7/17 Talkeetna to Healy

I already described our flight over Mt. McKinley this day in my last post. After picking up our gear and checking out we had a relatively uneventful ride toward Denali NP. It turned cloudy and cool and began to rain enough to stop and put on rain gear. Strip mall type development is beginning to occur around the entry to the Park. We decided to move on to our accomodations. We ate at Rosie's Diner and then proceeded to Ridgetop Cabins. Eric already mentioned this place, but he didn't really give the driveway in the detail it deserves. This driveway was steep, paved with cobbles, gravel and loose soil and had blind ascending switchbacks. The bike radios came in real handy as brother Lou called out the line to take. It really was every man for himself though as we used the hogs like dirtbikes many hundreds of pounds lighter. We all made it up, and then made it down, up and down again over the next two days. Very intense. The cabin was very nice, clean and nestled in to a trembling aspen grove. I had been noticing that the trembling aspens had gray foliage. You could pick out the groves on the hillside because of this peculiarity. At the cabin I was able to examine the leaves closely to determine why they had the color. It turns out that throughout Alaska the trembling aspens have a leaf miner that eats the chlorophylous tissue out from between the upper and lower leaf surfaces. This gives the individual leaves a greyish cast as you are really only looking at the cuticle on the upper and lower surface. Typically, grey birch has a leaf miner but that turns the leaves brown. It seemed that this insect pest was uniformly spread throughout the aspen in Alaska.