June Hikes, Part 1: Savage River Canyon and Mount Healy

Obviously I haven't been updating this regularly for the past few weeks, so it's probably about time for a photo dump from the hikes I've done.

The first one actually wasn't in June at all (May 31 is close enough though), nor was it even a hike that I intended to do.  I was trying to traverse a ridge that extends between two river canyons, but I missed all three of the turnoffs leading up to the top from the eastern end, the Savage River Canyon.  After having attempted (and failed) to get to the summit a second time a week later, I have no idea how I didn't see the paths to the top.  They're not really trails, exactly (more on that later), but they've been used by enough people that there are established routes up.

The view from the southern end of the canyon.

I ended up hiking to the northern end of the canyon, 4 or 5 miles one way from the bridge at the southern end.  It actually turned out to be interesting though.  The environment is very different from the wide glacial valleys in the road corridor - the Savage River goes very quickly from the U-shaped valley carved by glaciers to a V-shaped canyon.  The wide valleys are covered in plants, although trees are sparse even at 2700 feet, while the canyon is rocky and, with the exception of a couple swampy spot, mostly devoid of everything other than lichens and wispy grasses.

There were a lot of boulders in the way.

There is a maintained trail that goes about a mile into the canyon, but as you can see in the last picture, enough people hike beyond the end of it that it's pretty easy to stick to a path in all but the northernmost section.  I should note that Denali isn't like most national parks, where you're supposed to stick to trails at all times.  Outside of the park entrance area, there aren't many maintained trails, and you're encouraged to wander wherever you want to go.  I'll probably have more on that later, but suffice it to say that I much prefer it to being confined to a single path.

The trail is pretty much gone at this point.

As the canyon widens at its northern end, the areas close to the river start to get boggy and choked with brush.  Hiking through that is more chore than fun, so I turned around and headed back to catch the shuttle at the bridge.  I still got a glimpse of the view to the north though, and the low ridge system with lots of green covering it is completely different from the rocky, gray Alaska Range to the south.

***

The next day, I hiked up Mount Healy and along the ridge system at the top for somewhere between 1 and 2 miles.  The mountain is right next to the park entrance - the trailhead (there's a maintained route up to an overlook at the end of one of the arms of the ridge) is not far from the park Visitor Center.  But it's not a trail that your average tourist takes, or at least completes.  The trail to the overlook is only a mile and a half long, but it climbs over 1500 feet.  Even that doesn't tell the whole story, since it gets progressively steeper until you're basically switchbacking up a near-vertical rock face at the very end.

Looking south from the ridge.

Once you're up on the ridge, the trail levels out, although again, it's not officially maintained.  There are occasional rock formations that you have to go over or around, and there is a general rise to the summit a few miles away (I didn't make it that far).  After long sections of 50% grades, however, anything close to flat was a welcome rest.

I went around this one.

From the ridge, I could see smoke rising from the forest fire that is still burning about 10 miles north of here.  We've gone through a rainy stretch in the past 10 days or so, but before that it had been extremely dry, and forest fires had been popping up all over the place in Interior Alaska (in the general vicinity of Fairbanks, there are separate fires covering 35 and 90 square miles).  Unfortunately, the smoke didn't show up well on camera, but it's a little startling to be living that close to even a relatively small fire of only a few hundred acres.

Looking to the south, the colors of the Alaska Range mountains almost look painted on.  The photograph doesn't do it justice, but you can get an idea of how it transitions from green to brown to gray almost in layers.  The farthest line of peaks has an almost moon-like paleness because they're so far away and the light is traveling through so much air.  Denali, when viewed from about 10 miles into the park, takes this to an extreme, to the point that it's difficult to get it to show up at all on camera (not to mention that it's only visible from there about 25% of the time in the summer).  I made an attempt though, and by playing around with my camera settings, I got it to be visible.  Everything else in the picture looks really strange though because I had to shorten the exposure length so much.

Denali is about 75 miles away at this point, to give you some idea of the scale.  The top of the high mountain to the left of it is about 2000 feet above where I took this picture (about 5000 feet above sea level) and only 5 or so miles away.  Denali is 17000 feet above this spot (20320' above sea level).

In other news, this weather report is tons of fun.

I'm too far north for satellites.

At this point in the year, we don't reach civil twilight, which means the sun never even gets as far as 6º below the horizon.  Because of that, you can start a round of golf at 11 PM, and on Monday night (the solstice) there will be an all night (I use the term night very loosely) set of baseball games in Fairbanks.

Regarding the aurora: it's way too bright at night to be able to see it and has been since I got here.  It should get dark enough to be able to see it in August though.  So that's why you haven't seen anything about it.