Day 4

Woke up early (630am) and drank coffee on the ridge over our campsite for almost an hour staring at an unclouded sunrise on Denali, Muldrow Glacier and the surrounding mountains. Life altering beauty to see.

The sun was out so we threw every item of clothing out to dry while we breakfasted and packed up. Managed to make Mark's pack manageable with some extra OR cinch straps and lightening of load a bit. We decided to take the higher elevation contour on the way out and billy goating up a very steep skree slope successfully (VERY STEEP SKREE...Kate is getting braver).

Unfortunately, as happens in Denali, our route got marshy and we ended up getting funneled back to basically where we crossed on the way into Glacier Creek but the river was running much lower this time and we forded without any problem or worry, maybe because by then our boots had been wet for 4 days.. what does a couple more immersions matter?

As we approached the final stretch before the cliffy bluff that the road sits on, we noticed the tour buses stopping to look at something...a mama bear with two cubs go running across the road and down the bluff into a drainage directly next to our intended route up to the road, SHIT!

We cut to the right trying to give the brushy area near the drainage wide berth just in case mama bear comes down to the river. Mark points and grabs me by the arm. Mama bear and two cubs are sitting 300 yards away from us and looking right at us! We stop dead in our tracks and start walking slowly backwards with bear spray in hand. She watches us for awhile and even walks toward us for a few steps with her cubs in tow...but then takes a turn perpendicular to us and walks toward the river. Whew. Terrified, we start to walk toward the road, carefully avoiding any areas near where she was...I was terrified and nearly had lost my capacity to walk, but...with a few tears of fear and lots of courage we made it to the road only to wait for two hours for the bus. The Denali Bus system is a great deal, they provide you a pick up and drop off anywhere on the road in the park but when you (like us) are at a point between bus stops you have a pretty vague sense of when you will be picked up because the bus often stops to look at bears for several minutes between stops. Nobody is in a hurry in Denali.

We grabbed the first bus for Toklat. Toklat is a bus stop for all tour buses, I guess you could describe it as a Denali Rest Stop of sorts...bathrooms, gift shop, good viewpoint of the Toklat river etc. We dropped a food cache there on Day 1 and were now returning to restock.

We unloaded our garbage and repacked our packs with our food...pretty straightforward, except for the tourists. They swarmed. Lots of questions. "How do you cook out there?" "Is there animals out there?" It was hilarious and a bit of an ego boost, they thought we were really something :)

We hiked up the west side of the Toklat River and made camp about a mile up. Made camp and some delicious spaghetti. Washed up and SLEPT SO GOOD!!