Travels with Samantha Slide Show Page 8

A huge rainbow directly in front of me lured me south to Denali. The two-lane highway follows a ridge with lake-filled valleys on both sides. It looks like wilderness, but there is some sign of land use, either an unmarked dirt road or a mailbox or a business at least once every five or ten miles. I was reminded of how much more settled Alaska is with 500,000 people than the Yukon Territory with 30,000.

Denali means "the great one" or "the big one" in the local native tongue. Denali National Park is slightly larger than Massachusetts, contains one gravel road, and no trails. If you have the constitution and wilderness survival skills of a grizzly bear, it is a very pleasant place to spend a summer. I arrived there at midnight to find the north sky dappled with yellow and orange clouds; the south sky was a soft blue. I drove about 14 miles into the park, as far as one can with a private vehicle, and imagined that I saw 20,320' Mt. McKinley from the highway, something that is only possible on 30% of summer days.

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The gates to Paradise were locked for a couple of days so a baptist Army chaplain told me of his plans to kill all of Alaska's wolves while I sat in the back of a whitewater raft

[BIG].

Once I did get into Denali, the scenery was quite remarkable . Riding 11 hours in a noisy schoolbus didn't help me appreciate the wildlife inside or out (note the activity of the right caribou) [BIG].

I did see my first wolf in the wild but ISO 50 film, a 500mm, and his vast distance from the road made the picture less than satisfying.

Like most visitors, I never got a proper look at Mt. McKinley from inside the park.

"I was part of a high school graduation class of 7. I was 17 with $1500 and a backpack and decided that I could just as easily flip burgers in Hawaii as in Barnes. After 18 months in Hawaii, I went back to U. of Wyoming on a swimming scholarship. One of the first guys I met was Dan Shane, a doctoral student in molecular biology. We teamed up taking graduate courses for three years. I was doing great, but the department wouldn't give me a bachelor's because I didn't have the prerequisites.

I left school in 1991 and started backpacking across the U.S. If it didn't fit in the backpack, it didn't fit in my life. Last year, I came up here to work in the canneries and met some Chileans and Argentineans. We hitchhiked across Alaska, caught a plane ride to Seattle, and hitchhiked to Nogales, Mexico. From there, I went with Gonz, the Chilean, for four months in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras."

Nicaragua didn't appeal to Woody because people there are too accustomed to violence.

"They have rehabilitation camps so guys who've been carrying guns from the age of 8 can learn to shake hands without shooting each other."

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