The highway ends on the west side at Cantwell, near the entrance to Denali National Park. The spruce have repopulated the hills by now. Though we never got the views that the highway is famous for, we really enjoyed the drive. We spent two nights along the road, and had plenty of time to go slow and enjoy ourselves.
The Denali Highway is a "best of" highway in many ways. Since it's gravel, there are a lot fewer cars on it than on the other Alaska highways, which means there really aren't many cars at all. (The Parks highway, from Anchorage to Fairbanks, is the only highway that seems "busy" to me, and even there you can generally find a long break in traffic to pass someone within a couple of minutes. "Busy" is no busier than 54 WEST of Chapel Hill.)
There are no power lines, which is the case on large sections of the other Alaskan highways. It's amazing how much more open a road feels without power lines! There are no billboards, no trash, and very little private land. The land is largely managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which means you can pull over anywhere you want and go hiking or camp.
When you stop and look out, you can see miles and miles and miles, and all the land you're looking at is public land. There are no houses in sight, and very few roads, no buildings, and in all likelihood, no people. It's quiet. It's a different experience than driving anywhere else in the country. Even when you're driving through a National Forest or other public land elsewhere, you know that it's a limited corridor of public undeveloped land surrounded by developed land. In Alaska, things are reversed, and you have the sense that civilization is the pocket, and wilderness is the rest.
<<
<
Current
>
>>
