Discovery Hike in Denali National Park
I took a overnight flight to Anchorage on purpose so I could arrive to Fairbanks at 10 am and be at Denali before noon. I wanted to check if there were Discovery hikes available the next couple of days. A Discovery hike is a hike led by a park ranger for a maximum of ten people. The ranger can not repeat the same hike for more than twice in the year, so they are cool to take. Lucky me the hike for the next day was in an area that I really wanted to explore, Highway Pass, so I took it.
They offer an easy hike and an challenging one, take the challenging one. There was a family in my group and they handled it fine.
The next day you get on a separate bus at 8am (I would have preferred earlier) with the easy group and the strenuous group (there are two discovery hikes per day). If you had a transit bus ticket already, you need to go to the Bus Depot and exchange it. Else, go to the Bus Center with the discovery form and buy a ticket to the Discovery hike bus.
The easy group got off the bus near the Teklanika river stop with their ranger. Our group drove all the way to Toklat River and picked up the ranger there. The group consisted of a family of 5 , a couple, two single guys and me. We get dropped off the bus and the ranger starts a safety chat and takes an inventory of bear spray (me, him, and a couple has it).
The plan was follow a creek that was flowing from the top of a hill and see what was on the other side. After a bit of elevation I captured this image of Little Stony Hill at a distance:
And then a bear showed up ...............................
At a point in the hike a decision needed to be made (as an example from the ranger in examining the landscape for good routes): go up a steep hill following the creek to the top or go up a less inclined area and climb a ridge to our left. It was decided to go up next to the creek since we couldn’t see if the ridge route would take us to the top or just reach a dead end.
It was at that moment when we started to hike again up towards the top of the creek when someone on the group (a family of five, a couple, two guys, the ranger, and me) yelled “bear!”. We all turned to our left and we saw two bears on top of that ridge that we decided not to scale (40 yards from us). Both bears were digging for squirrels, a mama bear and a quite large kid (I assume that this would be the last year the kid would stay with the mom, after the winter ended, since the kid was not small).
The mom was really digging the hell out of the grass, with chunks flying off the ridge towards us. The baby at some moment ran away from the mom when it chased a squirrel into an hole in the ground. We all immediate started yelling at the bears while staying together. I think I was to the right of the group, with the ranger to my left and another guy to his left and then the rest of the group behind us.
About ten seconds into yelling the mom squared herself toward us and charged !!! Within one second the bear took five steps toward us in a sprint at full speed, which looked like she was going to attack us, but then stopped. That was a mock charge, obviously ................ I didn’t know she was bluffing when she started coming down the hill and I reached for the bear spray expecting that she was going to get down to business and reach us. All I could think is "it's on". Her face and the manner she was coming down told me she was beyond pissed.
We all kept yelling at the bear and she decided to stop the charge and go back up the ridge towards her kid. I guess she took an assessment of the situation and decided it was too many of us to bother with. After like a minute of us yelling the ranger instructed us to start coming down the hill slowly as he was keep an eye on the bear.
Yup, that is the bear and you can see all the dirt being removed. It is not in perfect focus since I had settings for landscape (F14) and they (and we) were moving, sorry.
So, we kept moving down the hill and the bears went back to their squirrel eating business. We had to figure out another place to explore since that original route was claimed by the bears.
Now ................. I suspected something and I wanted to ask the ranger about it: what if it wasn't 10 people yelling at the bear but 1 or 2 people; 40 yards close to the kid looked to me too close for comfort for the mama bear. So I asked him "what if there were only two people instead of ten, the bear would had come completely down the hill, right ?". He said that was a good possibility, and that would have been a more serious situation.
After a safe distance I managed to take a pic of them still digging.
Bears 1, People 0. The hike up that creek was aborted so we moved down and explored another area. At a safe point, we decided to climb up a large hill. The park ranger took the opportunity to talk about the fascinating geology of the park and why Denali towers over all other mountains in the area. He even showed us a newly discovered geological fault in the area.
what a view, uh ?
We eventually got down from the hill and hiked back to the road and got on the green buses back.
Not much exploration, but the bear story is pretty unique.