Alaska!!!

The road to Denali was long, we stopped about halfway, a couple hours North of Anchorage for the night, our camp site, on the banks of Montana Creek. We pitched the tents, and went right at the rods. We had stopped about an hour before, for some fishing at this nice little stream we passed along the way, the place my Dad almost went for his Salmon. We got up to Denali about three or four in the afternoon, drove right to the Ranger Station, looking to find where we should camp. These guys all loved the question, Dad and I had done pretty well, just floating around the State, we had no plans. The camp sites in Denali are reserved early in the year, the Rangers found a little humor in our question. We were stuck out in the middle of nowhere, a little bit of tension between my Father and me, something about me not being able to keep doing things this way! Just last week I got that speech, what’s changed, is now he always follows it up with a,”but your getting better. As Dad and I are in this heated discussion over what’s next, one of the Rangers comes up and starts talking, asking about our trip so far, about where we’ve been. He asked about how we were set up, whether we were in an RV. We told him we were just pitching tents, he said he had an idea, that he knew of a place a couple miles up the highway, where no one would bother us. He said it wasn’t National Park, said he didn’t know who owned the land. He said this was the place that he camped, that no one would even notice. Our camp at Montana Creek was in a forest, with a crisp mountain stream running through the middle. On the forrest floor, ferns grew in the shadows, thickets of berries grew in the patches of sun. The Ranger told us an exact distance from the Park Entrance, driving North on the Highway, where we would find a dirt road, off to the left. He said to drive down through the bush, that we’d find a place, when we got close to the river. We rented a Subaru 4 Wheel Drive Wagon for our trip through Alaska, we never could of crawled in and out of this spot without it. The bush this Ranger was talking about, was ten, to twelve feet high, and thick. Across the river, across the side of a mountain, the tracks of the Alaskan Railroad cut a path. Seeing that train coming across, looked like something out of an old postcard. We were the only ones here, the Alaskan Dream, isolated, we couldn’t have dreamed it any better. We had no more interest in fishing, we had finley figured that out, camping at Montana Creek. All the way up from the Anchor River, we had stopped on rivers and streams, to toss out a line, give it two or three minutes, just to reel in, and move on. The fishing was so outrageous on the Anchor River, seemed we couldn’t keep the fish off the hook, that anything less just bored us The river was wide, grey, and cold, up here in Denali, it runs fast through the round rock that litters the shore. Its that same old thing in Alaska, we weren’t paying any attention to the clock, we had left the Ranger Station about the time they had closed. We had taken time their, trying to plan the next day, about the bus into the park, about the location of the showers. I know it was late, we had a fire going, we were just sitting around talking. The light in Alaska, in late Summer, in the in the evening, glows, it was overcast that first night, the light just seemed to hang in the air. We threw some rocks on the fire, went off to our tents, we fell off to the sounds on the river