Talkeetna

The next day was our big travel day. We woke up in Seward and caught the bus up to our next stop, Talkeetna. We took a two-and-a-half-hour drive back up to Anchorage, catching a ton of beautiful views of mountains and lakes on the way. We had lunch at 49^th State Brewery in Anchorage. The brewery had a rooftop that offered some great views of the city and the bay, and it was a clear enough day that we even caught a view of the tip of Denali.

We hopped back in the bus to Talkeetna, the gateway into Denali National Park. The drive was about 2.5 hours, and as we got closer and closer to Talkeetna, the peak of Denali again started to peak over the horizon and pop in and out of view.

When we finally reached our hotel, nothing could have prepared us for the view. I’d been told in the upgrades that we got that we were getting a “mountain view” room, but I didn’t understand until we were actually entering our room just how incredible the “mountain view” really was. We took in the view from our room, the hotel’s deck, and the restaurant, staying up late to catch the sunset (although “sunset” is a loose term. Although the sun did set, it never gets 100% dark this far north during the summer).     

The next day we spent in Talkeetna. I’d heard that Talkeetna was a pretty small town, and essentially just the gateway to Denali. A lot of what people did in Talkeetna were plane and helicopter rides, but neither my mom nor Becca are comfortable with small planes, so that was off the table. So a few days before, my mom and I looked into alternative options. We settled on two activities, with about two hours in between to have lunch in the town. Although we didn’t have particularly high expectations of either of the activities, especially since they were both fairly random in comparison to the rest of the trip that had been planned by the company, but ultimately they turned out to be pretty fun and a good way to spend the day.

The first activity was a boat ride on the Talkeetna River. This seemed like the best option to get some different views of the Denali mountain without having to resort to taking flight. The first hour of our boat ride was indeed trying to go upriver to get some great views of the mountain. The views did not disappoint. The second hour of the boat ride, we learned a bit about the salmon that would be in the streams in a matter of days, the silt-water that ran in the river, down from the glaciers, and the dry cabins that existed all along the river. We also got out of the boat and took a short walk through the forest. In the forest, there was a replica of a traditional Dena’ina (Alaskan Native Tribe) camp, as well as a trapper’s cottage. The tour guide told us a bit of the history of both the Native Alaskan and trappers of the area. Then, it was already the end of our tour, and we took a quick 15-minute boat ride back to the docks.

After the boat ride, we took a quick walk into the center of the town. We were able to catch yet another view of the Denali peak, as well as wandering through the town’s small shops, grabbing lunch, and visiting the town’s historical museum. Then, we headed off to our second activity of the day.

The second activity was dog sledding. Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s summer, you can’t do dog sledding. True. But we went to the kennel of a six-time Iditarod champion, Dallas Seavey. The Iditarod is the annual long-distance dog sled ride from Anchorage to Nome. Dallas Seavey was the youngest winner of the Iditarod, and as of his 2024 win, he is the winningest musher in Iditarod history. He is extremely dedicated to the sport and his dogs, getting maybe 9 total hours of sleep over the 9-ish day race to ensure he’s able to prioritize his dogs’ health and safety. As part of balancing their summer rest time with their winter training, Dallas has designed carts that the dogs can pull during the summer in lieu of the winter sleds.

Dog sledding is not something I would have even thought to consider before about a year ago. But when stuck next to a chatty old man on a plane home from Calgary two years ago, I learned about summer mushing for the first time. This man, who talked to me for literally the whole flight from Calgary to Chicago, raised a bunch of huskies and was somewhat of an amateur musher. He told me about how the dogs always got so excited to run and had so much energy, to the point that he’d had to create a similar contraption to make sure the dogs were entertained and got a chance to pull something over the summer. They were itching to go out every single day, up and ready to go before he even started his day. He told me about how they preferred to sleep outside because their coats kept them so warm they were otherwise libel to get overheated. And all of his discussion about how much the dogs genuinely loved the mushing gave me a stronger appreciation for the sport and an understanding of certain aspects of it that I might not have understood prior.

The conversation with the man on the plane made it so that when the option was “sit down at the hotel or in the small town for a number of hours with my always-needs-to-be-moving mother” or “do a dog sled ride and kennel tour”, the choice was pretty simple.

Now, I know what else you’re thinking. Theresa, you’re very allergic to dogs. Also true. But it was an opportunity that didn’t come around every day, and I had my medicine. So I hiked up my big girl pants, and we spent the afternoon with some hard-working dogs.

We arrived at the kennel, met some of the retired dogs, and then headed outside to learn about the dogs’ training, stories, and races. First, we drove the summer-sled contraption. The summer-sled had been specifically designed by Dallas to both give visitors as accurate an experience to winter sledding as possible while also supporting the dogs’ summer conditioning. We spent about 45 minutes hitched up to a 4-dog team, going down the private forest trails with our guides. Becca and I were drivers of the summer-sleds, while mom rode along with me. One dog on my team and one dog on Becca’s had run in, and won, the Iditarod.

From there, we got a more in-depth tour of the kennels, meeting dogs, including Dallas’s oldest still-competing dog, a few dogs who had been part of the various tragedies that had befallen the sled teams in the last year. (In the 2023/2024 season, a drunk driver of a snowmobile had hit one of the sled teams causing injuries to a few of the dogs and the devastating loss of two dogs. To add to that, during the Iditarod, Dallas’s sled team had run over an obstacle in the snowy path that had turned out to be a prone moose. The moose ended up injuring a dog who’d been rehabbed from the snowmobile crash. Luckily, the team employs a very good vet who was able to support the continued rehabilitation of the injured dogs. Although they likely won’t be able to race in long-term races again, the 45-minute turn around the forest paths is a way for them to continue doing what they love, and some of the more rehabilitated dogs have already started running the 2-mile summer runs again.

After the older dogs, we got to meet a set of 8-month-old dogs who were just beginning their sled-dog training. They were cute, but the real stars of the show were the two-month-old puppies. We got a chance to go into their enclosure as part of the attempts to acclimatize the puppies to people. We all picked up a puppy or two, and the rest pulled at our shoelaces, making valiant efforts to untie them.

It was hard to pull ourselves away, but we finished up the tour with more information about the Iditarod and Dallas Seavey’s wins.

Then, we headed back to our hotel with about an hour to spare before our bus was supposed to pick us up and take us to Denali. We enjoyed the view of Denali from the lobby, taking in what should have been our final moments of the most impressive view ever.

That’s where things took an inconvenient turn. In the only true hiccup of an otherwise flawless trip, the allergic reaction I’d been anticipating occurred about 20 minutes before our bus was supposed to arrive. 20 minutes before our bus was supposed to arrive was also right when we were supposed to be outside, according to the fine print on the tickets. Somehow, I’d become team lead for a lot of the tour things because I ended up finalizing the details with the tour company while my mom was in Ireland. But through a variety of miscommunications, neither my mom nor my sister realized we were supposed to be outside that early, I ended up having to get my allergic reaction under control before we all ended up at the bus stop. We were still 5 minutes early, which should have been fine. We’d paid for tickets and were on their list. But we waited. We checked with the various buses that were around. The minutes ticked by. And we realized that the bus had left without us.

First, we were told by a bus driver from the same company who radioed his colleague that they would be coming back for us. But after an hour of waiting, we were forced to acknowledge that we’d truly been left behind. Then, we started calling around. First to the bus company, who did not respond because it was after hours. Then to the tour company, who also did not respond because it was after hours. Then to the hotel we were supposed to stay at that night. Then to a few taxi services, one of which did not pick up and another that said they would drive us the two-and-a-half hour drive for a reasonable price, but they would only take cash. The cash machine at the hotel wasn’t working, and my mom had used all her cash for tips.

Finally, Becca called the tour company’s emergency number. She chatted with the employee on the other end, and then a few minutes later the woman called back with a solution.

Another bus was supposed to come about three hours later. They were a bit delayed because of a crash near Anchorage, but they would have space for us. Our original bus was supposed to depart around 5:45. At this point, it was already around 7. The bus should be there between 10 and 10:30. We could wait.

We grabbed dinner, and I took a quick nap in one of the rocking chairs looking out onto the view. A little later, we got a text from the company apologizing for the mix-up and informing us that our bus would arrive around 11:30 since the traffic had turned out to be much worse than anticipated. But we would be refunded for the original bus trip.

I continued to nap, and finally around 11, anxious about missing our second bus, we went outside to continue to wait. The bus did arrive just a bit after 11:30, and we got on it as soon as it stopped and the departures had unboarded. We got going before 12 for what should have been a 2.5-hour drive. But the bus driver was having a much longer day than expected, and she wasn’t used to driving in the relative darkness. She drove the route slowly, and we didn’t end up arriving at our hotel until about 3:15, more than 30 minutes later than anticipated.

We checked into our hotel in Denali and were in bed right at 3:35. We needed to wake up by 4:45 in order to catch a 5 AM tour of the park. In total, between our hour-long sleep in our Denali hotel and our various cat-naps throughout the night, each of us got a maximum of 3 hours of sleep that night. But we were ready for the next day, when it came. We were seeing Denali National Park, our second National Park of the trip and home to the Denali peak.