's coming by a green one and they'll pick you up and take you back to where you need to go approaching texaneca campground take a good look around make sure you have everything hi we miss you being here at Denali is not really the most fun for Kona because dogs aren't allowed on trails in the park however there are a couple spots where they are allowed towards the beginning of the park they are allowed on the roadside trail as well as the bike path and we took Kona on the bike path a couple times and it's super nice they're also allowed to just be walked on the park road so we're taking Kona on a nice walk on the road outside the campground so she can get some exercise nice little two mile walk done i think Kona's one step closer to becoming a sled dog Kona what do you think do you want to become a sled dog? before we got to alaska we joked that the state bird is a mosquito and a few of y'all have asked for a mosquito update we will say this campground definitely has a good amount of mosquitoes one just hit me in the ear but we haven't really found the mosquitoes in alaska to be much worse than other places we've been to that have bad mosquitoes wearing these little wristbands that adam's mom got us i think they smell really good and they seem to have helped a little bit and we have our thermocell i will say i think the mosquitoes are still hovering around us i just don't think they're biting us as much i don't know i have some flies on me now too so it's kind of hard to know what's a fly what's a mosquito things are hitting me in the head but i don't think i'm getting any bites going into camping here we were kind of worried that we would feel trapped or that we'd be bored since you can't move around freely and we didn't know if we would have enough to keep us entertained and while we do think the campground would be even better when the park is fully open because you could get to the end of the road faster and you'd have more to explore we've loved staying here so far we've kept busy by riding the bus hiking and walking around listening to podcasts we even had time to take a nap and if tomorrow goes to plan it should be another full and fun day today we are going on an off-trail hike and to be honest i'm a little nervous about it but after doing research before we got to the park as well as talking to bus drivers yesterday and today we've determined that mount margaret is our best bet it's one of the more straightforward options so this morning we hopped on a bus going back towards the front of the park got off at mile 17 we can see kind of where we're going so we're just gonna start walking the bus driver led us off of the bend in the road here and then we crossed the road and he kind of showed us this way that we can enter into the brush here we've got a little bit of ways to go through the brush and then it should start to open up this is the kind of uh stuff that you could easily startle a bear in because it's a little brushy it's pretty tall so you may not see the bear the bear may not see you so our bus driver said make lots of noise so we're gonna sing a song just reached kind of the top of this knob i think we're out of the thick stuff it should just be more kind of knee high brush and then we should be in the clear to see wide open views so we're through all the trees we're up in the tundra now and one thing that our ranger told us yesterday that we're really having a hard time obeying is that on some of these off-trail routes people have created social trails and we kind of followed a social trail from the road up through the trees instead of having to like break down a bunch of bushes to get through but she's saying on the tundra it actually does less damage to the tundra if you and your group walk side by side you all kind of create your own path versus everyone walking in the same path there is a pretty clear path though to get to the top but from what she told us we shouldn't use it we should create our own path but it goes against like everything we've been taught about leave no trace to just walk on the tundra she said like try to walk on rocks when you can i'm enjoying this off-trail experience much more than i thought i would my biggest concern going into it was just getting lost and not knowing where to go but we picked one that's probably one of the easier ones to do it's more straightforward it's very open so it's pretty clear which direction you need to go you can also see the road the whole time so it's clear which way you need to go to get back down we just made to this first ridge we're gonna try to keep following it up that way and just see how high we can make it we see a whole herd of sheep off in the distance the closest we've ever been so finally some sheep 22 in total crazy yeah nice we're getting closer we're trying to go up there and we think the best approach is to kind of walk over here and then kind of just go up this ridge we did it oh i am very proud of us this was a little out of our comfort zone but it could not have gone any better since we've been up here fog has just been rolling over and then rolling back through the views keep coming and going but we think the summit the actual summit of this area here is right back there it's maybe only a few feet higher than what we are now so we're cool we're just hanging out here and enjoying the views but the scenery up here is really unique it's kind of a bald area but then there's these really awesome looking really rocky structures jutting out everywhere it looks like you'd film lord of the rings or some scenes from star wars here it's pretty cool besides seeing denali which is obviously pretty hard to beat this was our favorite thing we did here in the park we just had so much solitude we saw one group at the beginning but i don't think they ever came the whole way up but besides that it has just been so peaceful just us and all the doll sheep it took us a little over two miles to get up here and we'd love to walk along the ridges for a bit but we gotta get back to kona so we're gonna head back down there's the road while we were staying here at the campground we wanted to prioritize cooking over the fire so tonight we made a garlic and herb chicken and it's one of those mccormick seasoning spice packets we just marinated it overnight and then a greek salad it's gonna be mighty tasty but tonight is actually our last night here in the park we loved our time here at denali it was the perfect way to kick off our adventures here in alaska when we originally found out that the back half of the park was closed we were super bummed but it ended up working out really well we had plenty to do in just the front half of the park it was way more manageable and less daunting to only have around 43 miles to explore instead of 92 but with that said we will 1000 be back to the park in the future when it's fully back open so we can conquer miles 44 to 92 can i get to shaking before we got to alaska we had joked that this it's just me i won't hurt you this is how i scare away bears