Denali National Park 4K (Sept. 2021): Hiking The Savage River Loop Trail & Jenny Creek (short-form)

This day hike is part of a larger 7-Day trip to Denali National Park in September of 2021. This is a short-form day-hike edit of a longer form video.

This chapter sees us leave the Teklanika Campground, which we had called home for the last 3 nights. We make our way to our next Campground, where we would be staying for the following 3 nights. This campground is called Savage River, and it's absolutely gorgeous! The mountain herself was dead ahead outside our RV's window. We quite literally woke up to views of Denali each morning. It was wild!

Upon arriving, we immediately wanted to explore the area. There really aren't many trails in the area, but the Savage River Loop trail is a super easy hike around the campground area. This trail brings you down to Jenny Creek, and this is really where the fun begins.

From this point on, as it is in most of The Park, it's all off-trail hiking. The fact that it was a perfect bluebird day, that there was pretty much no one around, and that the area was blooming with unreal fall colors made this one of the highlights of the whole trip.

The entire area looked like it would be a wildlife bonanza.

If you've ever spent any time hiking in Grizzly Bear habitats, you know what I mean. There are just some places that SMELL like bears. noBear calls this feeling about a place "beary". The same way a surfer might call a certain break "sharky".

And boy were we not wrong!! The size of the Grizzly Bear prints, and those of the cubs which were accompanying her, were the biggest we've ever seen! by FAR! And they were super fresh, and heading in the same direction we were hiking.

It's important to explain that the other Grizzly Habitats in which we've hiked had well defined trails. Denali has none of that.

You are quite literally walking through brush that is thick and sometimes up to your shoulders. The chance of walking up on, and surprising, a Grizzly sow and cubs in a situation like that is very real. That is the most dangerous situation you can put yourself in when hiking in Brown Bear areas.

The fact that it was very late in the season, and these massive Grizzlies are in hyperphagia didn't really help. This is when hibernating animals will desperately find, kill, and eat as much food as they can.

We'd be lying, however, if we didn't say that this adds an excitement to hiking that we can't quite explain. The danger is palpable and VERY real!

We also came across Wolf tracks that looked like a velociraptor. They were incredulously big, and again... very fresh. Along with seeing a moose later in the afternoon... this place turned out to be heaven for us. And this place was exactly the reason why we wanted to visit Denali so badly.

Please join us as we explore the area. The weather makes the quality of this video exceptional. It's one of our favorites for this reason. We hope you'll agree.

We hope you enjoy joining us as we explore this wild and massive wilderness playground. If you do, please consider subscribing, as we will be dropping more content like this regularly. Not to mention that it really helps justify all of the hard work we put into it in order to provide you with a little bit of cool entertainment that we hope you enjoy. Thanks!

Love Always and Forever and Ever and Ever,

noBear (specifically Buldo & Evan, on this trip)