Savage River Canyon

Once I learn the layout of a park, its geography, landmarks, terrain, and such, I feel more comfortable leaving the marked trails and travelling across the wilderness. Denali is tremendously huge, as I mentioned above, but its layout is very open and simple. There is a mountain range (the Alaska Range, including Mt. McKinley) running 100 miles along its south side. There's a wide-open valley of tundra and tiaga forest running east to west across its middle, and a range of much smaller rock mountains in its north. The mountains in both north and south are pierced for miles with canyons and gorges. Several of the gorges on the north side provide outlets for the rivers of the valley. The park road runs for 89 miles along the southerly edge of the northern (smaller) mountain range, giving good views towards the south of the huge snow-covered peaks of the Alaska Range. For all its size, Denali has pitifully few hiking trails marked on its map. Rocky Mountains Nat'l Park brags about its two thousand miles of trails, even Shenandoah has hundreds of miles of trails. There are probably fewer than 20 miles of trails marked on the park map of Denali, and almost all of them are at the park entrance and visitor center. Denali is so free of visitors (because of its location), the rangers don't mind you hiking cross-country anywhere you want to. You can walk miles and miles across the tiaga forest and tundra of the valley to get to the rocky snow-covered peaks of the Alaska range. Or you can stay closer to the road by exploring the gorges, hollers, ravines, and maybe go up to the summits and ridges of the northern mountains. At mile marker 15 there is a short, marked, 1-mile walking trail that follows the Savage River downstream a ways through a rocky, but not very steep, gorge. It crosses the river and comes back up the other side. It is an easy walk, and at only 2700 feet above sea level, isn't very strenuous. The only obstacles are a couple of snow fields and mud bogs along the tundra of the rock mountainside. At the end of the trail, where it crosses the river and starts back on the other side, I kept going for another mile or so into the wilderness down the canyon, deeper into the smaller southerly mountain range. I was following the river and the walking was easy and open and very enjoyable. I climbed a few hundred feet up the rocky tundra once or twice just to get away from the slushy bogs from the ice melts. Below is the view looking back up the canyon, across the valley to the snow-covered peaks in the south. Click on the picture below and look in the exact center and you can see the only other two people I saw on the trail. This gives you some perspective of the size of the river, which looks tiny in the pictures above and below, but in reality is quite wide and deep. The picture below is taken from where I turned around, about a mile or two past the end of the formal trail. This is from several hundred feet up, looking down the canyon to the north, deeper into the smaller mountain range. The summits here are around the 4000-foot level above the valley floor (as opposed to the 14,000 foot average of the snow-covered peaks of the Alaska Range 20 miles behind me as I took this picture). I don't know how much further the canyon goes, but it looks like several more miles at least.

This is the outfall of a small glacier that empties into the canyon about half a mile pasts the end of the formal marked trail.

I spent about two hours on this hike -- very peaceful and relaxing, with meeting only two other people the whole trip.