An Alaska Road Trip–the plan

I recently had the good fortune to enjoy a trip to Alaska and thought I’d share a bit of that travel. I could really write a small book about the 2-weeks on the road, but hope to do far less writing and a bit more showing … pictures, that is. That said, today’s post may be a bit more wordy than I hope future posts will be!

I plan on four shorter blog posts that break the trip down into:

• the plan (this post)
• the Alcan Highway
• Denali National Park
• the ferry ride home

So with that, let’s start down this road and see where it takes us.

The setup

My grandfather had worked on the Alcan Highway, a road running from Dawson Creek, BC (the “can” in Alcan) to Delta Junction, AK (the “Al”). This road is alternately called the Alaska Highway (although 80%+ of it lies in Canada) and was built mostly with US resources in the early 1940s as part of the war effort to allow the rapid staging of materials to our 49th state. While the majority of manpower on the road were military recruits, civilians helped and, as I noted, my grandfather signed up. He was joined on at least one summer by one of his sons, my Uncle Joe. So earlier this year when one of my friends asked me if I was interested in traversing the Alcan Highway “just to see what’s there”, I was eager to join him but I had to check-in with my wife. Our home life is fairly busy, we had 20+ chicks in a brooder in our garage, and leaving her to deal with that (and cats and goats) for two weeks was a big request.

Saying I got a “hall pass” to go doesn’t do it justice: Suzy encouraged me to sign on, noting it was a “once in a lifetime opportunity”. That she would be home caring for 29 animals didn’t seem to phase her at all, and so I jumped in and we started coordinating details. In addition to my buddy and I, we invited a third friend, another retiree and frequent hiking pal, and over the next three months we made all the arrangements.

The itinerary

The trip broke down into three parts, with an additional staging day at the start. Which is to say, the first day we traveled far north into Canada, to be in position to hit Dawson Creek on our second day away from home. We’d then spend four days traveling the ~1400 miles on the Alcan Highway, and then continue on into Denali National Park. While a person could easily spend a week and then some in the Park, we only had a few days (two, to be exact), as we needed to get to Skagway in southern Alaska in time to catch a ferry ride south. The ferry ride itself spans five calendar days, but we embarked late on the first day and disembarked early the last day … so three full days at sea and then arrival and departure days.

The Sign Post Forest

While I’ll say more about this on the Alcan Highway write-up, one of the stops on the trip is the Sign Post Forest. You can be read about this tourist attraction here, but I decided that I wanted to hang a sign for Suzy and me. I asked my other two buddies if they wanted to do something along these lines, but we never were able to get together … I just ran out of time to coordinate something. However (and as usual), Suzy helped pick up my slack and we created a super-cool sign that I posted. With everything I had going on the week prior, it’s a wonder that we managed to cut the sign, route the lettering, get it painted, and then apply a finish to preserve it, but it somehow finished drying the night before I took off.

Packing

This was a challenge: do we schedule in time to hit a laundry, or just carry everything we need for two weeks of travel? We had a lot of driving so went for bringing everything we’d need; I budgeted socks and undies for each day, a new t-shirt every-other-day, and brought two pairs of pants. Additionally I had two sets of hiking gear for when we’d be in Denali and carried one extra of everything as spares. Given that most of the time we were just sitting in a car and we had showers each night, I had more than enough clothing.

All the clothes for two weeks packed into a large duffle, I had a backpack full of camping gear, and a bear canister with my food. Combine that with a phat stack of US currency and a credit card or two, and I was ready.

Let’s go!

With the details set, the day arrived and my two friends and I hopped into our rented Dodge Durango SUV and headed north.