And lo - yet again, no grue.

[camwyn]

I'm at the Riley Creek Mercantile just inside Denali National Park, waiting for my laundry to get finished. The washing machine takes about half an hour. It's sort of necessary; at this point my other jeans are kind of caked in mud. I wore them for my attempt on Mount Healy the other day, and then yesterday I wore them to Denali Saddle Safaris.

DSS is a company on the northern side of the park that does horseback riding in the vicinity of the mountains. You don't actually go inside the park. What you get for your $65 (one hour) or $85 (two) is, however, pretty close. The price pays for a shuttlebus from the Park visitor center or your hotel, plus a guided ride over the public-use tundra that stretches from the local town to the edge of the park. Given that it's 13 miles to the visitor center, and that you've got a round trip being paid for, the shuttle driver would appear to get roughly $1 a mile - not a bad bargain no matter how you slice it.

The riding is done Western style - you get a cowboy saddle and a pair of reins that you're told to hold in one hand. The horses are matched to your experience and approximate weight, which is more of a consideration than you'd think given that tundra in general gives new meaning to the word 'soggy'. (Hey, two feet down is permafrost. If there's any rain at all within two days of your ride it's gonna still be in the soil when you get out there.) The guide - in my case a late twentysomething named Brian - knows his stuff, and happily tells you all about the land, the landscape, the horses, the park, whatever you want. The scenery is absolutely amazing, and even though it can take close to an hour to get a mile and a half out onto the tundra, I think it's worth it. Lord knows I would be hard put to get anywhere NEAR that far - we're talkin' yards and yards on end of the kind of sog that I hit on the University campus!

My horse was a decent sort, a gelding (at least I assume it's a gelding) named River. Kept trying to eat at every turn, even though he gets fed perfectly well back home. There were two other people on the ride besides myself and the guide, one of whom was a gentleman named Lorenzo who works for the local Princess resort. When he found out I wanted to go rafting but couldn't, he said Princess' company was still accepting bookings. I tried calling them when I got back to the hostel but they only had slots open for a 6 PM ride. That would be, um, COLD - given that it's an hour of prep time followed by two hours on the raft. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Anyway, the horses did awfully well, and I got some really lovely shots of th e north side of the Alaska range. Today I am going to do my laundry and then, with any luck, get all the way up the Mount Healy trail since rafting =! in the picture. No great loss, really. Thought I'd try, that's all. Tomorrow I go to the park for a few hours, then get a bus at 1:30ish that takes me back to Fairbanks. All should be well, and I will report again when I get there.