Denali means "the High One."

We are in Denali National Park today. And I just ate my first Alaskan fish dinner...and there is something to be said for eating Alaskan Halibut in Alaska. The kids ate Alaskan hot dogs.

Denali is a highly regulated National park. They restrict the number of vehicles that are allowed into the park each day and most of it doesn't have roads through it anyway. So we didn't know if we would be able to get passes (since people generally make reservations MONTHS in advance). However, it is off-season, so we were optimistic. Luckily we were good, but unlucky in that it was super cloudy and chilly today. So there was no good view of Denali (or Mt. McKinley), which we wanted to see. Mt. McKinley is North America's highest peak and the object of Andy's climbing desires. We didn't see any wildlife either, other than an Arctic ground squirrel. The squirrel was cool, but I was hoping for some mammals of substantial size. We had much better luck with wildlife viewing in Northern B.C. 

The highlights of Denali were watching Annika and Kai receive their Denali Junior Ranger badges (a mini-ceremony was held and they were quite proud), the visitor centre, and playing with the sled dogs.
Soren walked around the visitor centre telling all the other visitors (he calls them 'the MANs') about the animals. "Mom, I just showed those mans all about the squirrel and the frog."--Soren.

Annika and her favourite sled dog- Sylvie.

Our Junior Rangers--Kai and Annika.