The weather is perfect. The passengers are congenial, comparing notes, sharing tips about gear and hostels and their experiences in the park and elsewhere in the state and the world. We talk with an Australian woman, a Japanese backpacker, a personable Irish priest, an Israeli couple. Coming in to Broad Pass, we round a bend in the road and are face to face with Denali in all its splendor, its 20,320-foot summit sharp against the cloudless sky. A collective gasp goes up, the driver stops the bus, everyone pours out, cameras click repeatedly.
Some people are silent, awed by the majesty of the scene and the moment.
The mountain dominates the skyline from many vantage points for the next 70 miles. South of the Alaska Range we see moose along the highway near the Talkeetna Spur Road. We wish time permitted a stop at that unique little town, but it is 12 miles off the main road, and there is a schedule to keep. That fact is definitely driven home as we enter Wasilla, which was a sleepy little hamlet until the undreamed-of development of the 1970s and early 1980s transformed it into a boom town. A citizen of the area prior to those years, dropped down today along the main street, would never know he was in the same place.