Most people are aware of Denali National Park’s sled dog kennel and their line of working dogs. A rarity among national parks in the United States, Denali allows dog mushing within its boundaries and even has a page on their website dedicated to mushers.

This was planned to be a shakedown trip for us to test out backcountry traveling with the dogs in Alaska (Mary Shields terms backcountry camping trips with her dogs, “traveling,” and I’m fond of that usage so I’m following it here). Denali National Park helpfully has a GPX file of the winter mushing trails on their website that I had downloaded onto our phones and used to print off maps, but it dated from almost 10 years ago, and I had no idea whether those trails were there anymore or what condition they were in.

Our trailhead was at mile 12 of the park road (there is only one road in Denali). It was a gray winter day, and it being a weekday we were the only people there. There was a vague trail on the south side of the road and with much postholing we dragged the sleds out, got the ganglines set, and hooked the dogs up one by one. At 2 PM, we pulled the hooks and set out.

The trail from the park road quickly dropped off the ridgeline into a valley. After about a half mile we connected to the main sled dog trail heading west into the park and crossed the Savage River. The traveling was easy, and we were in the open, crossing rolling hills. The only excitement was an open creek crossing, a first for both the dogs and us. Our leaders hesitated for half a second and then leapt over the water, scrambling up the opposite bank. Everyone else followed suit, except for my two wheel dogs, Gala and Dakota, who decided that they didn’t like this idea of jumping over an open creek but being in the rear they didn’t have much of a choice and were unceremoniously pulled across by the rest of the team. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the sled, but I’ve learned in these situations it’s best to just go with it and hold on for the ride. A quick tap on the drag mat, half a second of air, and then the runners slammed into the opposite bank and the dogs hauled me up (on the way back I decided to lean back to prevent the brush bow from digging into the opposite bank, which seemed to work better).

As we progressed into the park the “excitement” kept increasing. Dropping into the Sanctuary River drainage at about mile six I did my first barrel roll. The trail makes a 90-degree left on a steep sidehill. My wife, who has many thousands of miles on a sled more than I do, managed to stick the turn. I wasn’t so fortunate, and my sled and I cartwheeled down the hill. Fortunately, the snow was deep and both I and the sled emerged unscathed, aside from a twisted bridle. We later learned that the Park Service mushers had tried several times to reroute this section of trail, but their dogs were so persistent in following the original trail that they had given up.

A short while later a wrong turn sent us to the Sanctuary River cabin, where we were greeted by several of the Park Service dogs. The Park Service dog teams travel between patrol cabins and following their trail had sent us straight to one of them. Outside the front country there were no trail markers, so we had to rely entirely on our maps and our dogs, and we had missed the turn for the Sanctuary River.

Backtracking led us to the correct turn, just in time to pass the Park Service dog teams returning to their cabin. Sadly, there were no trees to hook to which made it impossible to stop and say hello. Following the trail led us to the Sanctuary River, where the Park Service teams had turned south and followed the river. Assuming this was the correct route, we turned south as well.

We traveled another 10 minutes before it became obvious that we were not heading to the Teklanika river, which was where we intended to go. This created an interesting dilemma. The river was glare ice with a dusting of snow on top, which made it impossible to stop. The claw brake just dragged along the ice without digging in. We didn’t want to ask the dogs to turn around because of the risk of someone getting tangled and we’d be unable to stop and get off the sled to fix it (I later asked Mary Shields what to do in this situation and she just grinned and laughed, “I guess you’re effectively along for the ride!”).

Thankfully, we came to an island and my wife’s leaders took the command to go off the trail and around the island, which got us turned around. We went back the way we came, assuming we had missed the turn somewhere inland, but we ended up right back at the patrol cabin. This time, one of the Park Service mushers, hearing our dogs, came running out. In the brief conversation we had, we learned a few things.

One, we were the first dog team they had seen in Denali in many years, and they were very pleased we were here. Two, the mushing tracks we had downloaded from the website were very accurate. The dogs follow the exact same trail each year, so we could trust that the trails we had on our GPS were correct. Three, we needed to cross the Sanctuary River and not go down it. The trail was obscured since they had not run it in a couple weeks.

We thanked him for his help and headed back to the river. It didn’t take me long to find the correct trail, and with a little convincing we got our leaders headed in the right direction. I didn’t know how our lower 48 leaders would do finding a trail buried under the snow. The terrain was low scrub tundra and windblown, so it was completely obscured to my human eyes in many places. I was thrilled that the dogs followed the trail exactly with only a few minor hiccups. Sometimes when I’m running dogs, I get this feeling that we’re doing something really cool and this was one of those moments.

We quickly reached the Teklanika river and once on it, we split off from the trail on the main river channel and followed the gravel bars until we found a good camp. Setting up camp went smoothly. The dogs were jacketed and unhooked from their tug lines. We were on a gravel bar up against the river embankment, so the dogs had shelter from the wind.

Dinner was a beef stew made of various vegetables and beef that we had dehydrated. The dogs too had beef for dinner, however it was served raw in a warm soup over their kibble. That night, the clouds cleared and by the time the morning had dawned it was -20 °F. We discovered that our sleeping pads were entirely inadequate because in addition to our backs being cool at night, when I pulled the tent there were two neatly molded depressions of ice where Jenny and I had slept (we now use Exped Dura mats).

We had a lazy morning because neither of us were desperate to get going until the sun hit us and warmed everything up. We didn’t set out until after noon, but we made good time because we and the dogs now knew where we were going. The gravel bar on the way out was more exciting than I remembered it being on the way in. We kept bouncing off rocks that were barely concealed under the snow. I had to be careful to stay off the main brake to avoid wrecking on one of the jagged land mines. The remaining 12 miles we had traveled in was uneventful on the way out and only took us a couple hours to traverse. It was a gorgeous day that warmed quickly with the warm spring sun. With bluebird skies we were treated to spectacular views of the Alaska Range and Denali the entire time and we were both grinning from ear to ear.

The most magical part about Denali is that there are no snowmachines and no motorized traffic in the winter. In today’s mushing world we share our trails with snowmachines almost everywhere. I have nothing against snowmachines (we own several) but running dogs in Denali is like traveling back in time to a world before the snowmachine where dogs were the only realistic means of moving people and freight over large distances in the winter backcountry. That makes Denali unique and special. Every serious backcountry musher should have Denali on their bucket list.