Dall Sheep

This Blog Entry builds on the prior eight entries.

While the Grizzle bear appears on many Denali National Park symbols, it really should be the Dall sheep. Mt McKinley National Park was established 1917 to provide a protected area for Dall sheep.

These white sheep are easy to see (except against snow cover) and very docile, so they were "easy pickings" for miners and professional hunters who sold meat to miners. Additionally, there were stories of sheep being killed not for food, but to prevent other miners from having access to meat. By 1910 when mining activities in the Kantishna Hill was tailing off, the number of Dall sheep was very low.

A hundred years later, the population of Dall sheep has recovered. We saw a few dozen Dall sheep in herds of 10 or so on mountain sides during the bus rides in an out of the park. At a distance of a half mile and more, they were easy to locate but a challenge to photograph. The above is a much clearer photo of a ram from an Alaskan Photo Geographic web site.