Our night backcountry camping in Denali

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

While in Alaska, we spent 1 night backcountry camping in Denali.  It was a great experience, but much more fun to look back on than some of the hiking was in the moment haha.  Keep in mind that we are pretty new to the backpacking world, and only had day hiking experiences prior to this.  Also, we should have done some things differently to make the most of the experience.  I’ll do a separate post on what would have made our lives easier :)

We had a lot of good intentions to practice hiking with our packs and other research and planning but life got really busy with things we couldn’t control, so we did the best we could.  I still felt prepared enough to be safe, but knew it would be hard.

Since we were in the park a couple days before they opened up buses to the further units, we had less options, but still plenty to choose from.

Watching our bus drive away was such a weird feeling!

The views were beautiful, and though the hiking was a bit intense for me, it sure was nice to admire the scenery during my many breaks :)

Caribou off in the distance.  Minus a few small birds, this was the only wildlife we saw while camping in Denali.  Although we did see a moose and her calf on the bus ride back when we were done!  I wasn’t quick enough to get a picture of them though.  (We made a trip later to the Alaska zoo to see some Grizzly Bears and other animals)

Some of the terrain we hiked through… makes for some slow moving!

But seriously, the views!  The hike down was much easier than the hike up :)

Although we had a wonderful time in the end, it’s true what they say, the more you put into planning a trip, the more you get out of it.

I’ll be posting about our supplies, and things we learned to improve future trips soon :)