July 8, 2009

This morning it was smokier than yesterday. We left Denali National Park and headed down the Parks Highway to Talkeetna. When we were breaking camp Nancy took the dogs to the dumpster to dump our trash. When she turned to head back to our camp site a mama moose and her baby walked out of the trees onto the road about 30 feet in front of her. She had a horrible flashback for a minute but the moose just continued across the road and into the trees.
We did get some fairly good views of Mt. McKinley through the smoke.


We stopped at the Alaska Veterans Memorial in Denali State Park. It is a very nice memorial honoring Alaskan veterans.


We got into Talkeetna in the afternoon and almost didn’t get a camping spot. They are having the Moose Dropping Festival this weekend and almost all the camping sites were spoken for, but as we weren’t going to be here over the weekend, we were able to get a site for one night.


Talkeetna is a small town with lots of touristy type shops and many flightseeing companies. We did manage to find a very good peach cobbler sundae Mmmm. There is a major airport for Mt. McKinley and glacier flights and a major stop on the Anchorage to Denali railroad route – all just a few steps behind our campground. Good thing they don’t fly at night or we wouldn’t get any sleep (although it doesn’t get dark here until about the middle of September).
We read in the Anchorage newspaper that there are currently 85 fires burning in Alaska – no wonder we are seeing smoke. We’ll head south tomorrow.

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