If you look hard at where the path curves in the picture, you'll see there's a person standing there, probably gaping. Grandeur amok, terrain that is both virginal and dangerous, a tantalizing combination if you're willing to overlook minor things like comfort and exist in your natural, free, wet cold stinky state. My body went into shock from the lack of pollution, the abundance of fresh colorless air and the absence of any real, nondehydrated food. If you're hungry enough, even the lizards start looking like little kebabs. Okay, there are no lizards at Denali, but it is teeming with every other imaginable type of life---everything struggling at once to be born, procreate and die in the space of a few minutes or a few weeks, an immense push for growth that hovers on the edge of one's awareness the way the sun hovers on the edge of the sky.

I don't know if you've ever tried sleeping in your tent at 1AM when it's still daylight outside. Millions of years ago in kindergarten, my teacher used to force us to take naps on little foam pads around noontime. Back then, we could adjust the blinds and at least pretend it was dark. I always thought those Zsa-Zsa Gabor eyemasks were stupid, until I tried to sleep in a tent in the middle of the summer in a place where the sun doesn't set (it dips). It didn't help that I had to share the tent with Proto-Ann and rude people decided to have sex in the tent next door. Anyway, it's not like we needed sleep...we had only climbed *one* mountain. Besides, no one really sleeps in Alaska during the summer, they just drop from exhaustion in the fall. It rains a lot, and the rain freezes on the sides of your tent (but not the top, body heat, maybe) although capillary action still works on ice, meaning that I was squinched up like a microfiber nautilus trying not to touch Ann, the tent walls, or myself while universal moans and the occasional German naughty word escaped the lips of someone I have never met and feel I should know very well. It just wouldn't get dark. We couldn't sleep. They were moaning. So we started moaning, too (and possibly giggling). Not that permafrost is an aphrodisiac, just that the essence of prepubescence never really goes away, and if you can camp, you can moan.

Denali and Mount McKinley are the same thing, it's just that "Denali" is native for "extra large mountain" and "McKinley" is American for "extra large president". The rangers don't tell you this on the bus tour, but then, you're busy wondering how the bus can seemingly dangle on two wheels while backing up a quarter mile for another bus off the sides of a cliff on a road built just wide enough for bicycles and landslides. It's very similar to a bus tour in the Andes, although the drivers don't curse at each other (at least, not to each other's faces) and there are no live chickens underfoot, only the occasional arctic ground squirrel. The drivers sometimes look at the road and steer the bus, but for the most part they are busy telling you how not to let yourself get killed.

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