A week intimate cruising within Glacier Bay National Park on our beautiful little yacht reaffirmed all the lofty maxims of the many wonderful people who had the foresight to preserve such a treasure: our souls were refreshed!

My Alaskan safari began with The Far North in Fairbanks in the wide-opened tundras of Denali and ended in the unbelievably lush rain forests of Glacier Bay.

The six days private cruise began with a splash as we took our first of several kayaks. Over the course of the week we’d kayak in secret little coves among towering mountains, along intertidal cliffs laced with starfish colored like a rainbow, among icebergs crashing down from great glaciers and through literally tens of thousands of seabirds!

I can’t imagine exploring Alaska without a kayak. Even for the uninitiated, it’s simple and safe and our group chose mostly to go in two-man kayaks, although I stuck to a single one. It doesn’t take long to learn to push instead of pull, and once achieved you sail through the waters like a dolphin.

Several of our group even kayaked among humpbacks. Glacier Bay is famous for its whales, and we learned of tails of joy and misery with them. On the path leading to the dock at Bartlett Cove is the skeletal remains of “Snow,” a 40-year old whale killed by a cruise ship. Our leader, Kimberly Owen, told us numerous stories of whales including some spiritual stingers precious to the First Nation Hoonah peoples who inhabit Glacier Bay.

We probably saw 20 whales or more, including one group of three that just wouldn’t stop breaching! I counted a dozen breaches in less than fifteen minutes!

Every day we hiked. Some were longer and harder than others, but everyone made it and returned without sore joints! Hikes were up mountainsides, above glaciers, through rain forests, on beaches and among great pieces of ice!

We saw dozens if not hundreds of fabulous sea otters and learned about their near extinction and recovery, one of the great (and few) stories of successful wildlife reintroduction.

At one haul-out of stellar sea lions, I counted more than 750!

And we saw bears, and experienced the narrative of a four we saw on a beach that included two juveniles that just couldn’t leave Mom even as Mom was laid out on her back nursing a new cub.

Sea birds galore. Tufted and horned puffins. Marbled and Kittlitz murreletz. Even murres! Thousands and thousands of kittiwakes, and many glaucous winged gulls and oyster catchers. And of course many grand eagles. We kayaked under goofy pigeon guillemots that treated us like welcomed guests and sailed among loons and cormorants!

But I think the grandest wildlife experience was as we sailed beneath some steep cliffs looking for mountain goats.

We found them, high up but close enough to see clearly even without binocs. They went about the terrifying cliff edges nibbling away, and we watched a little one following mother having just learned that a large percentage are lost to slipping!

Then someone noticed a goat freezing. They’re not hyper but usually constantly on the move, if for no other reason than to maintain constant balance. But this one froze as if we’d taken a picture.

It stared in one direction and we knew something was going on. Following the goat’s line of sight, we then saw a hoary marmot racing onto the top of a rock, standing up and looking towards us, then quickly twisting around and looking away, and then racing to the left, then to the right as if it just couldn’t figure out what to do.

We sailed slowly around the tip of the peninsula and there was a wolf! Obviously what had happened was the marmot saw the wolf and freaked, then the got saw the marmot and froze. It was a wonderful example of how everything is marvelously connected!

Our trip is coming to an end. Stay tuned as we sail into our final hours!

Yes you’ll see some wildlife, but Denali National Park impresses with its massiveness, scenery that simply exists nowhere else on earth.

We spent two days in the park, which is what all casual visitors do. Denali attracts the serious backpacker and hiker as well, and I can only imagine what a wonderful adventure that would be, but probably 95% of its million visitors annually are two-nighters who step in and step out rather quickly.

The park is a long, narrow protected wilderness with North America’s largest peak, Mt. McKinley at its far western end. There is a single road that stretches west from the train station at the parks main entrance, about 90 miles west to the tiny town of Kantishna which is just outside the park.

Kantishna was once a roaring mining town, and in fact we would see dozens of small mining operations that still exist when we flew out of Kantishna two days later. But today the town is mainly the service depot for the three lodges that exist on this far western side of the park.

This is where I take my groups. There are only about 300 bednights here, compared to the 3000 bednights at the train depot. This is also where Wonder Lake is, and some of the most magnificent hiking a “casual visitor” can undertake.

Most visitors staying on the eastern side buy a park pass for a day. This allows you to ride the regular park buses between the four ranger stations along the route, where you can disembark and hike as well as enjoy park ranger presentations.

For those of us staying in the west we take a lodge bus that picks us up at the depot and travels across the entire park, making stops at ranger stations and for wildlife. The ride takes about six hours.

No matter what month of the summer that I travel this route: June, July or August, my experience has been pretty much the same with regards to wildlife.

We’ll see a dozen or caribou, usually at several hundred yards. We’ll see 3-5 bears, often much further away, and dozens of dall sheep, but sometimes miles away on a distant rockface. In my many trips here I’ve also seen wolf, wolverine, pica, porcupine and fox, but only a couple times and this is considered rare.

The closest animal seen is the moose, and we saw our requisite couple, although last year I remember a third one practically sticking its nose through our bus window.

Unlike Africa, the buses – whether lodge or park – are all school bus types, not very comfortable and not particularly good for photographing, although their height off the ground is helpful.

So seeing wildlife should not really be an object of your visit to Denali. It doesn’t have to be!

The scenery is well undescribable. The stops at ranger stations where you can go wandering for a few minutes take you into an unbelievable land, a primeval cartoon as I see it. Distances are unfathomable. The sky – even when overcast, which is mostly the case – is spectacular.

And for our full day at the far western end, most of us went hiking. Excellent guides take small groups in a variety of directions, but wherever you go, however strenuous you wish to make it, the concept of panorama takes on new meaning.

So much of our planet must be like this. I’ve seen it, of course, in the remote parks of Africa and many lucky souls experience in even more remote places like Antarctica. Why this seems beautiful to us is a question that has plagued me all my life, because it is essentially not a quest for understanding as much as an acceptance of the foundation of the definition of what beauty is.

The closer you come to grasping this natural immensity, the more insignificant your person becomes. And frankly, I can’t really think of a better result for any of us.

As is almost always the case, our weather was not sunny and clear. It was heavily overcast and often misty. But it stopped none of us from thrusting ourselves into the wide open spaces and refreshing our souls.

Tomorrow we’ll try to fly around that great mountain! Stay tuned!