Denali National Park (September 2021): Hiking The Savage Alpine Route & Savage River (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.

In this Chapter we find ourselves at The Savage River Campground on our second, and final day at this site, before we finish up the trip at Riley Creek.

On this day we decided to hike one of the few maintained trails in The Park... The Savage Alpine Loop.

This trail is an awesome, fairly easy, 8-mile loop trail that begins at The Savage River Campground, and heads up about 1,400 feet up and over Savage Pass & Mountain. Once over the pass, you descend down to the Savage River Bridge.

The elevation gain was gradual, and I would categorize it as moderate. We had an absolutely gorgeous day, once again. As fickle as we'd always heard the weather in Denali can be, we experienced none of that. Almost every day we spent in The Park was a bluebird day.

It was pretty windy, however, once we got above tree-line, but it was manageable. The exposure was minimal, except for a few sections, and the hike was amazing on every level.

The best part of the hike... you will have amazing views of Denali herself, if you're lucky enough to experience the trail on a day like the one we were afforded.

After the hike, we decided to head down the Savage River Loop Trail once more to Jenny Creek in order to spend the rest of the afternoon scanning the surrounding hills for wildlife.

We were awarded some amazing time scoping out a Moose meandering the hillside.

That night we chilled by the fire hoping to see the Northern Lights for the first time.

Denali didn't disappoint. We didn't get the full Aurora experience, but we got enough of it to capture on an iPhone. The experience was magical, and would've been enough for both of us if that was the only time we saw it on the entire trip. Luckily, we scored an even better display the following night.

This trip was fairly spur of the moment for us, and we weren’t sure if we were taking too big of a chance going this late in the season. We could not have been more wrong! The Autumn colors, bluebird days, mild temperatures, and easy hiking was an absolute dream. Not to mention that we basically had the entire Park to ourselves.

We hope you enjoy joining us as we explore this wild and massive wilderness playground. If you did, 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, 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)