newsminer.com

DENALI NATIONAL PARK — Rain drizzled down at Wonder Lake and the Alaska Range was shrouded in fog as Gary Borenstein pulled the green park bus up to a small group of sleepy campers, ready to stow their backpacks and climb aboard.

It was 6:30 a.m. It was cold and it was raining.

“Good morning, my name is Gary, and we’ll be getting back at 11:30 a.m.,” he said.

“Everybody happy?”

Then with a look at one bedraggled camper, “Hey, you don’t look happy. Buck up, man. Buck up.”

In his 14 years as a Denali bus driver, Borenstein has developed a rapport with the thousands of campers who’ve clambered aboard his bus, including several dozen campers from all over the world who return to Wonder Lake every August to photograph the autumn colors and wildlife preparing for winter in the park.

He’s also a veteran hiker, quick to offer sound advice to backpackers on where to hike and camp and landmarks to look for along the trail.

After a rainy August night of tent camping 82 miles inside of Denali National Park and Preserve, he’s got the bus all warmed up by the time the 11 riders board.

Someone asked, “What’s the temperature?”

“Forty-seven degrees,” said Borenstein.

“Barometric pressure?” asks another.

“Twenty-nine-point-four and falling.”

He turned and smiled. “I’m pretty good at guessing.”

“What’s the white lichen?”

He turned again. “You want the Latin name?”

Borenstein knows more about the flora and fauna in the 6 million acre park than any other driver out there, said longtime friend Greg Lahaie, owner of Kantisha Air Taxi and the Skyline Lodge, a rustic lodge based at Mile 94 of the park road.

“He really takes an interest in it, and he’s really well read,” said Lahaie.

“He’s got just enough balance, crustiness and crankiness, humor and good heartedness,” said Matt Uterberger, who works for Lahaie. “We here at Skyline Lodge are always happy to put our guests on his bus, because we know he will treat him well.”

Lahaie, Uterberger and others have a particular fondness for Borenstein, because of his colorful personality, his knowledge of the park and because his year-round home lies just outside the park. Most of the other drivers spend only summers in the state.

Borenstein, who bears a striking resemblance to actor Al Pacino, hails from the Bronx, in New York City. A University of Wisconsin graduate with a degree in psychology, he’s a world traveler who has worked at hotels, driven cabs in New York City and Anchorage, and a truck in Antarctica.

For the past 14 years, he has driven a bus during the visitor season at Denali National Park. He also drove the bus, during the off-season, for the crew filming “Into the Wild,” the tragic odyssey of Christopher McCandless, who died in the Alaska wilderness in August 1992.

“I love driving in general, and I love the park. This is my office,” he said, as he maneuvered the old green bus down the narrow gravel road, through tundra heavy with the previous evening’s rainfall as the new day began.

Fifteen minutes later, Borenstein, ever on the watch for wildlife, pulled over, without a word, nodded toward a large female moose grazing on aquatic grass in a pond.

Two riders were sleeping, but everyone else had their digital cameras clicking.

Soon the clouds lifted, revealing a green, red and orange panorama of drawfed shrubs, lichens and mosses. Mount McKinley, at 20,320 feet, was still shrouded in fog, but the silent beauty of the park spoke for itself.

“You ask what I like about my job?” said Borenstein, nodding toward the broad expanse of multi-colored tundra, as the bus rolls toward the Eielson Visitor Center. “This.”

The three-mile expanse on either side of Eielson is his favorite part of the park, “the most beautiful, the most dramatic, even without Denali being out,” he said.

The area around the Eielson Visitor center itself was clear. But all around, the fog obscured what on a clear day is a breathtaking view of the mountain and the Alaska Range. The area from Eielson to nearby Stony Dome can be very foggy in August, he said.

The hikers warm up to Borenstein and start swapping stories with him.

Terek Chammah, a Microsoft Corp. programmer from Seattle, related how he recently climbed Mount Rainer with the “Into the Wild” film crew. Chammah and two fellow Microsoft programmers were on their first trip to Denali.

At the Toklat River, Mile 53, Borenstein offered advice on the trails to two more riders, Will Marchell, a NASA physicist from Seattle, and his friend Alena Shmygelska, a post-graduate student at Stanford who is studying computational biology.

Backpackers like Chammah, Marchell and Shmygelska, with their zest for the wilderness, are the other best part of driving the bus, Borenstein said.

“The difference is the people on the camper buses at some point touch the wilderness spirit, the intrinsic value that Denali can offer,” he said. “The people on the other buses can’t. I don’t feel I have to do any narrative. People on this bus sense what this place is all about. People on the other buses, you have to tell them it’s a wonderful wilderness park.”

Around Mile 45, the bus stops again, and the riders are treated to the sight of two young red foxes engaged in an energetic game of tag. It’s an unexpected highlight of the trip back to the park entrance, and Borenstein acknowledged it’s an unusual sight.

Another rider, a young graduate student from New York, asked if there are many coyotes in the park. Coyotes don’t last long here, because the wolves get them, Borenstein tells her.

Kind of like the black bears, he adds. “If they come into the park, the brown bears will kill them.”

A drive through the park is filled with constant surprises, from the riders to the wildlife.

On the trip out to Wonder Lake, just a day earlier, the riders were mostly guys under 30 years of age, swapping backpacking stories with Borenstein and telling about life on the road.

College buddies Steve Nylund, of Long Island, N.Y., with David Byers and Sean Beyard, both of Boonesboro, Md., said they began their odyssey in June, traveling through Tennessee, Kentucky and Maine before coming to Alaska.

They too got a good taste of Denali, spotting a caribou with a huge rack, a Toklat grizzly sow and cub, arctic ground squirrels, snowshoe hares and more, plus the grandeur of the park itself.

There was a lot more wildlife to sight back when there were just about 25 buses a day traveling through the park, Borenstein said. Nowadays there are 80 buses a day on the park road during the tourist season.

He gets tired, cranky and exasperated at the bus traffic at times, but he’s never bored, he said.

He still loves the park, with all its flora and fauna, and the people who ride the camper bus.

“My ultimate motto, which I’m going to have made into a plaque, is Ôlife is better off not on the bus than on the bus.”’

It’s his tribute to the backpackers who come to explore the park, the place he calls home.