DENALI, Alaska — Passengers on Princess cruise ships have three choices when it comes to seeing the Denali National Park. You can spend 4 hours riding a school bus, 8 hours riding a school bus or 13 hours riding a school bus.
Now, in case you think that sounds like torture worse than being punished for cheating on an exam in the eighth grade, a funny thing happens when your Denali tour ends.
You forget you were on a school bus.
That’s the only way you can navigate the 92-mile road that penetrates this 6.2 million acres of parkland, because those are the National Parks rules. Naturally, Princess Cruisetours play by the rules. The buses come with a guide to explain the landscape and the wildlife. The deeper you go into the park, the more the landscape changes and the more plentiful is the wildlife. Having taken the shortest tour — called Natural History — if we did it again we’d opt for the Tundra Wilderness Tour, a 30-mile and $54 tour upgrade, because there’s certain to be more wildlife encounters.
As forgettable as the school bus, do you know anybody who wants to ride one for 92 miles and 13 hours?
You can’t get to the signature mountain (McKinley) from the park but you can see it from here…on a clear day. Like the mountain, the park has undergone a change in name since its creation as Mount McKinley National Park in 1917. Originality designated as a sanctuary to protect dall sheep, it’s now home to black bears, grizzlies, moose, eagles, cariboo and foxes, most of which are not available for camera bugs on the four-hour tour.
In lieu of encounters, we settled for “fall foliage” — it’s arguably as impressive as what you see on those east coast cruises, and in Alaska they call you “leaf peepers — and stories on wild encounters from our bus driver. Sara Clyce is a seasoned hiker who had been nose-to-nose with both kind of bears and moose…and survived. She once avoided an angry moose (in Alaska more people are killed by moose than by grizzlies) by jumping into a small grove of trees so the moose couldn’t kick her. That was about as close as Sara came to not being our bus driver.
Besides people, moose don’t like grizzlies. Their only safety from the moose killers is in numbers: 2,500 moose, and 300 grizzlies. Incidentally, no person has ever died from a black bear attack in Denali, yet visitors are coached all the time about what to do if confronted by one.
In addition to the road that took 15 years to build, Denali has other man-made intrusions. One is the Savage Cabin and, while the cabin is authentic, its lone “resident” is not. He 
goes only by Happy Harry and he’s there to provide a little entertainment for park visitors, and he does it well. There are some scratches in the outside wall that he swears were the work of a grizzly “probably in May” and the nails around windows and doors are to keep the bears out.
“It’s my Anti-Grizzly Entry System,” says Happy Harry, who’d like you to think he’s still back in the ’40s.
Oh yes, we did see a little wildlife. A massive bull moose was partially hiding behind a tree, and there was a (we think) cariboo on its way over a hill at Primrose Ridge Point. You’d need binoculars to see them and a bigger telephoto lens than most tourists carry to take a photo of them home.
So unless you’re heavily into fauna and flora, or trees and tundra, the 8-hour tour is better bang for your buck.
You won’t even remember the school bus.
Our next-to-last blog at Phil Reimer’s Ports and Bows is all about Alaska’s capital city, Juneau.