by Simon Hamm (owner, Camp Denali & North Face Lodge)

Today is the day that our early crew was to have flown to Kantishna to begin taking down the shutters, undoing winter's mischief, and launching into facility improvements for the upcoming summer. It is typically a day of celebration, hard work, and excited anticipation of the season ahead. Instead, it has become the occasion to announce that Camp Denali and North Face Lodge will not operate during 2020- a first in our 69-year history.

A canceled opening notwithstanding, the pull of spring ritual remains strong, and so on Sunday I hopped in our small Cessna airplane and flew out for an annual fix of springtime in Denali. It was warm, calm, and “severe-clear”- a beautiful day for flying. Landing on the airstrip and hiking the four miles back to our lodges, untouched since September, I could almost imagine that we still live in a world without COVID-19. I could touch any doorknob without hesitation. I could scratch my nose when the season’s first mosquito came my way. As one of a handful of people in a six-million-acre park, I was less concerned with social distancing than maintaining distance from the grizzly whose fresh tracks I was following. While the time on the ground felt like a privileged cross between a time capsule and an escape pod, the in-flight time afforded a chance to reflect on a few sobering aviation truisms, and how they relate to the prospect of a 2020 operating season:

by Jeff Anderson

With COVID-19 dominating the news cycle, and impacting our lives in unprecedented ways, it can be challenging to stay positive and think about anything beyond the scope and scale of this pandemic. Many of us are holed up at home with our families for the unforeseeable future, and doing all we can to keep our loved ones safe and sane. This is new territory, and although I'm not an epidemiologist or public health specialist, I humbly offer some tips from an iconic species of the subarctic - the North American Beaver.

Beavers use engineering, ingenuity, and hard work to change their surroundings; more so than any other animal besides humans. Not only that, but beavers actually increase diversity by creating great habitats for amphibians, insects, and birds. Through the spring, sumer, and fall, they work nights constructing dams and crafting lodges. They gather food and cache it for the winter in the deep, cold ponds created by their dams. It's a lot of work.

by Jeff Anderson

A winter’s morning walk through the boreal forests of Denali National Park is a quiet affair. The cacophony of summer’s bird song is replaced with an ethereal stillness that only hints at the harsh realities facing birds who winter in the far north. While the allure for species to migrate to Alaska for the breeding season is simple (abundant food resources and nesting locations), the reasons to stay year-round in such an inhospitable environment are more nuanced. For a bird to survive year-round in the frigid subarctic, they must be able to excel at two critical tasks: maintaining their body temperature and procuring enough food to stay (somewhat) active and sustain their body heat. None of this is easy. In fact, it is so rare and difficult that most birds
evolved to risk the daunting alternative of migrating/navigating thousands of miles to escape winter in the north. Consequently, there are only a handful of birds in Denali that are considered “residents”, with different bird groups using novel strategies for winter survival.

WellRight BLog by, Lynn Zimmerman. Camp Denali guest, 2020.

Original version here.

Greetings from Camp Denali, located in the heart of Alaska at the literal end of the road in Denali National Park. This is where I spent a week of my summer vacation, and it was amazing; I didn’t want to leave. As we were planning our Alaskan holiday, I have to admit that sleeping in a cabin without electricity and running water was a bit daunting to imagine, but the service, gourmet plated meals, knowledgeable hiking guides, and especially the sense of community made it well worth the slight inconveniences. In fact, I began to enjoy the morning fires to heat up the cabin and the walks to the lodge for a hot cup of tea in the late afternoon.

The promise of the view of Denali from our cabin drew me to the camp, but the staff’s ability to create a sense of community and well-being will keep me coming back for more. I learned that the highly-engaged and highly-educated staff also keep coming back each summer because they love working for the family-owned lodge. As guests, we truly got the sense of community during the first morning when each staff member introduced themselves, shared why they worked at Camp Denali, and explained the role they would play in our adventure during our stay. Then it was our turn to introduce ourselves and talk about why we were visiting. The common thread amongst staff and guests was the concern for conservation and sustainability, and we all recognized the fragile ecosystem of the environment.

by Lilly Schneider

If you’ve ever gone to summer camp or sent your children to one, you may be familiar with the philosophy that a lack of letters home is actually a good thing – it means the camper is having too much fun to write. Consider this a humble excuse for the pause in blog posts since May. We’ve been so busy adventuring outside, clamoring for cookies and cozying up in our cabins that we just couldn’t find the time. But I promise we’re all—guests, staff, and the Camp dog, Pelle—making lots of new friends.

Spring came fast and hot this year. Hikers and porch-loungers alike were treated to warm temperatures, dryish days, and the annual rainbow of wildflowers: hues of pink, yellow, greenish or buttery or spotted white, purple, blue and forget-me-not, Alaska’s state flower, which are of a particular color that the English language is not at this time equipped to describe.

by Lilly Schneider

photo courtesy of Margeaux Maerz

Every summer, birds from all seven continents flock to Denali National Park to feast, mingle, and make the most out of the almost endless sunlight. In recent weeks, birds of a different feather, but with similar aims, have settled themselves about Camp Denali & North Face Lodge: our staff, summoned from their winter roosts by the promise of a rising summer season. From Vietnam to Vermont, Seattle to Scotland, Montana to Mexico, our rambling staff members have heeded the annual call to return. As of 10 days ago, our entire staff is on campus, and it’s all hands on deck to ready the lodges for our very first guests.

by Lilly Schneider

When staff say we work in Denali “for the summer”, it’s a bit of a half-truth. Over the four months we live and work at Camp Denali & North Face Lodge, we experience the tail-end of one winter and the first snow of the next; in between, we experience an arc of seasons as colorful and unique as the rainbows that so often fall across the Kantishna Valley.

When the first staff arrive in early May to pry the plywood off the windows, get the pipes flowing with fresh water, and otherwise make Camp Denali & North Face Lodge ready for another season, there’s often  snow on the ground, and Wonder Lake is a plate of cracking ice. Ptarmigan still have most of their white feathers, snowshoe hares are just beginning to turn brown, and the caribou are molting their winter coats. Thus--in our own winter coats--we begin our so-called summer.

by Lilly Schneider

Climbing the Camp Ridge—1500 ft in just under a mile—is a bit of a rite of passage at Camp Denali & North Face Lodge. From the ground, it’s tough to tell how steep it is, just as the powerful rivers that braid through the stone and gravel riverbeds of the Park may look like trickles from afar, and the 12,000 foot peaks of the Alaska range look reasonably sized (spoiler alert: they aren’t) beside the Great One. Many of our staff are veritable mountain goats (or Dall sheep, if you will) but I’m more of a stop-and-smell-the-wild-roses kind of a hiker, and I’ll admit I wilted a fair amount on that first summit.

But if I’ve learned anything from my time in Denali National Park, it’s that summertime ain’t no time to quit. While the sun shines up to twenty hours a day, plants and animals are all seeking and soaking up as many nutrients as they can. And us human beings? We come to load up on wonder. When I made it to the top of that ridge, bedraggled and shaky-kneed as a newborn caribou, I found a massive cairn formed by thousands of hikers who’ve made the same trek over the years, and I placed my own stone into it. And at that moment I felt, more powerfully than ever before, what I so often now feel at Camp Denali: a happy collision of joy and gratitude for this magical estuary of a place, where human beings and wilderness meet in harmony.

by Lilly Schneider

The road that leads to Camp Denali & North Face Lodge winds ninety miles into the subarctic, through sweeping valleys and craggy mountains, beside braided riverbeds and kettle ponds, over windy passes and around the snowy foothills of the Alaska Range. On the five-hour trip you may glimpse grizzlies, moose, caribou, wolves, beavers, Dall sheep, ptarmigan, fox--but, aside from other vehicles, a handful of ranger stations and the visitor’s center, you’ll see little in the way of human life.

It can feel a bit surreal, then, when the bus turns off the road at mile 89, cabins begin to appear through the spruce trees on the hillside, and suddenly the bus is surrounded by a bunch of friendly, well-fed-looking people who clearly feel at home in this place. In a few days, maybe even an evening, you might start to feel that way, too.

by Lilly Schneider

It’s not enough to say I love the people at Camp Denali & North Face Lodge because they are wonderful. Truly, they are a remarkable bunch: adventuresome, generous, playful, hard-working, sincere and almost suspiciously chipper. A shared curiosity about the world and our own possibilities for moving through it--the same curiosity that has pulled people to Alaska its whole settled history--brought us all here. We live in close proximity, work in close proximity, and do pretty much everything together. We are friends. We are the kind of family you may not have heard of before.

Camp Denali has an uncanny knack for hiring terribly interesting and loving people. But there’s an instant bond, or at least an instant opportunity for bonding, between every person, staff or guest, who has gone to the trouble and had the good fortune to find their way to Camp Denali, which comes from this simple fact: we’re out here together in the wilderness. And that means we rely on each other for everything.