Today was a day for sightseeing since things hadn't changed much with the National Weather Service. Most of Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve is limited to where you can go by foot, ATV (shame on the NPS), horseback, or air taxi. At the north end there is a maintained road that can be driven about 42 miles into the park and along the way there are some pretty spectacular views. In this entry I'll share a few that I took today with cloudy skies. Unfortunately the big peaks in the Wrangell Mountains were all but totally obscured by clouds.

In a couple of locations you have to ford streams to continue down the road. Even with all the rain they are easy this late in the summer but, given their width, they must be a real nightmare during spring runoff. In the image at left you can see one of the (now dry) stream beds that eventually reaches the road just below center to the left. In the image at right I was standing on a pile of boulders that had built up on a bank.

These images (and those below) are just different views of the same peaks. One of the things I picked up at the park's visitor center was a topographic map but it doesn't show them them as having been named. But then they are just hills in the vicinity of 8000 feet when compared with some of the monsters that are a few miles south (like Mount Sanford at over 16,000 feet or Mount Wrangell - the largest active volcano in Alaska - at over 14,000).