The bus driver, Darlene, said they rarely see moose on this trip. But here is a mother and older child:
Just afterwards we saw another caribou, but it was raining hard so we didn't get any good pictures.
It continued to rain as we made it to Wonder Lake:
We turned around and headed back, but we had 85 miles of scenery and wildlife to enjoy.
The white spot in this photo is a short-eared owl (it was much better in the binoculars):
More scenery:
Caribou crossing a stream:
Wow:
A lone grizzly (this bear is a dot in the above photo):
The wolves were still around on the way back. This is a pup playing:
Turns out seeing wolves from the bus has only been in the last three years since the pack moved in close to the road. Darlene had been driving ten years before she saw a wolf. To see wolf pups was even rarer, she was very excited.
Back at Toklat we stopped again, the bus was getting a bit dirty:
Two merlins:
A hoary marmot (ground hog/woodchucks are a lowland marmot):
A gyrfalcon. We also saw four in flight, we think harassing a wolf that Diane and some others briefly saw:
Another caribou:
An arctic ground squirrel, the main food source for many predators in Denali:
At the Teklanika River bridge the bear and cub were still eating roots, but the cub was behind the bushes:
Towards the end of our bus trip we got a good close view of this caribou:
It was a great bus trip. The clouds never let us see the mountain, but we saw a large variety of wild animals. We also saw many wildflowers but didn't get pictures.