We woke up late, at 9:20 am. It was mostly sunny today. We headed out to drive the Denali Highway to mile post 68. We drove the other end to mile post 68 from Paxson. We went on a couple of short hikes into the tundra. We took pictures of Mt. Nenana, Mt. Deborah and Mt. Hess in the Alaska Range. There were glaciers in between the mountains. A beaver ran across the road and into a pond. We saw another Ptarmigan family. We took a side road to Valdez Creek Mine, a former gold mining camp at Denali which was founded in 1907 after the 1903 gold rush. This mine closed in 1995. We took our gold pans to the creek and tried our hand at gold panning but it didn't pan out. As we left the mine area there was a grave on a hill in the middle of nowhere -- it was that of a prospector. We ran into the lady with the Scamp who we saw in Banff National Park (we also saw her in Talkeetna.) She has her partner with her now. The camp host gave us two pins that celebrate the 10th anniversary of BLM's National Landscape Conservation -- one for Scenic Trails and one for Wilderness. We stopped to purchase a can of diet coke to have with lunch and were charged $5.00. This is a record price.
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