The latest issue of National Geographic is as packed with glorious goodies as all other issues of the magazine tend to be, and one of them brought back a lot of great memories: an article about the sprawling natural park region all around “the Tall One,” the moody and incredible mountain I knew as Mount McKinley. The article is written by Tom Clynes and features gorgeous photography by Aaron Huey, and as with most National Geographic feature articles, the message isn’t merely one of celebration. Out of some sense of providing a balanced picture, Clynes not only talks to tour guides and wilderness officials but also talks about the bitter scum-creatures who insist on viewing the Denali wilderness – and all the animals within it – as their personal property. There are pictures of these ranchers and trappers, along with their gruesome handiwork: dead wolves and decapitated moose.

But at least the bulk of the piece is celebration. Denali hosts hundreds and hundreds of awestruck tourists every season, but Clynes also visits its back country in the off-season, in the middle of winter, and he gets to those regions in pretty much the only way possible:

“Dogs connect people to history and to an experience most people will never have,” says kennel manager Jennifer Raffaeli. “In the winter they’re the most reliable and reasonably safe way to move around parts of the park. Unlike a snowmobile, they’re always ready to start up. They also have a survival instinct, which is something no machine can ever have.”

That afternoon the cold snap breaks, and we mush in a caravan of three dog teams to the ranger station at Wonder Lake. At 2 a.m we step outside our cabins to catch a dazzling show of the aurora borealis as the dogs sleep nearby.

“A lot of Denali is untouchable to most people, but with the dogs, traveling like this, you can touch it,” Raffaeli tells me as we stare in awe at the curtains of multicolored light flowing across the sky. “The sense of peace you get here in the winter is so intense it’s almost beyond belief.”

This brought back a flood of memories of the times I’ve visited Denali myself, and those memories, encountered again while sitting in a cozy book-lined parlor listening to the contented snoring of two old dogs who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs, let alone mush over broken terrain, were of course both sweet and bittersweet. Long, long gone are the wonderful dogs I knew back then, from under whose warm weight I looked up at those “curtains of multicolored light flowing across the sky.” Long, long gone are the adventures big and small we encountered far from the haunts of humans. It was wonderful to recall those experiences, and it was almost equally wonderful to see, from Clynes’ story and especially from Huey’s stunning photographs, that Denali is still entrancing people – and luring some of them deeper into its back country, to experience its humbling wonders.

And as an added bonus, the issue’s photos also included one that made me hoot with unexpected laughter – surely the most “what the hell?” shot of a grizzly bear anyone has ever managed to get. It shows an enormous bear breaking the herbivore diet and eating a hapless ground squirrel: