Solstice Day!
We woke up and it was raining. Pretty hard. We had planned to go biking, but decided to bag it because of the rain. Instead we hiked around a bit and saw a big beaver dam near the lodge. It's amazing how well built it was -- at first I thought it was man made, until I saw the back side.
In the afternoon we went for a walk along the road out by Wonder Lake. It was not raining, but still pretty wet. Out there we saw more signs of beavers, including this enormous beaver lodge:
And along the roadside we saw these trees -- notice how they are gnawed.
That's from porcupines!
After dinner, we went back up to Wonder Lake. The clouds were breaking up, and Mt McKinley finally came into view, for the first time since we got to Denali!
Here's the panorama of the Wonder Lake area, with a view of the Alaska range and Mt McKinley (note that this was taken at 11pm).
While we were enjoying this wonderful view, all of the sudden:
Moose on the Loose!
Yeah, I know, blurry shot -- I was scrambling to get the picture before he left. But he didn't leave. He just wandered down to the lake to start drinking.
And then, with both the mountain and the moose out, I got a few great shots:
After this, a second moose came out, a large cow. We figured maybe it was time to skedaddle, before the moose started to outnumber the humans...