Tundra Wildlife

On the first day of August of this year, we headed north into Manitoba, Canada all the way up to Churchill on the Hudson Bay with a stop or two along the way. It was the furthest north we had been on our planet (other than a stop in Iceland's Keflavik Airport) since December of 2013 (which coincidentally was ALSO Iceland but for a real vacation there). Our most important priority for this trip was pretty simple: see some polar bears in the wild in the last stop on the trip in Churchill. 

We succeeded. Four days in Churchill, six polar bears. Mission accomplished. 

We've been on enough nature trips in our lives to know that when it comes to truly wild wildlife, there are no guarantees. But I have to say if we hadn't seen any white bears on this trip, I think we would have considered the whole excursion a failure. That attitude may have been a little unfair to our tour operator of choice and even ourselves and that's because there were other experiences that were worthwhile other than seeing polar bears, including finding other mammals and birds in the Great White North that were thrilling in their own way. 

Those other species are blog-worthy but I still would have declared the trip a failure (again...harsh...I know) if we hadn't found polar bears. So in the spirit of blog-worthiness, I thought it would be worthwhile spotlighting what other wildlife we saw on our Canada 2026 trip. I'm going to do that through three posts and, truth be told, the first two will be mostly a photo dump at some point (and yes, that means the last one will be different). 

I'm going to start those three posts on our last full day of the trip in Churchill.

Three Hudsonian godwits. Churchill Wildlife Management Area.

The last day of our four days in Churchill was spent inside the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, a slice of tundra adjacent to Wapusk National Park, a Parks Canada property. This is the spot to find polar bears in August and it worked. We found five in our six hours that day looking out the windows of a Tundra Buggy, a sort of giant, jacked-up school bus designed to off-road within the Management Area to maximize wildlife viewing. Most of our day while we were driving was spent looking through two giant front windows shown in the cover photo of this post.

And yes, we were driving over tundra. Maybe this is the time to talk about life on tundra.

Here's the thing: nothing much really lives on the tundra, the top layer of soil and vegetation that supports life up north. The tundra (apparently it's a Russian word and it's for sure cold in Russia) sit on top of the permafrost, a strata of the Earth that is perpetually frozen, although these days (and in the future) the reality of permafrost will cease to exist more and more. 

There is vegetation on the tundra, but think small. Moss. Lichens. Grasses. Shrubs. The odd flowers like the purple-pink fireweed. Maybe some single trees or small stands of trees together but again, think small. Like really small. Like low to the ground. Sure there are trees there but if there's a single tree anywhere around, it's a flag tree, a tree subject to maximum wind effect, which usually causes all the branches on a tree to grow on one side in the direction of the prevailing wind. Our tundra buggy driver joked that in Churchill you need a minimum of two trees to make a Christmas tree during the holiday season.

Considering all that, and pretty well knowing that we had a shot at polar bear or two (or five!), our sights for other animals were set low. I mean if there's no vegetation, then there's no life. African safari this was not.

Churchill tundra. Not in the Wildlife Management Area (can't get this close to the ground in there).

Species spotting proved to be hard work on the tundra. There's just not a lot out there, a reflection of just how inhospitable this environment really is. Need to grow to a pretty good size? You really need some pretty good sized food or a whole lot of it and generally speaking there's just not a lot to eat unless you are a polar bear (which eat seals when they are on the frozen ice) and caribou, which eat...get this...caribou lichen. And lichen there is aplenty on the tundra. 

We did manage to find some new birds for our life list, including some godwits, snow geese and golden-plovers, and we got a good look at some red foxes with mother and kits at play and sometimes trying in vain to hunt the nearby golden-plovers and in one case successfully catching a vole. I can see foxes (or find fox poop) in our driveway at certain times of the year so I'm not going to be super excited about any species of fox I can find in Churchill. 

Well, except maybe an arctic fox. We did not see an arctic fox.

Red foxes and American golden-plovers.

But in our six or so hours roaming around the Management Area in our Tundra Buggy, we did find a couple of signature wildlife experiences worth remembering and sharing. And sure enough, and again reflecting the scarcity of mammals out on the tundra, most of our non-polar bear excitement came while finding things with wings. Things with wings can migrate easier than things without wings.

Here's what we found that I will remember.

Willow Ptarmigan

If you had asked me which bird I wanted to see most of all before we set off on our Tundra Buggy journey, it would have been a ptarmigan. We'd seen a singular ptarmigan once before in Denali National Park in Alaska but I wanted more on this trip. These birds are a sort of dirty brown in the summer but turn completely white in winter to camouflage against the snow. We knew we'd be getting the dirty version of the bird at this time of year and that was going to have to be OK.

The flock of ptarmigans below (of which the one above was one) was the first wildlife we saw in the Management Area. 30 minutes in and we saw nothing but a few ptarmigans. No polar bears (yet) so even though I really wanted to see ptarmigans, seeing these birds without a giant white bear nearby was frustrating. Do we stop and look at these or just keep going? We stopped. 

This was, after all, part of what I wanted. To look at some birds that with the right light and imagination in non-winter, look pretty much like chickens.

Here's the astonishing thing about these birds, and I know this is not the first time I've written something like this on this blog...these things in summer are about impossible to see against the tundra floor. Seriously. Take a look at the photograph above. There are six ptarmigans in the picture above but it's not a sure thing. There may be more here and there or it may just be dead vegetation on the ground. On a mostly green floor, it's amazing that there's really much doubt about the number of brown birds there are in the view above.

Would these birds have been cooler in winter, all white on all white? Sure they would. But it was August and this encounter was pretty exciting, particularly because of the quantity all in one spot. I am not likely to come back this far north in the willow ptarmigan's range for a long, long while (although my travel habits sometimes surprise me) so it's likely this spotting will need to last me for a good amount of time.

Caribou

While it appears to be a matter of some online debate, caribou are often credited with the longest annual terrestrial migration. The numbers? About 1,500 miles annually and some herds number over 200,000 individuals. That's a lot of caribou.

Caribou migrations start as early as August and includes a range which covers part of Manitoba. We were in Manitoba in August and caribou live on the tundra. Cool! 

We saw one caribou.

Wrong place, wrong time. I don't really think that there are ever hundreds of thousands of caribou migrating through the Churchill Wildlife Management Area at any time of the year, let alone August. If there was a mammal species that I was hoping to see in the CWMA other than the polar bear, it was the caribou. We did it! One counts, right?

In many ways, caribou for us are the mammal equivalent of the ptarmigan. We'd only seen them once before and, like the ptarmigan, it was in Alaska's Denali National Park. They also blend in remarkably well with an environment which on the surface of things seems totally dissimilar in color from a caribou's coat. Nonetheless, the colors do blend into the tundra colors. 

Not much more to say on this one. There was only one and we saw it for probably less than five minutes. Exciting...but we need to move on.

Sandhill Crane

I don't have a lot of cranes on my bird life list. In fact, after visiting Churchill, I have just two on my list: some type of crowned crane (I'm not totally sure if I saw a grey or black crowned crane before) and the sandhill crane. Truth be told here, there are only 15 species of crane in the entire world.

We've flirted with seeing sandhill cranes in the past while also coming nowhere close to these birds. There is a large gathering (like a million) of these birds annually in Nebraska which we looked into when we sneaked into the northwest corner of Nebraska a few years ago. And there is another large population that winters in New Mexico just south of Albuquerque (I feel we will get here eventually). These birds migrate very south (like Florida and Mexico) in the winter so it's possible to see them in a lot of different places. But until Churchill...no sandhill cranes in person.

Our sandhill cranes in the Wildlife Management Area were at a pretty good distance but we did see a few seconds of their famous dance. This is like the star activity of these birds. And by a few seconds and a pretty good distance, I really do mean that. We managed to see a couple of different groups of cranes but very fleeting. Still, pretty thrilling. Hopefully we'll see many more on a specific sandhill crane trek some other time. Maybe.

Arctic Tern

Who was impressed by that 1,500 mile annual caribou migration? It's OK if you were. It's a long distance. It's OK to be impressed.

But the caribou's got nothing on the Arctic tern. 1,500 miles? Child's play. For some reason, the Arctic tern has decided it has to breed in the north of the globe in the summer and spend the northern hemisphere winter all the way down on the other side of the planet in the Antarctic. How far do some Arctic terns travel in a year? Maybe as much as about 56,000 miles. Take that, caribou!

We've seen terns in the wild before. They are plentiful all over the planet including in the Forster's tern variety as near as the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland about an hour or so away from our house. But we'd never seen Arctic terns before. 

Like a lot of other species of tern out there, I'd wager that most people see terns and think gulls and then are surprised by how well put together terns are on a second look and decide they are not gulls at all. Whether this is true or not for anyone else besides me, I have no idea. But I am not interested in gulls and I am particularly interested in terns. Where gulls are ungainly and brash (not in a good way), terns are smooth and suave and are gorgeous flyers, able to hover on the wind without flapping and suddenly dive for food. Maybe it's just me but I like terns.

I spent a lot of time on our tundra day watching and photographing terns in flight after our lunch in the Tundra Buggy. Most efforts were fairly disappointing but I'm OK with the picture above. These birds really are some of the best to photograph on the wing with a camera like ours. I tried.

We also managed to see a very young Arctic tern in a nest. And by "in a nest", I really mean sort of loosely located in or around a pile of rocks, rarely standing still but with no boundaries to confine him or her, how can you blame it? It seemed to be getting fed. Our guide mentioned that this one was quite late in the season to be this size. It's got some serious flying to do in the very near future. Hopefully it made it.

Bald Eagle (although really short-eared owls)

I can be at a bald eagle nest in about 30 minutes if I leave my house at the right time of the day and week and I can pretty reliably find one or both eagles that live in the nest at most times of the year. If I'm at my parents' house, I can cut the time to a bald eagle nest in about half.

So given that introduction, it might be surprising that a bald eagle viewing would be in this post, right? Although to be honest, the picture above is about as good a picture of a bald eagle as I've ever taken. But it's also not the reason why I'm remembering our bald eagle encounter at the Churchill WMA.

We saw (I believe) one bald eagle in our time in the Management Area. We actually had two encounters with eagles that day but I'm fairly sure it was the same eagle both times. The second time we saw it, I got the photograph above. 

The first time we saw this same eagle, it was perched on a similar lone tree that also looked too light to support the eagle's weight (check out the bend in the tree on all these pics). But it had company. And the company was not friendly.

We see small birds chasing larger birds all the time when we are birdwatching. In the US, these larger birds are usually crows or hawks, although we've also seen blue jays making a ton of noise around owls. That Sunday out on the tundra, it was a pair of short-eared owls chasing this massive bald eagle, likely too close to the owls' nest which would have been somewhere nearby on the ground.

This whole thing lasted maybe a minute but these tiny little owls were aggressive and drove off the eagle in pretty short order. But considering I'd never seen a short-eared owl in my life before and that I'd never really been able to photograph a cool small bird chasing away a cool large bird (meaning NOT sparrows chasing crows or something like that), this brief look at a conflict on the tundra, which was literally the only drama we saw in six hours, is etched into my memory as an important part of our last day.

Once we left the tundra, our remaining time in Churchill was counted in hours. 4 p.m. dinner (not joking) reservation and then straight to the airport. The Wildlife Management Area was the highlight of this trip. For sure. Maybe. Probably. It's debatable. But polar bears and then a mix of other birds and mammals? Pretty hard to beat on this trip.

Snow goose. Another first-time bird species for me. Churchill Wildlife Management Area. 

Denali

When I published the initial post of this five year blog on my 45th birthday, I made some commitments to myself. One of those commitments was to make it to either Alaska or Hawaii or both. Four years and a couple of months later, I've made it to both. 45 states down, five to go!

When I first committed to the idea of going to Hawaii, I had one destination on my list: Volcanoes National Park on The Big Island. When I first decided it was time to head north to Alaska, I also had one destination on my list: Denali National Park. I wanted to go to Volcanoes because I wanted to see lava flowing over the cliffs of the island and turning instantly to rock when it hit the ocean. I didn't get to see that. Instead, I saw the glow of the bubbling molten rock in the Kilauea Caldera from a distance of about eight miles. I wanted to visit Denali because I wanted to see how massive the mountain is and to get a good look at the amazing wildlife in the Park. Consider this paragraph some foreshadowing. Remember that I wrote "some".

When we landed on The Big Island last February, we headed straight for Volcanoes National Park. It took us about 45 minutes. When we landed on mainland Alaska last month, we headed straight for Denali National Park. It took us about seven hours. If you are planning on stepping off a cruise ship in Seward and heading straight north to Denali, be prepared for a long ride. And make sure you fill your gas tank before you leave Anchorage. You might regret leaving Anchorage with less than a half a tank. Just saying.

Before I continue with this post, perhaps a quick stop is in order to provide some background and clarify some terms. Denali National Park and Preserve is an area of Alaska about 4.7 million acres in size set aside as the third largest National Park in the United States (number one and number two are also in Alaska). I'm going to refer to it in this post as Denali National Park or just the Park. Running throughout the south portion of the Park are the Alaska Range mountains which includes the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet above sea level. That mountain was called Denali by the Athabaskan peoples but was named Mount McKinley by a gold prospector in 1896 in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who went on to win the office. The name Denali was restored officially by the Obama administration in 2015. I will be using Denali for the mountain name and not Mount McKinley. If you are somehow a McKinley supporter and object to that, get over it or just hit the close button.

Day one's best wildlife sighting: a snowshoe hare. Seriously. They'll turn white in the winter.

Driving north to Denali gives you a lot of time to take in the gorgeous scenery and watch out for moose at the side of the road as advertised about every two miles. After a few hours depending on your point of departure, you'll reach Denali State Park and a pull-off called Denali View South. You might want to get off the highway at this point and see if you can see the peak if it's a sunny day. Remember it's Alaska.

Because we were anxious to just get there and we'd been driving long enough already, we skipped this stop on the way up and kept going to the National Park, which is north of the State Park. But from the point we skipped Denali View South until almost the time we got to the Park, we kept trying to guess which mountain was Denali. It's a difficult task on a cloudy day (read: a typical Alaskan day) because the top of just about every mountain around you is shrouded in mist. And that's considering you already know in which direction the mountain lies. Which we really didn't.

After a few mis-fires (maybe that's it? or that? that looks big!) we started to wonder if we'd be impressed at all with how high it was. Would the mountain even appear to be that big if it's embedded in a range? Would we be astounded by something obviously higher than anything else in sight or be faced with a peak just a few hundred feet higher than its neighbor? Clearly we hadn't done much research on this subject and didn't know really what to expect.

Then at around mile marker 214 on Alaska Highway 3 we found ourselves driving towards a massive wall of a mountain, something so wide that it filled the entire windshield. It was also engulfed in clouds at such a point that it seemed like this peak could get really lofty. This had to be it, right? I mean it was just huge.

Nope. Nowhere close. We drove around that mountain and kept going. After that, embarrassed by our failures, we just gave up and drove, convinced we could just ask a ranger at the Park to point it out to us. We were fools to expect this, although we didn't know it yet.

As it turned out, we weren't really anywhere close to Denali at any point along the drive. The visitors center is a good 40 plus miles from the mountain and we never really got closer than that on the way up there. All our speculation was for naught. To make matters worse for us, we couldn't even see it when we got to the visitors center because of cloud cover. We never saw it at all that first day of our two day visit.

Willow ptarmigan. Another of Denali's residents who will turn pure white in winter. Very excited. No sarcasm.

Of the 4.7 million acres in Denali National Park (which is larger than Connecticut by the way), vehicular access is restricted to about 92 miles into the Park. And that's not your own vehicle; if you want to drive yourself, you can only go about 15 miles before you have to turn around and go back. We wanted to explore the Park as deep as possible in our limited time there. To do that, we had two options.

Option one: hop on one of the free shuttle buses that takes you further into the Park than mile 15 and let the driver know where to let us off so we could go hike around some. Now I don't know about you but the thought of walking around in the woods where I could stumble upon a moose in heat (it was rutting season while we were there), a grizzly bear mama with cubs (read: extremely protective) or a pack of wolves (no explanation needed; I mean it's a pack of wolves) didn't exactly appeal to me. Let's take a look at option two.

Option two would be to take one of the paid bus tours available through the National Park Service website. We opted for the seven to eight hour version called the Tundra Wilderness Tour which would take us right to the Stoney Hill Overlook just a bit more than 60 miles into the Park. We hoped along the way we'd get some quality wildlife sightings (see above for the spectacular look at animals we got on our own on day one) and maybe a clear look at the mountain at the end of the drive.

Up at 5:45 a.m., check out of the hotel 30 minutes later, a half hour drive to the Wilderness Access Center, a quick breakfast of a half bag of White Cheddar Cheez-Its washed down with some water and I was ready for a morning and afternoon on a slightly deluxe schoolbus, complete with the almost-impossible-to-open and just a bit more almost-impossible-to-close single hung windows. Ahh the unexpected memories of junior high and high school that this trip evoked.

Four hours later, after passing beyond the public access point and making our way over the one way and totally unpaved Polychrome Pass about halfway on our route that featured breathtaking (I mean that not in a good way) un-guardrailed drop offs about four feet from the bus and I was ready to be shown the highest mountain in North America. Bring it on! After a long drive and a few stops for restroom breaks, I was ready to be awed at Stoney Point Overlook. What we found was fog and the view below.

Spot the Denali. Can you see it? No way, right? Total disappointment.

Yep that's right. A flight from Dulles to Toronto then Toronto to Vancouver, followed by a seven day cruise northward and a seven hour drive and an overnight stay and all I got to see of Denali in the Park was the view above. Bummer. If there's one thing for sure about Mother Nature, it's that she is not one to cooperate every time you need her to. She denied me the Aurora Borealis in Iceland in 2013 and she denied me Denali this summer. According to our bus driver, this year has been especially bad. Instead of seeing the mountain for 20 to 30 days in a summer, this year his days visible count was 11. Told you there was some foreshadowing.

We came to Denali for two reasons, remember? The mountain was obviously a disappointment. But as it turned out we made out pretty well on the wildlife side, although it didn't necessarily seem like that was going to work out at first either.

We entered the Park on day two with a 15 mile drive into the park under our belt and an already seen wildlife list which consisted of about six magpies and maybe a dozen snowshoe hare, which apparently breed like rabbits, or so I'm assuming. Our luck had to change on day two, right? And it did. About five or ten minutes into the drive we spotted a young bull moose on the road. Of course, we didn't get in line for the bus quite as soon as we could have so we ended up near the back of the bus and didn't see the moose well from that position. We certainly didn't get a picture. Bummer on that account, too.

Ten minutes further down the road though, the back of the bus got its look at some willow ptarmigan. Now, I can sense maybe you are feeling some sarcasm but I'm not disappointed with my close up look at these birds. I might have been if that's all we'd see that day but it wasn't. Checking out a ptarmigan or two close up was a treat. If I'd been there about three months later they would have been totally white and the ultimate winter survival bird, able to keep their body temperatures up in outside conditions way below 0 degrees fahrenheit. Cool stuff!

Dall's sheep rams. Not a great picture but considering the half mile or more distance, pretty good after all.

Ultimately though, we didn't come for the ptarmigan and I am happy to say that we got a good look at three of Denali's signature residents later in our tour: the Dall's sheep, the caribou and the grizzly bear. No wolves (sorry to spoil the suspense) but some pretty amazing looks at the other three species. And being at the back of the bus really didn't hurt us after the non-photographed moose. The school bus actually facilitates double sided viewing and photographing of wildlife in a way that shocks me even as I am typing these words. Plus it helps to have some fellow travelers that are interested in getting everyone in the bus a good look at what's outside. Thanks to the total strangers on the bus with us for that.

Ever heard of Dall's sheep? Nope? Neither had I. Had no clue there was such an animal. They are sort of like a bighorn sheep (in that they have big horns) except the ones we saw were totally white. We spotted several groups of these animals way up on the slopes of some of the higher mountains at three locations on our drive. Carry a good pair of binoculars or a good camera if you want to get a decent look at them walking calmly and steadily over a landscape that seems to be littered with loose rocks ready to plummet down the sides of the mountains in a rock slide at any time. Dall's sheep were definitely a surprise. Check a new animal that I never knew existed off my "seen in the wild" list.

I don't usually get too excited about sheep, but throw a pair of enormous curved horns on them and I'm all about checking them out. The same sort of logic applies to deer except even more so because even with pretty big horns on them I can't find much to get excited about with deer. I can see some variety of deer species (albeit mostly dead on the side of the road) with horns near my home in northern Virginia. Heck, I saw one running through downtown Washington, D.C. one day on the way to work. I can't see what the fuss is here.

Three caribou grazing on a hillside on the way to Stoney Point Overlook.

Unless...they have like really really big antlers. And caribou have enormous and extremely lavish racks. Caribou are worth checking out.

While the attraction for me about the caribou is clearly their headgear, there are some other pretty notable aspects of caribou life to get excited about. Their herds can get to be enormous. By that I mean like half a million animals enormous. And some species of caribou have the largest migratory range of any land animal, sometimes with individual caribou traveling up to 3,000 miles with the total herd covering a range almost 400,000 square miles.

We didn't see herds as big as this, although honestly that alone would have been worth the price of admission for the bus ride and way way more. We spotted seven or eight of these animals a good distance off the bus on our way out to Stoney Point Overlook and managed to get a closer look at a pair on the way back. The couple on the return trip got us a great look at the sheer size and complexity of the horns these things grow. It's amazing these things even walk around with such horns on their heads, although I suppose the weight of the curved back portion of the antler is somehow well balanced with the two prongs and the fan-shaped appendage on the front. I doubt I'll get a better look at these animals in the wild ever. Their habitat is not somewhere I usually end up traveling.

A closer up look at two caribou on the journey out of the Park.

And then there were the bears. We saw a total of three bears in Denali. That might not seem like very many bears, although it's not like these things travel in huge packs. Yet it was a completely unforgettable experience.

There are five kinds of bears in Alaska: polar bears, black bears and brown bears with brown bears coming in Kodiak, coastal brown and grizzly varieties (listed in order of size from largest to smallest). In Denali, it's all about the grizzlies, which in many respects are the coolest of all the bears despite their smallish (for a bear) size. You can argue with me about polar bears being the coolest and I'd probably concede but I haven't yet seen a polar bear in the wild in real life yet so I'm partial to grizzlies right now.

It had been years since I'd seen a grizzly in the wild. We spent maybe 15 or 20 minutes years ago in Yellowstone National Park watching a grizzly dig in the ground looking for food at a distance of maybe a quarter to a half a mile away. This encounter was closer and cooler. About a mile or two before we got to the turning point on our drive we came across a female grizzly and her two cubs and we were able to watch for a little while on our first sighting and then again on the way back.

Mama bear in search of some food. Or just on patrol maybe.

Mama bear and the cubs finding food together.

Mother grizzlies keep their cubs with them for two to three years. It seemed to me that these cubs were about half the size of mama so I'm guessing they were likely about two years old (there's admittedly some speculation on my part here). The majority of the time we watched, the cubs spent their time eating with maybe a little bit of play under the watchful eye of mom. We were lucky enough to see the mother allow some freedom of movement by the cubs before corralling them back into her immediate vicinity every so often. Grizzly mothers have to be protective of their cubs from the biggest threat to their existence: a full grown male grizzly bear.

We managed to secure some great pictures in our two looks at this bear family and were unfortunately able to tell that one of the two cubs had a damaged or hurt left paw. He kept limping along after his sibling as the family moved through the grass. Mother bear seemed at times that she was aware of our presence on the bus but certainly seemed unaffected by our being there, which is awesome that these creatures can live in their natural environment like this.

One of the cubs on his back playing. Looks like he's got a stick or something in his mouth.

What you looking at, tourist?

It took us a while to get to Denali on our first full day on land in Alaska but it was totally worth it, even if we managed to miss the mountain entirely. Despite the lack of a clear look at the peak, we did manage to get some awesome (if sporadic) looks at wildlife in the form of three bears; one moose; a dozen or fewer caribou;  plenty of Dall's sheep from afar; and smaller critters like the ptarmigan and hare and one solitary arctic ground squirrel. The only unfortunate part about the ride home (in this case to the Anchorage airport) is once you've driven a while to get to a place, you are going to have to backtrack for an equal amount of time to get back to where you started from.

We didn't see the massive mountain in the Park. It was just too cloudy on the two days we were up there. But after our hurried trip up to Denali, we were determined to stop at the Denali View South we had passed on the way back to Anchorage. It would be our last and best chance to see how high the mountain really is. Unfortunately, we didn't get a clear picture of the peak we drove seven hours to see but we did get our best look of the trip. Glad we stopped here; it was way better to see the base exposed with the top firmly in cloud cover that it was to settle for the fog view at Stoney Point Overlook. You can start to imagine how big this peak is and can I imagine how gorgeous it would be as a single mountain even though it's embedded in a range. I imagine it's pretty impressive with the clouds gone.

This is the best look at Denali we got. From the Denali View South at Denali State Park.