Denali National Park // Riding the Park Road

[Music] [Music] this is the first thing i've checked in like 20 years because i don't trust the airlines you know the best part is we all got here within five minutes of each other and we all took three different flights i think i saw you passing me in the sky i saw a delta that was right next to us that's gotta be danny all right guys we got three bikes in there i'm glad they all fit this is exactly what the truck looks like it before the grizzly bear got into it and stole everything [Music] we are getting our bikes put together making sure they're all still there bike in one piece yes thank goodness not my bike so it's important that it be in one piece how much gear can you fit in one room we're finding out this cabin looked so good about an hour ago we've been packing for hours and it's just gonna be funny to see if we can actually be rolling down the road flopping around dude how is that that's not helpful yeah it'll tell us which way the wind's blowing i have this really bad vision of me making like 10 pedal strokes and then hearing some popping noises and buckling noises and then all my crap goes flying down the freeway like five minutes into it but i don't know we'll see it's been a very long day a day that started at 4 45 matt picked me up for the airport but we packed up our bikes here at the gateway to denali national park and we're gonna ride out tomorrow and hopefully have everything we need and not crash within the first one or two miles because our bikes are overloaded in places they shouldn't be it's raining and that's a little discouraging but we're going to try and get some sleep we've all been awake for nearly 24 hours so gonna be nice to get a little rest before we get no sleep again tomorrow night because of all the prowling grizzly bears 5 30 a.m here in alaska where we are on the edge of denali national park to do a bike tour on the park road the denali park road this is actually my second bike tour in alaska i did a bike tour here some time ago with my brother-in-law we rode from juneau up uh took a ferry up to haynes and then rode all the way through canada back into alaska to seward and then took the train up to anchorage and actually my second time in denali national park i came here to do a job for someone and actually was at the park couldn't get uh down the road because i hadn't won the lottery and i did a ridge traverse right here where the road is closed to motorists and i never put it up because the wind was so so hard that there was just no audio today we'll be riding the denali park road 92 miles out to where it flips around then we'll be camping and then the next day riding back or catching a bus we haven't decided yet right now we're trying to solve matt's flat tire problem he woke up with a flat tire and uh his tire goo all over the place which is not the way you want to wake up when you're just about to head off on a bike tour what but we're going to try and flex fix his tire get some breakfast we spent all night till about 12 o'clock packing up our bikes took forever normally in past bike tours i've used bike trailers but this time they wanted to go as minimalist as possible so we're using just bike bags it's gonna be a long day mosquitoes bears wildlife rain and hopefully an unobstructed view of denali peak but it's good to be in alaska see how i feel at the end of the day [Music] well good morning i mean this trip is already just a series of massive successes the airlines didn't crunch any of our bikes they all showed up on time all of our luggage all of our flights were on time three different flights you know i listened to matt talk about alaska for endless hours on trail runs on every you know every adventure we go on it's compared to alaska and something that matt's done in alaska so finally i'll have something to share and contribute back and i can pass on that mediocre legacy of bragging about how cool alaska is that's all my stuff on my bag we're ready to do this 92 and a half miles into the park it's raining gotta get started sometime so here we go denali [Applause] we got the bikes out of the truck without any unfortunate events and we are at the riley day use area this is well where we will start what appears to be a very wet long day we got a back country permit which um i'm talking to other people seems like nobody else is out here i mean this place when i was here two years ago was absolutely jam-packed and there's like one group of people here so the park is empty and actually after mile 66 matt yeah after mile 66 we will be the only people on the road other than the occasional park worker it's uh as empty as denali can get on an august afternoon but we're gonna we're gonna start here and instantly realize that several things need to be adjusted tightened taken off um removed this the next 10 miles is just adjustments and then after that we'll get going dude how cool is this came here one year ago the idea of let me not take a bus as my kid we go danny kristoff on bikes and almost one year to the day here we are riding this is shaping to be one of those outings that instead of giving us the gratifying pleasures immediately as we set out it's kind of making us earn it [Music] off the pavement and onto the gravel we've already seen moose and wolf so that's enough to make me happy but it rains all day that might erase the moose and wolf sightings how many miles of gravel do we have matt uh we should have about 75 75 miles of gravel good looking gravel last time i was at denali i got stopped right here behind me at the savage river bridge and i was so bummed out i sat in my car sulking after being told i couldn't drive down this road and then look behind me and they're freaking northern lights okay we've hit the gravel and uh today's shaping up to be a pretty awesome day although we've ridden 15 miles in pretty much pouring rain but we were prepared for that and we're pretty optimistic that it's gonna clear up and we're just gonna keep being optimistic so how awesome is this guys we've come in 15 miles into 100 miler today almost it was dumping rain but now it's just kind of like this overcast we've seen four moose a wolf and now we've got a big big caribou just walking across here in velvet on this open landscape couldn't ask honestly when it comes to the world of gravel bikes this has got to be a must-do ride we are 30 miles in and just shy of 3 000 feet of vert so we made a good vert push decent mileage a third of the way in weather is really shaping up nicely the more we ride the better it gets gonna ride another 60 miles the grizzly bear wolf moose and some amazing views we were just joking that had it started off as really good weather and then gotten worse we wouldn't be talking about how awesome the weather is right now because even with this low cloud cover it's pretty awesome we're debating how much if we want to split this up and do two-thirds today and then do a bunch tomorrow or just do the whole out today and then come back tomorrow that's what's nice about national park i guess is you know you can pretty much go as long or short as you want and then jump on the shuttle bus if you don't feel like uh it's your day hey what do you think christoph it's like lord of the rings out here the misty mountains [Music] [Music] man it is getting so good [Music] it's taken us an hour to get from the river down there up to what the sign says is called polychrome pass we just can't get over the nature we're having nature overload we stop at every turn to shoot a video or take a picture the views have really gotten spectacular and the sun came out at just the right time it's like we can't even ride more than 100 yards it's so cool up here without stopping to take more video and you go around the corner and it's like views even better [Music] we're here at mile 55 where there are some bathrooms and a store matt said that normally this place is jammed wall-to-wall with buses and people but it is uh a strange scene with almost nobody here there's two people waiting for a bus and then there's us you could kind of say we have the park to ourselves occasionally we do see a bus it passes us and early on we saw cars but you know with every mile we see fewer and fewer people trying to figure out what to do we spent a lot of time gawking at mother nature and kind of burned a lot of our daylight hours so somewhere between here and the end of the road is where we'll camp that's kind of what we're shooting for right now we're eating putting reorganizing things drying some stuff out this is amazing the only thing missing is the big d denali sticking out somewhere in this area i'm really looking forward to camping tonight in bear country with zero people around [Music] okay we're animal sighting number 53 on the denali park road matt has uh spidey alaskan senses that tingle every time there's wildlife within 400 yards and we have to stop there's no debating it's always a stop and a watch which i don't mind because i'm the worst person at spotting wildlife so the only the only reason i've ever seen any kind of wildlife out in nature it's because of matt and danny that pick it out for me so one more reason i guess i make myself somewhat available to tag along on these outings [Music] i was just here here at isle sin where we were just offered some hot water and made hot chocolate from uh person who attends this place out here in the middle of nowhere and it was a delightful unexpected treat but now we have the last 20 something miles to go and it's been raining for the past hour and a half we've decided to see it through get it all done hopefully by continuing to ride we won't be setting up a wet tent that's my dream my vision i put on all my layers too because i'm super cold [Music] danny what's behind you rainbow all right we are at the very edge of where we're allowed to camp which is pretty close to the end of the road in the morning we're going to ride the last couple miles out and back just so we can buy the t-shirt and say that we did it what a view for a campsite we're all hoping secretly that when we wake up in the morning denali will be visible so oh close rad all right guys there's tent lined up on the hill we're really hoping to see denali in the morning it is so close i would say the cloud layer right now is maybe about 15 000 but it's thin and then it could just blow off we could see something cool we've got bear spray on us we're cooking 100 yards upwind i mean downwind of our um food and uh hopefully that's good enough we're just trying to be i mean the bear poops here are honestly like five or six black bear poops it looks like an elephant like an african elephant has taken a dump so we're on this hill watch the beautiful sunset as we put up our tents and then we quickly cooked our meals mine not so quickly it required 20 minutes of waiting while the rice was softened but yeah now we're sitting in our tent it's probably midnight there's a little light outside not much but we're gonna try and get as much shut eye as we can and hopefully tomorrow um we'll get a small miracle and the clouds will be gone when we wake up and denali will be visible which is kind of the reason we came as ridiculous as it sounds right now after watching all of that we uh we timed this uh to coat this trip here to coincide with good weather uh but the weather after we bought the tickets went from being the day with the least amount of rain to the day with the most likely chance of rain and that chance turned out to be a 100 chance but when we wake up we'll throw some stuff together it will finish the small amount of uh mileage we have left to go to the actual end of the road but to legally camp we had to camp here we could go all the way it's 5 30 in the morning and i'm just gonna tell you right now i've already peeked outside my tent to see if you can see denali and it was totally worth it to ride through all that rain yesterday to be on a road that's closed now except for the bikes and to have the mountain all to ourselves because it is the most pretty thing i've seen it is like such a cool mountain you've got to see this thing that's freaking gorgeous i would have never guessed yesterday i was always trying to picture my mind at what height i would think the mountain would go up to and how big it would look and then you just you would never guess it goes that high into the sky i mean it takes up a quarter of the sky even from like 30 miles away since 5 30 i've listened to matt talk about how cool denali looks and eventually you got to get up and trying to heat up my clothing in my sleeping bag even though i know it's a futile task it'll make it a couple troopers warmer but it definitely won't dry it out oh this is the worst part of camping getting up on a cold morning danny have you ever seen uh denali in person what's that that's quite a mountain dang that's right it's like twice as high as i thought it would be in the horizon that's cool get out of there i thought it would be bigger dude that is cool ah i saw it north america maybe it's because i've been waiting for so long to get this view i appreciate the most i don't know i've been thinking about it every day for a year christoph just woke up and didn't even know denali existed 24 hours ago today is just gonna be pleasure riding meaning we're gonna go so we can say that we rode the entire road even though it's just a couple miles down that way but then as far as riding back we're just gonna ride until we feel like we've gotten as much denali as we can absorb and then we'll jump on the bus i'm glad that christoph finally got up because i really wanted him to see that mountain but it took forever i had to wait from 5 30 to like seven for him to get out and have that look there it is you know over 20 000 feet and the coolest part about that 20 000 feet is it goes all the way down almost to sea level you know a couple thousand feet above so it's the vertical rise is just unparalleled it is so cool to see so much mountain you know if you look at timpanogos at utah this is like three of those stacked on top of each other the same visual and i just filled a memory card all right kristoff is he looks like a wild animal picking blueberries for breakfast how are they kristoff [Music] oh that's a tender bottom for sure i can feel all of yesterday's 85 miles on my butt [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys there she is [Music] end of the road mile 92.5 denali national park and preserve maybe the signs that say congratulations you've gotten yourself right into the middle of a mess now you've got to get yourself all the way out of here it's a big climb out of here but this is the end of the road it was it was a year of thinking you know maybe like every couple weeks i think about this like oh man when the snow melts when the weather gets good i can ride my bike out there it met all my wildest dreams we waited we were patient we came to see denali and you we could not have had a better view of it and the best thing is we could have miles and miles of that view all day long the road unceremoniously just ends here in this little cul-de-sac 92.5 miles we camped just about three or four or five miles away last night because we didn't have a permit to camp here but what a spectacular ride really i mean one of the best bike tours i've done and as matt said we still have to turn around and go back out it's hard to say how much riding we'll do on our way back but we're gonna jump on our bikes and ride until we get our fill of nature and once once our nature cup spilleth over we'll probably grab a bus great ride though 92.5 miles of awesomeness in a remote place that just has everything animals landscape and north america's tallest peak [Music] we're back at ieltson which is where we are going to take a bus yes take a bus back to our truck most people actually catch a bus back there where the road ends but buses are not driving past this point so we had to ride almost 40 miles today to go to the end of the road then ride all the way back to eielson we just let kristoff go first he's in the bus all alone he'll probably take a nap plus we let kristoff go by himself on the bus so that he can have a moment of chill because he complains that we're just always in a mad rush and so he gets to take a nap gets to sit at the truck and live his chill moment that he's going to need because tomorrow and the next day we're probably going to have a lot of rushing about feels good to be done uh and i'm actually looking forward to going on and seeing another part of alaska and doing something cool that's the denali park road here in alaska well worth the trip

Channel: Mediocre Amateur

Views: 61,786

Rating: 4.9483566 out of 5

Keywords: Denali, Denali National Park, Alaska bike touring, bike touring, Alaska, mount McKinley, national parks, us national parks, adventure vlog, travel vlog, planet earth, revelate bags

Id: 2aMJI3KThVw

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/font9a]

talked non stop about riding all 92 miles of its majestic gravel glory

I'm surprised they didn't attempt this capsule style, with a team of 100 sherpas.