Okay, ready for the bears!!!

After searching for bears in the park, we finally realized that we could locate the grizzly bears by looking at the snow and following the footprints. These prints were a little too close for comfort, but did eventually lead to this bear!
Wowza!
Here he is sitting by a tree!
Here he is scratching his back on a tree! These are REAL photos friends and family! I was amazed!!
So, I decided to be a little artistic. I believe this photo may be included in my Christmas Cards this year! Enjoy!

More animals...

These are caribou but they were very far away. In fact, these were the only 2 caribou we saw the whole day I believe.
Dan and Sherry attempting to share the binos to watch the dall sheep.
The first bears! Triple cubs and a mom but so very far away that you can barely make them out. Click on the picture and you will be able to find them. Don't worry though! The coming photos of bear in Denali will make you cheer!
A nice, medium-sized bull moose walking pretty near the road. We were pretty excited about this moose and thought it would be the only moose we got to see! We were wrong!

Dall sheep and more dall sheep...

Isn't this one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen? This is one of the 56 Dall sheep we were able to see inside Denali.
There are some BIG rams. They were pretty far away so the picture isn't great, but you can see the curls in their horns really well if you click on the picture.
More female sheep. These were on the side of a hill just above the road. TONS of cars were pulled off to get pictures of them. We were so close, the rocks that were falling due to them walking about, were hitting the cars that were pulled over (including ours!)

Driving to Denali and just inside the park

Beth is taking a black and white photography class at the college so she was having a blast taking pictures on this trip. I think she took 3 rolls of film.
My dear brother. Please don't ask what he was doing?
Weren't the colors just amazing?
The first animals to greet us just after entering Denali were three moose, a mom and two babies. This is one of the babies. Notice the hair on it's back is standing up. It was getting pretty nervous with all the car stopping to look at it, so we quickly moved on down the road.
Here are all three of them from our car.

My brother's visit...

What an amazing summer we had. Our final visitors were my brother Dan and his wife, Sherry. I can't tell you what a great time we had. It was two weeks of wonderful Alaskan fun and fellowship. If you don't know my brother and his wife you wouldn't understand, but they are just so fun and loving and YOUNG for their ages that you can't help but have a great time with them. Our visit started before Ralph returned home. In fact, just after we picked them up from the airport (well, the next morning) we headed straight up to Denali for the driving lottery. I was blessed by a wonderful lady in Anchorage with a driving lottery ticket and was able to share that experience with Dan and Sherry and Beth and Kyle. As you will quickly see, it was an experience of a lifetime! Here is just a sampling of things we were able to see on our trip!


Here they are arriving at the Ted Steven's International Airport in Anchorage!
Our first view of Denali on the drive up to the park.
A beautiful Ptarmigan changing over from summer brown to winter white.

The boys!

What a difference a year makes. This picture was taken at Kyle's baptism in Sept, 2006. These are his best buddies.
This is one year later. Although they couldn't remember where they were standing for the baptism picture, this is them one year later, still best buds and still working hard to become black belts in Tang Soo Do. I think they have each grown 4 inches this year.