Wendy said:
So you would recommend hitting Denali earlier? Denali would be my main reason for visiting Alaska. But I can't think of anything I've ever wanted to do at 4:00 AM !!
Still enjoying your travels....keep it up !
Wendy
If I were coming for the first time, I'd do it exactly as we have done it, and as the Brewers recommended. But, if I were to do it a second time, I would reverse it and do Denali first. We talked with people who did it in late June who saw lynx, bears, caribou, ptarmigan, even a marmot. They said their driver was snapping her own pictures, and she said it was the best day she'd ever had. That means that in a lot of other late Junes, she didn't see as much. That lady was lucky! I've heard that earlier in the season, the animals are closer to the road. We talked with others who did it earlier this summer, and they all also saw more animals and closer up than we did. Last time we were here, we saw almost nothing, and the driver told us that it was so warm that many of the animals went to higher elevations.
The flip side is that our current neighbors in the RV park did the Kenai Peninsula(Valdez, Seward, Homer) just when we left it and had two solid weeks of rain every day all day. They left Homer after just a couple of days, even though they'd planned on staying a week, because they were so sick of the rain. We only had 4 days planned and ended staying 10. If you recall, Betty bought rainboots and trekked through mud daily when they did Valdez toward the end of their trip. Our top two favorite things happened in Valdez.
A lot of this trip is luck--luck of the particular day(s) you're at Denali, luck of the weather gods (The RV park manager told us that the wind we encountered was really rare.), luck of the animals being where they usually are in the ocean, luck of having your RV running well and not encountering delays, and for us this year, the luck of not many other people up here. We can just go to any event or RV park whenever we want. But, this also means that some businesses that we enjoyed will undoubtedly have folded by the time you get here. At the VC yesterday we learned that Moose Nuggets & Other Alaskan Gems is gone, as is the Ester Gold Camp & the Malamute Saloon, and we've seen the "For Sale" signs all over. However, maybe other new ones may open. We found one here in Fairbanks called Yukon Quest.
One other thought is that you can go on the shuttle bus two or three times. The downside is that it's $85/two people each time. You can drive those first 15 miles into the park several times, and we saw bear and my 2 unphotographed, up-close caribou there. I think we drove it 3 times, and only one of the three did we see anything, but that time we saw the snowshoe hare and the caribou. Being a lucky person helps.
I hope this answer, convoluted as it is, is helpful.
Linda