August 25, 2026

Thursday 25th of August

Up very early as we had to walk to the Wilderness Access Center and be there for 06.00 as our bus was leaving at 06.15 and it was about a 15 minute walk from our tent to there.

Jane doesn’t ‘do’ early mornings, apparently. Must be her shortest note yet. ;-) However, this day was a really good day. It marked our very first sighting of a wolf. After finding all those tracks in the mud along the banks of the Yukon River, we had yet to see a single hair of a wolf, until we got on a bus!

I may have gotten a little excited when the driver pointed out a wolf. At least, I think it was the driver. When he lost sight of it, I called out… Okay, I shouted out that it was at his 2 o’clock. I was less than politely informed that one does not shout on a park bus. But then the driver did some crazy manoeuvres, pulling out sharply and around the bus in front, blocking their view and improving ours.

I took a few photos, my first glimpse of an animal I have longed to see from the moment I read about wolves in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild shortly followed by White Fang. It’s funny to think that now, in Denmark, we have a ‘wolf problem’, and I work in an area that has been visited by wolves the size of Denali wolves, perhaps bigger. A wolf was even spotted a couple of kilometres down the road from our house. And yet, the only wolf I have ever seen in the wild, was in Alaska.

We hopped off the bus as soon as possible, if only for me to avoid catching more evil eye from the driver in the mirror. And then, with our wolf preserved on film, we took another photo of yet another USPO to go with all the others. It’s a better photo than those of the wolf, but of course, I prefer the grainy, blurry glimpse of the wolf. ;-)