TALKEETNA, Alaska - Bob and Sally Corey of Dawsonville, Ga., planned to see North America's tallest mountain. That's more of a challenge than you might think.

The 20,320-foot Mount McKinley is often covered in clouds, and probably only one out of three visitors to interior Alaska gets to see the entire mountain.

Indeed, it was rainy when the Coreys first visited Talkeetna, a quirky community about 100 miles south of Denali National Park and Preserve.

Talkeetna offers some of the best viewing of the entire mountain and other Alaska Range peaks. Numerous flight-seeing tours are based there. On cloudy days, that is the best and only way to see the mountain.

The Coreys took the flight their first day in Talkeetna, and the pilot was able to get past the cloud cover.

"It was amazing," Sally Corey said afterward. "I said, 'Don't get any closer.' He said, 'We're 10 miles away.'

"It was like you could almost touch it. It was massive."

Hide and seek

Many visitors wind up playing hide and seek with Mount McKinley, which is in the heart of Denali National Park, nearly 200 miles north of Anchorage.

The mountain is elusive to visitors partly because of the location of the Alaska Range, park spokeswoman Kris Fister said.

"The range itself bisects the state, and it is the meeting point for those colder, drier systems coming down from the north, and the warmer, moister ones gathering the precipitation from the open ocean coming in from the south," she said.

As the systems collide, they often produce lots of clouds, obscuring the mountain.

Fister estimated 45 percent of it is actually visible most days.

The mountaintop can be seen from Anchorage or Fairbanks on clear days. For those driving to the park, there are plenty of opportunities to see Mount McKinley at popular pullouts along the Parks Highway.

There also are incredible sightseeing opportunities from the south and north viewing areas on the Parks Highway in Denali State Park, which abuts the national park.

As majestic as Mount McKinley is, Fister says it is not always the biggest priority for park visitors. "They'd like to see a grizzly bear," she said.

She said bus rides into the park offer the best opportunity to see the park's incredible menagerie of wildlife.

But if seeing Mount McKinley is your goal, you can't beat the views from Talkeetna, about 14 miles off the Parks Highway.

One of the best pullouts to see Mount McKinley is just before you get to the eclectic town, which has 800 residents.

Mount McKinley is the No. 1 reason tourists visit Talkeetna, said Kris Dupey, who works at the local visitors center.

Prominently parked on Talkeetna's main drag is Harvey Phillips' taxi, a covered wagon pulled by mules. He offers to take tourists to see Mount McKinley, if it's not in the clouds.

This is the fifth year Phillips has spent summers in Talkeetna and winters in Florida, and he never tires of seeing Mount McKinley.

"After all the years I have been coming up here," he said, "it still takes my breath away, and I don't pass up a chance to see it."

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