Getting Outside

We packed up the family and drove to Denali Park back in early May. The park was not officially open yet so you can camp for free in the campground and drive 30 miles on the park road.  

This Ptarmigan was the first animal spotted. We were driving along and Wyatt yells STOP!! so we stopped and he said he saw a ptarmigan and we had to back up to look for it. We backed up and saw nothing so started driving again and again he yelled STOP! so we repeated the procedure with the same result and were about to chalk it up to a 5 year old imagination when we saw this little guy.  Wyatt really is very good a spotting wildlife, we should have never doubted him!

We saw tons of caribou.

and lots of moose but unfortunately no bears.

 

The weather was not so great, it was cold and really windy (even snowed on us off and on) but we took advantage of the wind by doing a little kite flying.

 We did get one good hike in despite the weather. The boys are getting to be great little hikers and we got up high enough to get some good looks at Dall Sheep.  Wyatt kept pointing to the tallest peaks and saying "I think I could get to the top of that one...even though I am only 5 I could still do it!" The day these boys can out hike Mama and Papa is probably not too far off.

 Still a bunch of snow up here.

The hike did go a little too close to nap time so I ended up carrying Sam on the way back down.
Are you wondering why Papa didn't carry him?...so am I!!

We stopped in and visited with the parks' sled dogs. I found out that they adopt out dogs from the kennel, I am really wanting a skijor dog so I was very intrigued by this idea.  There was one dog named Muddy that I fell in love with, but he was already spoken for :(

We worried about sleeping in the tent, last summer every time we went camping Sam would be up half the night crying. This time it took him a while to settle in but once he did he was down for the count and we  got some good sleep in.  

We drove the 30 some miles into the park two days in a row which was  a lot of time in the car for the boys but they seem to enjoy it, especially when they didn't have to be strapped in the carseats. The being able to bounce around was exciting for them, although Wyatt was sure to keep in eye out for the police so we wouldn't get sent to jail.  We also got to go visit some friends of ours that live just north of the park.

 In late May we took a nice family hike to Bear Creek, which is about a 45 minutes south of Delta.  We didn't actually see any bears but we figured that at least one had been there not too long before us.  Sam said "That is the biggest poop I have never seen in my whole very long life."

We had to stop so the monkeys could climb in the monkey tree.

Papa found this Junco nest along the trail.

We went up high enough to look for some sheep with no luck but we were treated to some nice looks through the spotting scope at a nest full of Raven chicks on the cliff.

Looking forward to many more family hikes this summer!!