Mount Drum
Have you ever heard of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park? Before we began planning our trip to Alaska, Debbie and I hadn't. We did know that there are A LOT of national parks in the vast 49th state, but we were unaware of this one. It turns out that Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the system at 13.2 million acres. It's six times bigger than Yellowstone. It's even larger than Switzerland - and has taller mountains!
Debbie and I stayed two nights near the park's Visitor Center at one of the Alaskan hotels operated by Princess: Copper River Wilderness Lodge.
Copper River is the smallest of Princess' Wilderness Lodges as not too many people venture here. But we found it to be incredibly scenic and fun to explore. The lodge has its own naturalist (Adam?) who took us on a guided hike during our first evening there after dinner. We had just gotten off our cruise ship eleven hours earlier, and here we were deep in the state of Alaska.
Mount Drum is the closest mountain to this Copper River region, and visible in the background. Our nature hike explored some of the trees and flowers of the area. We didn't get to see any wildlife up close, but you could say we had a brush with a moose as we found "evidence" of its presence.
Moose scat
We also came across many examples of the "national bird" of Alaska, the very ferocious mosquito. The below picture is only a slight exaggeration. I believe the northern climate makes the bugs that much hardier and more aggressive.
On Sunday morning, Debbie and I got up and enjoyed a simple breakfast. We picked up our boxed lunches from the front desk that we had ordered the night before. Then we took the shuttle from the wilderness lodge to the Wrangell-St. Elias Visitor Center. We watched the movie, toured the various buildings, took a guided hike from a park ranger, and enjoyed our picnic lunch with a beautiful view of Mount Drum.
No comments:
Post a Comment