July 13 -- evening outside Denali

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The hotel we stayed in near Denali was very pleasant. I snapped this from the train, and just serendipitously caught what I'm pretty sure turned out to be our hotel....

What you see here is perched on top of a hill. The hotel is composed of several buildings, and many of the rooms are in buildings down near the river, which would be to the right of the hotel in this pic.






Of course the hotel has lots of flowers. I don't know what either of these are.











DH and I lucked out -- our room opened to the river. This is the view out the window of our room. You can see the river as a silvery place about halfway down, and you could hear it very clearly. I love the sound of water.....






After a nice dinner in the hotel restaurant, we wandered down the bank to the river.

It was clear that the river had very recently covered all of this rockiness.






The exposed riverbed was rocks, mostly, with a lot of silt (you'll recall my mention of silt in rivers due to glaciers upstream). The silt looked like quicksand (not that I know what quicksand looks like, but it looked very dicey to walk on). It felt like wet sand under our shoes, though, not slippery or scary. (We were being cautious -- vacation is no time for turned ankles or worse!)

Here you can see the silt, complete with what I presume are raindrop marks. You can see it looks damp. Some of it looked quite wet.

My nephew picked up a rock which had a quantity of dried silt on it. He brought it around so we could all touch it -- the silt was finer than flour. He suggested it was fine as powdered sugar, and I think he was right. Exceedingly fine indeed, and I'm glad he thought to share that with us. Thanks, B!






More silt, with birdy footprints.






We did make it all the way to the edge of the water (and back, with no mishaps!).






What a beautiful spot!






Fireweed.






Looking back toward the hotel. You see here the second floor. Our room was directly to the left of that balcony just visible behind the pair of trees, down one floor.






I wanted to leave the windows open all night, so we could enjoy the sound of the river, but it was cold enough that I had to close them most of the way.

This shot taken at 10:15 pm.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, a link to the next one is here.

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