Trip to Denali 2016

Our trip to Denali N.P

Earlier this month Sharon mentioned she always wanted to visit Denali National Park. We've lived in Alaska awhile and had only driven up to the park once. And we wanted to spend a little time there so we decided on a short overnight,

Six years ago when I first put the sidecar on my bike, we took a ride across the 

Denali Highway. 

Denali Highway

Highway

Denali Highway is a lightly traveled, mostly gravel highway in the U.S. state of Alaska. It leads from Paxson on the Richardson Highway to Cantwell on the Parks Highway. Opened in 1957, it was the first road access to Denali National Park. Since 1971, primary park access has been via the Parks Highway, which incorporated a section of the Denali Highway from Cantwell to the present-day park entrance. The Denali Highway is 135 miles in length.

en.wikipedia.org · Text under CC-BY-SA license

• 
  Wikipedia

• Length: 135 miles (217.26 km)
• Formed: 1953

And we stayed at a real nice place that was situated on the Denali Highway and was real clean and reasonably priced but unfortunately I didn't remember the name of the of the place. 

So I went to AirB&B to see if I could find a place to stay, I typed in Cantwell and this picture showed up for the cost of $ 70.00 per night. Generally the prices around Cantwell run $70 at the low to $180. for the high, we're just looking for a place to sleep, $70 sounds pretty good

Follow Link for information on Cantwell

Cantwell Alaska

The place we stayed in six years ago was the the Backwoods Lodge  which is at

 .2 mi. on the Denali Highway and the other is 2mi on the Denali Highway. I pulled into the Backwoods Lodge and was told there were no rooms available and that I never made any reservation with them. I immediately called the number I had on my phone and found out that I really messed up and I should have been at 2 miles on the Denali 

Follow link to where I thought we were going to be staying

Backwoods lodge

The place we actually ended up staying

The building we stayed in is actually a refurbished Man Camp that was gotten off the north slope. The owner added quite a bit of money and time at covering the outside with wood so that it looked less industrial.   

Below is a actual man camp on Prudhoe Bay the building we stayed in is 200 ft long

Sharon wasn't that impressed with the accommodations

There were two doors in each rooms and Sharon thought they were bath rooms but then realized that they were closets  

The bathrooms were way down the hallway

I didn't have any problem sleeping

The Raven was right outside the window

But we're just sleeping here for one night

Inside the visitors centers they have some beautiful dioramas 

Denali and the Alaskan Range View from the South

Definitely the best view to see Denali is from Talkeetna on a clear day

Picture taken from the end of main street Talkeetna Alaska

Looking at the Alaska Range from the park entrance

Our typical ride home with rain potential

Outside the park it really gets pretty commercial 

Glitter Gulch

Follow this link