08/20 Woke up after a week of rain just hoping that the sun would finally be out… I wasn’t disappointed! Today was perfect. Had breakfast at the lodge and then took off for Denali National Park, the offical end of Leg 1. The Denali Highway was paved for the first 20 miles or so and then it was all gravel. Personally I didn’t think it was that bad but a little later one of the guys working at the lodge said a Princess Cruise bus driver was complaining that it was bad. Not for me. I was zipping around pot holes like they weren’t even there.
Rode for over 5 hours and covered 56 miles. I was only planning on 40 so the extra miles were great. It felt like I had limitless energy. Today would have easily been a 100+ mile day if I was on pavement. It might have been the 2 times I stopped and had strawberry/rhubarb pie and Kokanee and stop #2 that had me so pumped today. Lots of hills but none of them were that steep. Still ended up climbing 3884 feet which is a fair bit.
The road was pretty hard packed so no issses with slugging through anything soft. That was my biggest worry. Rain is supposed to be back on the 22nd so I’m hoping to be in Cantwell and on pavement by then. If it stays cool and the wind is calm like it was today that shouldn’t be too hard.
The views today were stunning. Passed by 3 glaciers and several mountain ranges. Lots of snow on top of these ones. Glad I finally figured out how to take halfway decent shots of the snow without washing out the picture. The trees gave way pretty quickly to tundra which is new for me. I saw a little the other day but nothing like this. For as far as the eye can see it just blankets everything. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m so glad I came through this way.
The other little thing I was kind of worried about were cars spraying me with gravel or it being really dusty. The dust was a none issue because of the rain and except for 2 morons in SUVs everyone slowed way down. The SUV guys were probably excited because they’ve never left pavement before and this was a huge thing for them. One couple in an RV slowed down and we chatted for a minute while I rode along. Lots of waves too.
Camped not too far off the road in an area that was probably scraped out by the DOT. It looks like of like a really small gravel pit. Saw lots of these all along the highway. This is by far the easiest place to find a place to camp at night.
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When you’re dealing with things with extreme contrast remember the basics of the Zone system. Your meter wants to make everything a Zone V (Roman Numeral 5) gray. Point it at a black cat in a coal bin and you’ll get a Zone V gray cat; point it at a snow bank, you’ll get Zone V gray snow.
That’s where you have to outwit the meter. Underexpose your cat about three stops and you’ll have a perfectly fine black cat; overexpose your snow by about three stops and you’ll have perfectly white snow.
That’s why I used to use an incident meter that measures the that’s falling on the object rather than the light that’s being reflected from the object.
It’s a lot easier to be a photographer these days with a digital camera and display.