Train Ride: Anchorage to Denali

9/5

A day I expected would be just a long train ride turned into a breathtaking experience of color and beauty. We set out from the Anchorage hotel to pretty cloudy skies. The train is made for sightseeing—the bottom floor is the dining car, and the second story has a domed roof with clear glass extending all the way from the seats up to the roof (the very top part is slightly tinted for those rare sunny days) giving us the opportunity to see everything so clearly. As we began the ride, one of the first things we saw was the majestic Denali rising above the layer of clouds.

The scenery was quite pretty, especially for us southern Californians—thick lush woods of Aspens, birch, spruce and beech trees with the occasional tinge of fall color on a tree or two or patches of fireweed. 

But as we got farther north, the colors got richer and richer. If you include the blue of the sky, the only color missing was purple! The bottom layer was a bright red carpet of red willow—the color of Burning Bush from the northeast, then moving up were the aspens with their bright white trunks and leaves anywhere from green (not turned yet) through the palest of yellow-green as they began to turn, through yellow, gold and even orange as they got higher up the hills. These were splashed in huge swaths and interspersed with a pale green (I’m not even sure what kind of trees they were) high up on the mountains, to the almost blue dark green of the Spruce trees, and all of it topped with the gray of the tundra. And in addition to all that, the sight that apparently only appears an average of 16 days out of the year, the majestic peaks of Denali, both the north and south peaks, jutting out above the tree line, covered with permanent ice—the highest mountain in the US. The closest anyone can get to Denali without actually being there (on a public road or transportation) is 46 miles away, and that’s from a certain point on the train. But because the air is so clean and clear, you can see the mountain (on a clear day) from both Anchorage and Fairbanks, and we had a number of amazing sightings from the train. I think we took about 200 photos from the train alone!

The ride was about 8 hours—it’s only 230 miles but at times the train goes very, very slowly. But the scenery was so incredible, and the train so comfortable, that the time went very quickly. We stayed right outside the park at a really nice lodge which had a .8 mile nature trail right on the campus. We walked it once to enjoy the beauty, and then ran it 3 times for exercise, before going out for the evening. We had heard that there was a place that sold amazing pizza and local beers, so we tried that, and the reports were correct. We had a fabulous chicken, pesto and sun-dried tomato pizza, Yoram got to try the local brew, “Beavertail Blonde” and we had a very enjoyable evening talking to a guy from outside Stuttgart who was hitchhiking his way around the state while his wife stayed home to study for her final exams…