We look forward to comments and insights from visitors about this special place. Please take a moment to reflect and tell us what Denali means to you.

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More than a hundred years ago, two remarkable men spent the winter in a cabin not far from the present-day Toklat Road Camp. Their experience and interaction with the wild landscape changed them. In turn, they came to have a profound influence on preserving the landscape for generations to come.

Charles Sheldon, an early conservationist and gentleman hunter from Vermont, along with Harry Karstens, a legendary outdoorsman and dog musher, struck upon an idea over the long winter to make of the place the world’s first national park established to conserve wildlife. By 1917, after almost a decade of hard work, Sheldon and others persuaded Congress to create Mount McKinley National Park. Four years later, in 1921, Karstens was hired on as its first superintendent.

We encourage you to take a moment, much as Sheldon and Karstens did together more than a century ago, to think about your experience, and ponder what influence you may wish to have on Denali’s future. For inspiration, here are a few things you can do or discuss with others:

• Sit silently for a full minute and listen carefully for all that you might hear.
  
  
• Before you take a picture, stop. Turn around 360 degrees to take in all that surrounds you.
  
  
• What did you expect before you came to Denali? Once you arrived, what were your first impressions? Do your first impressions still ring true?
  
  
• What would you like Denali to look like in the future?
  
  
• If you had to summarize Denali in one word, what would it be? How will you describe Denali to your family and friends back home six days or six months from now?

 

In the lower level of the Denali Visitor Center is a place where you can express what Denali means to you. Here are a few thoughts shared by past visitors:

• “Denali means new adventures, experiences, sensations, sights and knowledge. My job as I leave this beauty is to let it change me and my treatment of the world.”
  
  
• “Yesterday, two wolves ran along the road right toward our tour bus and passed us. As the first wolf ran by he looked right up at me and for the first time I could see what a truly wild, dangerous, beautiful animal he was just from his eyes. That the wild, dangerous, beautiful world remains here unchanged is food for the soul, and that is what Denali means to me.”
  
  
• “It has taken me 25 years to save and okay this trip. The moment I stepped into Denali I knew it was worth every penny and every moment of planning. I can honestly say that the rest of my life has been changed by this magnificent experience. I’m old – May the young keep it alive for those who follow.”
  
  
• “Traveling through Denali by bus is like a rolling meditation. The driver requests silence as we observe a sow and cub. A deep sense of peace and balance arises within me. Thank you.”

Carolyn Kremers is a 2011 Artist-in-Residence. She has a long-term relationship with, and love for, Denali. In the early 1990s, she was inspired to write the following prose poem.

Backcountry Unit #12                                   

Thirty-eight caribou spill over a ridge and run down the mountain, cross a snowfield, drop into the canyon, splash across Sunrise Creek. They bound up the other side, your side.

A golden eagle tilts in the sun, white tail feathers, pterodactyl wings. Body and spirit spiral up and up and up in an updraft, up and out of range of your binoculars into a blueness you can feel on your face, smell in the blue cool mornings through the mosquito-screened tent.

You are sleeping, walking, cooking in grizzly bear country, and you are loving it. Fresh holes gape in the damp tundra where arctic ground squirrel tunnels have been ripped to roots, huge dirt clods thrown back in a frenzy of paws and claws. The grizzly rarely wins this race, but there will be others. She can run forty miles an hour. You rehearse how to stand your ground, how to face her if she charges. You would think of someone you love or of music. Intricate. And loud.

Denali National Park, once called McKinley, founded in 1917. No one has died here by a grizzly. Twenty maulings, but no one has died. These bears have not learned to associate backpackers with food, and you do not intend to teach them. You cook a hundred yards from your tent, stow raisins and toothpaste in a three-pound bear-proof canister a hundred yards from your kitchen, wash the scent of rice from your hands and face before sleeping. You scan every ridge and willow patch for bears, blonde bears, ravaging, ravishing, thick-furred bears.

Piles of hardening brown scat dot a snowfield. Near Sunrise Glacier, a long hole in the tundra gleams white with sheep hairs, fresh earth scattered all around. Is this a wolf cache, robbed by a bear? Yesterday? Today? Footprints, footprints. Dall sheep, caribou, arctic ground squirrel, fox.

You watch a caribou calf through binoculars, marvel at how the herd clatters down the mountain, over snow, through rushing water, sweeping the spindly calf with it. You search the hillside, see no sign of why they spooked.

A single loon floats in a beaver pond, guarding its mate and an egg. Thumb-sized ptarmigan chicks hop in the grass. This is the day after Solstice. Night never falls. Tiny pink moss campion flowers glow on green cushions, fluorescent pink, fluorescent green.

You will camp in this country for three days, wake every morning to creekwater music; to concerts of snowbirds, robins, Lapland longspurs; to a necklace of snow gracing green jagged mountains. Cradled in the singing, in a large life cycle, a deep picture, you will forget that you could fall prey to a startling brown blur more decimating than any accident or disease in a civilized place.

These things will stick, they will go back with you. And leaving little trace, you will take all that you can.