We woke up nice and early to get ready the bus ride. We had breakfast at the Perky Pantry Moose. The coffee was good the breakfast was ok, something to get us through the day. We picked up our lunch that we had ordered the day before. It was $18 came with a lunch bag we got to keep, sandwich (we had 4 options to choose from), orange, cookie (that was very hard), granola bar, and bottle of water. Once we were done with breakfast we went outside to wait for out bus to arrive at 6:40 am!!! The bus arrived and it was a school bus with charter bus style seats. We selected to go all the way to the last 3 rows of the bus. We store what we could in the racks above our heads. The tour bus also provided us with a water and snack box (pretzels, nuts, cookie). The bus wasn’t full which was amazing so we go to spread out a little bit. Now for the fun of looking for animals along our 63 mile ride into the park. We booked through the Denali Park Village and did the Tundra Wilderness tour that was 7-8 hours long.

The morning was very foggy and we were worried we were going to be part of the 70% of people that do not get to see the peaks of Mt. Denali. As we were passing into the park we saw a snowshoe hare and shortly after the we found our first Moose. Our guide stopped once to show us the Ravens, Snowshoe hare, and ground squirrel and let us know we would see them a lot during out trip.

We were getting excited about the prospect of seeing the mountain as the sky was clearing up and we could see it peaking out during the drive. The driver still wanted to make sure and stop to show us the wildlife, but we also knew the longer we drove the clouds may come back out and cover the mountain. The bus driver was good about stopping when she saw animals. As we were driving she said we are going to stop because some of the buses were stopped up ahead. The reason for the stopping was a grizzly bear!!!! That is exactly what I had been hoping to see on this trip. I was so excited to watch him run in the field around the bus, then he ran in front of the bus. It was so exciting how close he came to the bus.

After seeing the bead we continued to drive and came across some Caribou. We stopped and watched them for a few minutes before continuing around until we reached the turn out of the viewing of Mt. Denali. We stopped there for a few minutes getting a view of the mountain. Then it was time to drive back down. We stopped back and watched to Caribou again and could see the grizzly off in the distance running in our direction. We were wondering if the bear was heading in the direction of the caribou. We were wondering if we were going to get an Animal Planet moment if the bear was able to catch up the caribou, but we lost the bear down in the raven and the caribou moved off to higher ground. So now animal planet movement, but it was time to continue to drive on back towards the entrance of the park.

This bus tour made stops about every 90 minutes for bathroom and stretch breaks. Each stop was only about 10 minutes, so there was not a lot of time to look around a few more minutes would’ve been nice. They tried to keep the stops short, so there was more time to spend looking at the animals and enjoying the view of Mt. Denali. It was a great tour the company offered longer and shorter tours. Going through the park you also had the option to do a hop on hop off bus if you want to spend time hiking or at a specific stop.