Denali National Park. No way to even describe this place. The kind of country that makes you drop to a knee every now and then and thank your maker that it even exists. It fills your soul. 6 million acres of national park. Elevation from 600 feet to 20,360. My first experience with the park was with the rangers at the Wilderness Access building. The ranger just grinned when I said I would be running here today and asked for trail maps. Trails and buses are for tourists he said. We encourage hiking or running off trails. Run across the tundra, follow the rivers, try and stay out of the heavy brush. Go anywhere that you want. Park your car outside and run the ridgeline into the park, park entrance fees are for the folks riding the park buses. What?! I ran on the tundra for an hour or so and then angled up into the mountains maybe gaining only a thousand or so feet. I had jello legs from yesterday and had no idea how long I'd survive. It's easy to not get lost since the sun is always just above the west horizon, morning, noon, whatever. I carried a big PB&J in my pockets and drank from the rivers again since I had no issues from yesterday. The thought kept coming to my mind today that this is the reason why I run at all. Just to live. You could spend months in this park running. The only odd part of the long run was hearing these weird bells for a while coming back and then I came across a solitary German hiker with a battery powered set of bear bells on his pack. Constant jangling. No idea how you could learn to hike with those all day. Check out the price of a veggie tray at Fred Meyers in Fairbanks... 
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