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WOOOHOOOO! Look at that lil guy hiding in the leaves (Y-shaped branch pictured in the background was part of the alder that broke when I grabbed it, which made me fall, which made my phone take a trip down-slope)

This post is slightly delayed update due to lots of fun things going on over the past few weeks. I hit you with a whole boatload of text in 2026-06-28 to 2026-07-02 - First Overnight Fieldwork + Lost Phone (rip), so we'll keep this one light with plenty of pics - including some retrieved from my temporarily misplaced phone.

I did some additional field work during the week - I'll share some pics from that before getting to the lost-but-now-found photos.

Livin' fine up in the alpine!

Borrowing a book about a couple who spent a year living in Paradise Inn on Mount Rainier, but we've also got some pretty paradisiacal sites in Denali!

There may not be sunny, sandy, beaches up here. However, you can kick your feet back, relax, and read a book up in an alpine meadow which is pretty cool! (Photos taken on a lunch break while doing equipment maintenance)

Fun Plants!

A stellar example of Yellow Moose Dung Moss (splachnum luteum). A funky (and apparently somewhat uncommon) plant that, as the name suggests, likes to grow starting in a pile of moose droppings.

Dwarf Fireweed (Chamaenerion latifolium), closely related to our normal fireweed which recently started flowering all over. This version is shorter and grows in mats rather than long stalks. Fun fact: it's the national flower of Greenland, where it goes by the name Niviaqsiaq

Slightly blurry, but here's a Tundra Rose / Shrubby Cinquefoil (dasiphora fruticosa)

And finally ... we'll start off our photos from my recovered phone. Here's a meadow of Mountain Avens (dryas octopetala) in the alpine tundra!

Patrol Photos!

Misty views of the Teklanika River valley from day 1 - I think this was during a brief break from the rain.

Fortunately, the winds weren't too bad (although it was still a bit noisy blowing against my tent the first night), so we were able to set up camp with a view.

We stopped here for a snack/meditative catnap break and just quietly soaked in the sights and sounds. You can see the rain falling on both the left and right sides of the image, but this spot was nicely sheltered at the time.

There's a rainbow on the other side of the rain!

Rainbow One

Rainbow Two

The Backcountry Rangers with whom I was working survey the valley through the lens of our second rainbow!

For this update, I'll end with an excerpt from a write-up I did for our park newsletter after the trip:

We shwacked through wet brush, got rained on plenty, woke up in the clouds, hunkered down in our cook tent, and I misplaced a phone. However, on day 2, after watching the weather systems undulate through the topography around (and on top of) us all day, more patches of light began to appear. Though the last fits of rain weren't done just yet, the sun brought much-appreciated warmth and the stunning, ephemeral sight of a double rainbow off the ridgeline.

Sunshine and sweeping vistas are lovely (and make for clearer pictures), but the rain and fog and clouds contribute to the landscape's dynamism as well. Without our time in the Denali drizzle, we wouldn't have gotten our rainbows! ... Keep on bringing your sunshine to other people's lives — it could be just the moment for a rainbow that comes after a storm!

The Mountain peers over the ridge line to greet us on our final morning!