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We'll put this in here just in case: Disclaimer: you can read more about the history of the mountain currently officially referred to as Mount McKinley here. Ohioan politicians really dedicated a lot of time to preserving that name back in the day.

Several weeks in, and I finally got the chance to see THE mountain out in all its glory!

Putting the "Denali" in Denali National Park & Preserve

I saw the mountain on multiple occasions this week! The first was during our weekly run club. We bussed out along the park road and ran to the aptly named "Mountain Vista" area to take advantage of a beautifully sunny and clear day.

During fieldwork, we got a gorgeous view of the Alaska range expanding out into the distance that also include the mountain (right side of the image in the distance)!

All I can say is AAAH what a mountain it is! I was just staring sideways for a good chunk of our run to take in the unclouded view of a 20,310ft peak. The pictures don't quite do it justice.

Additional fun fact: Denali measures 18,000ft from base to peak, which makes it the tallest mountain from base to peak on land. Everest may have a higher summit elevation, but Denali starts out much lower.

A sobering and dangerous place to climb though. There have been some sad incidents up there over the past few weeks.

More Fieldwork!

We got some more acoustic monitoring equipment and an aircraft logger out this week. Planes are one of the major noise sources in Denali (and in most parks), so it's super valuable to cross-reference flight paths with the sound levels collected by our microphones.

A beautiful sunny day for our second acoustic monitoring site deploy!

We had to cross the Teklanika River shown in the valley below to get to the site. A very chilly bit of water with some fast flow, so you have to solve the puzzle of determining the least risky way to cross a river. You also have to account for a potential rise in water levels due to storms and/or snowmelt on your return trip. Wow the views are great though!

Me harnessed up on the radio tower ziptie-ing the power cable for our aircraft logger. A little bit awkward to climb with all the things sticking out but was a fun extra step in getting our equipment mounted.

We've gotten a good bit of our equipment out, so next steps for fieldwork will be maintenance of our existing sites combined with a more remote multi-day trek out to our third acoustic monitoring site of the season. My supervisor will also be assisting other parks in Alaska with deployments of the same monitoring setup which is a cool responsibility!

Flora and Fauna

A Wooly Lousewort (Pedicularis lanata)! Another fun fuzzy plant that pops up in high tundra ecosystems. This isn't the crispest pic, but what can I say, I like pink or purple flowers that pop out of barren environments.

'bou on the chew! The big herds of caribou don't like to hang out around people, but you get a few of them along the road semi-regularly! There's apparently a massive (estimated >100k individuals) herd called the Porcupine that roams the far north of Alaska and Canada.

American Three-toed Woodpecker going hard in the paint (idk any good rhymes for woodpecker - best I could come up with is "these woodpeckers ain't playin checkers"). There's been an increase in spruce beetle infestations up here in recent years which is probably a bit sad if you're a spruce tree, but heck yeah that's a bonanza of little snacks wriggling around in the tree if you're a woodpecker.

This ain't the most impressive summit view, but it's a visually appealing (at to my lil brain) blend of feather moss and last season's detritus and fungus and spruce needles and hail from a quick cloudburst that I think really captures how many different things are going on in the spring-summer transition here in Denali. There are so many natural processes that you can dedicate a whole career to studying that are happening all around us each and every day.

Finding the beauty in each moment

We may have had sunshine and sweeping vistas the past week, but there's beauty to be found in the rain and fog and clouds as well. I didn't fully see the mountain until multiple weeks after moving here, but that's all part of the experience. So I'll close this week's blog with a quote shamelessly stolen from a friend's ranger presentation.

Whether you see the mountain or not, whether you're in the Alaskan wilderness or the desert southwest or the great plains, it can be nice to stop and remember that...

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

And there's your little bit of park ranger wisdom for the week - take a moment to stop in a natural place and hear, see, and smell what's around you. I hope y'all can find the beauty of the current unique picture where you live this week!