Thursday, June 15, 2017
Got up early and left Fairbanks around 9:30am. Nice uneventful ride until around 11am when a crown popped off my tooth and landed in my hand. Not a good feeling.
We arrived at Riley campground at 12 noon and got set up. We both started calling to find a dentist in Denali. Guess what, no dentists. The closest is in Fairbanks, 125 miles away. What??? We just left there a few hours ago.
I figured I could wait a couple of days to get it put back on until (Dr.) George said drink some water. I did and almost came out of my seat. Locked up the rig and started back to Fairbanks.
I googled dentists on my phone and the first dentist that came up was Dr. Helmbrecht. I called and explained what happened and asked if I could be seen that afternoon, and they said “yes ” if I got there by 4pm.
By this time it is 1:15pm and we said hell-yeah, we could be there by 3:30pm. They also will take our Delta Dental insurance so it was a plus. George pushed the pedal to the metal and we were there by 3:15.
The staff was so nice and accommodating. Dr. Helmbrecht was very personable. No novocaine, just a little air on the tooth which brought me up out of the chair, cement in the crown and pressure and we were done and out of there by 4pm. What a good experience (getting it fixed !).
Since we had nothing to eat except some yogurt in the morning we treated ourselves to Pagoda Chinese food at the North Pole, about 10 miles on the other side of Fairbanks. The Mongolian beef was excellent again.
Our trip back to Denali was uneventful. We got back to the park around 7:30pm and decided to quickly drive the park road until Savage river at mile 15 to see what we could see. We were hoping to see the “Mountain”.
Just some clarification of the “Park Road”. The park road is actually the road goes through Denali National Park. Why clarify you ask, because we just dove 400 miles to get to Denali (twice yesterday) on “Parks Hwy”. The 358 mile long Parks Highway connects Fairbanks to Anchorage and was named after George Parks, and has nothing to do with the Denali Park.. Oh boy……
At mile 4, we spotted a female moose not ten feet off the road eating the tender leaves off the willow bushes. We stopped and got some pictures. Ann Marie was talking to it, in her “animal whisperer” voice. But the moose was not buying any of it.
A bicyclist, pedaling up the hill on the other side of the road was happy we stopped because the moose was eyeing him and we blocked her. We have been told, if a moose charges towards you, you can not outrun it, get a tree or something between you and Bullwinkle quickly. So I guess the BFT really helped the cyclist…..
Up the road a bit we saw the Denali sled dogs being walked by volunteers. Looked like a pretty intense walk if you ask me, but hey, they are “Huskies”. Denali is the only National Park that has working sled dogs that are used in the winter. More on the Huskies later, and its not a “Frank Zappa” reference. (Does anyone get that other than me?)lol
So, as we are driving we are trying to figure out where Denali is. There are huge mountain ranges all around us and right now they all look alike.
We look back down the road where we just came from and wow, there is a huge white snow capped mountain we think is Denali , so we stop and take a selfie. We drive a little further, and stopped at a roadside pullout, there is a plaque, that said “Hey, dummy…look this direction to see Denali, if there are no clouds”… That was Sugarloaf Mountain, at a mere 5000 feet tall. Ok, we have 7 more days to see her and she is 20000 ft tall. Oops .
We travel to mile fifteen of the Park road and it is at the Savage River. These first fifteen miles of the road anyone can drive on it. The next 80 or so miles only park buses or those few with campground reservations (like us!) can drive along because the park wants to preserve and limit the impact humans have on the eco-system.
On the drive back home we saw a porcupine but I could not get a picture of it. George asked me if I wanted to go into the underbrush to find it and of course I said no. I am not going to be a pincushion for a porcupine, lol.
Tomorrow we are taking a four-hour narrated bus tour so we will find out just where or where Denali is… hopefully.
So, it was a very long day for us. Ten hours of driving, one crown re-cemented, good dinner, and hopefully tomorrow we will see Denali.