Alaska Adventures

November 28, 2021

Explore Denali National Park and Preserve

So, it's been a while and I'm extremely late to the game on this one. In September of this year, I spent a week in Alaska. I traveled with friends to some of the most remote and beautiful places I've ever seen on this earth. Alaska in September is absolutely breathtaking. We explored an ice cave carved out of a glacial river. We ventured to a hot springs where the natural geothermal energy heats a warm and relaxing bath. And we saw North America's highest peak at Denali National Park and Preserve. That's right, we actually had good enough weather to see the peak of Denali (aka. Mount McKinley). Here's a few fun facts you may not know about Denali:

- The summit is permanently covered in snow and temperatures can reach as low as -75 degrees Fahrenheit

- The mountain stands tall at 20,310 feet! More than 35,000 people have attempted to climb it, but only about 60% success rate. It is the most challenging mountain to climb because of the low barometric pressure.

- The mountain has changed names a number of times. It was originally mapped in 1839 and named Tenada by Ferdinand von Wrangel. Then named Bolshaya Gora, meaning big mountain in Russian, before America bought the land from Russia. The first English name was Densmore Mountain, then in 1896 the mountain was named in commemoration of William McKinley as Mount McKinley. It remained that name until 2015 when President Obama announced the name change to Denali as the Alaskan Natives has always known it.

- Only 30% of visitors to the park are able to see the peak due to obstructions of clouds and fog. I became a lucky member of the 30% club as we traveled there on a nice clear day.

I've been highly distracted these last couple months which has put me off from making this map. I've had it on my mind constantly but haven't had the time to sit down and commit to finding the data and creating a design. I am not a cartographer, but I figured this would be a good chance to work on my cartography skills. I didn't do as well as I would have liked, but I'm improving on many tools I didn't even know existed before.

I attempted to make a postcard-like design that shows the Denali National Park with hints at the wildlife and sights available. The park is incredibly large with limited options to explore via car. The best option is to take the shuttle bus about 60 miles on the park's only road. Alaska state residents can travel on this road certain times of the year, but coming NOT from Alaska, that wasn't a choice for us. There are campsites along the road too if you want to stop and explore for a few days. Now, this is a National Park, so on foot is really the most authentic way to explore. There are only a few maintained trails in the park but most of the exploring is done through the backcountry with an old fashioned map and compass. The Alaskan Range covers the park to the south with glacial rivers flow out from the beautiful snow-capped peaks.

Finding the right data for this look was actually quite challenging. First, I tried to use ArcGIS Living Atlas and found it just required too much work to edit the way I wanted it to look. So I settled on downloading the data from the National Park Service's Open Data portal. While the portal didn't have everything I wanted, I was able to work with more flexibility having the data in my own geodatabase. Campsites, roads, landmarks, boundaries and trails were all available in this dataset. The toughest dataset challenge was the waterbodies. The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) has an immense amount of data, but cluttered my area too much with minor bodies of water I didn't want to display. National Atlas, which is no longer supported, still has digital vector data available. I decided to use a 1:1,000,000-scale of streams of the United States which I clipped to the boundary of the park. Mountain peaks were easy to locate with some of the most famous indicated here on the map.

I hope you enjoy this map, and if you ever have the chance, I highly recommend making it out to Alaska at some point in your life. What a beautiful and amazing place on this planet!