We left Anchorage (traveling once again via railroad) on the way further north.
Controversy: What’s in a name anyway
A short aside is necessary as we begin this next section. Not being from Alaska, I was only vaguely aware of the disagreements regarding the name of the tallest mountain in North America (about 20,310 feet for those keeping score at home). I am so old that I originally learned about it as Mount McKinley. It was called that for political reasons shortly before 1900. However, a lot of Alaskans still used the name the mountain has had for several thousand years… Denali. Which is also the name of the national park. In 2015, the name of the mountain was officially changed to Denali by presidential order. And it was changed back to Mount McKinley, again by presidential order, in 2025. I’m not against former President McKinley (a safe guard against hyper-inflation, unlimited government spending, and currency devaluation -historic reasons for supporting the gold standard- sounds pretty good in the current economic climate), but I’m going to stick with the several thousand year precedent of calling it Denali. McKinley never visited Alaska anyway.
Flag Stops
We started off traveling through an interesting area north of Anchorage known as the “flag stop” territory. This is because, due to the lack of roads, the railroad allows customers to have one of the trains that runs on these tracks stop between stations in this area to load or disembark. There are several small settlements and isolated cabins that rely on the train as a connection to the outside world. Many are artists or authors, although from the conductor’s spiel there are a fair share of iconoclasts and rugged individualists also.
Railroad into Fall
Aside from the uniqueness of the flag stop arrangement, the other striking thing we noticed was the relatively abrupt arrival of autum. Within a few hours of leaving Anchorage, we went from this
To this…
To this over just a couple of hours.
It was like seeing the fall color change compressed into a single day. We did not plan to hit Denali National Park at the height of the fall color change, but it happened. I’ve heard it said that it’s better to be lucky than good. In this case, totally true.
I took a lavishly self-indulgent number of foliage and landscape pictures. I almost felt guilty because a professional photographer could have supported themselves for a while with the good fortune in timing we had. I certainly didn’t do the scenery justice (but I had fun trying!)
Tomorrow we meet the cutest, if not hardest working, National Park Service employees.
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