Alaska

Click here for all our blog posts from our time biking and backpacking in Alaska.

Rough map of our travels in Alaska

Our route through Alaska began on the northern coast in Prudhoe Bay.  We took a plane to Deadhorse and followed the Dalton Highway south from there (it's the only road), stopping for a week for an extremely difficult but rewarding backpacking trip in a tiny corner of Gates of the Arctic National Park.  The only towns along the way, Coldfoot and Wiseman, have a combined population of ~25 (depending on who's there at the time) and very limited services, so we sent two food packages addressed to ourselves to the post office in Coldfoot, c/o General Delivery, with enough to get us around the Brooks Range and to Fairbanks.  There's a decent store in Deadhorse, a restaurant in Coldfoot, and two restaurants near the Yukon River.  Don't count on much else.  See this photo for a summary of the Dalton's services.

The Dalton's surface is light gravel with some pavement here and there.  We rode it with 38mm tires and didn't have any problems unless it was raining hard, which makes the thick mud pretty much impassable with any width tires.  Traffic up north is almost exclusively trucks from the oil fields, and increases with tourists as you near Fairbanks.  There were also a number of cyclists and motorcyclists on the road.  The one pass is Atigun Pass, nothing too serious at 4,739 feet, but there are a lot of steep hills, especially in the southern part.  Camping is harder than it might seem due to tundra pools up north and dense, shrubby forest for the rest of the Dalton, but the pipeline, a wide cut in the trees, is almost always nearby.  Natural water sources are plentiful and easy to find.  We didn't want to become grizzly food (but still almost did...), so we each carried a bear canister; hanging food is out of the question with the stubby boreal forest trees.  Surprisingly, most cyclists we met did not have bear cans and knew very little about keeping themselves safe in bear country.  They all survived, but don't be like them.  Bear education and precautions are imperative for the safety of future cyclists in the area as well.

So clean, but not for long!

The Dalton: gravel, pipeline, mountains

Backpacking in the Brooks Range

From Fairbanks we headed south on the Parks Highway, taking a detour to ride the beautiful road through Denali National Park (no cars allowed, woohoo!) and doing another incredible backpacking trip there.  The small town of Healy and the touristy area around the park entrance ("Glitter Gulch") don't have any big grocery stores, so we brought some backpacking food from Fairbanks.

Denali National Park

Other cyclists we talked to said great things about the unpaved Denali Highway east of Denali Park, but, wanting to visit Anchorage and southern Alaska, we continued on the Parks Highway, visiting Denali State Park and Talkeetna along the way.  Road surface, shoulder, and traffic were always very good.

Tam on the Parks Highwa

Getting into Anchorage has been made much more pleasant by an easy-to-follow bike path for the last twenty miles, and there are a lot of bike paths and some bike lanes in the city as well.  It's still a city, though, and there was a lot of traffic in the whole area, partly but not entirely because we were there on 4th of July weekend).  There was also a fair amount of construction in the Wasilla area, which made things somewhat unpleasant.

From Anchorage, we had a tough time deciding where to go.  The Alaska Marine Highway provides a versatile maritime transportation system, meaning we could go to the Kenai Peninsula and not have to backtrack, but we ultimately decided to continue overland east to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.  The Glenn Highway always either had a shoulder or it wasn't needed due to there not being any traffic, the one exception being one short area near Palmer and Sheep Mountain.  We stocked up at the IGA in Glennallen for our time in Wrangell-St. Elias before heading south to Chitina via the Richardson and Edgerton Highways, both good cycling roads.  There are two unpaved roads into the park, the McCarthy Road in the west from Chitina and the Nabesna Road in the north from Slana.  We were able to hitchhike in to the small, historic mining towns of McCarthy and Kennecott, avoiding the rough 60 mile ride.  There are a few gear shops, guide services, and restaurants in the two towns, and we were able to go packrafting and rent crampons in Kennecott for glacier backpacking.

The Glenn Highway approaching the Wrangells

Plenty of time to kill while waiting for a ride.  The fourth car -
in three hours - picked us up.

We didn't end up traveling the Nabesna Road, but we did find a great local treasure near there.  A mile or two east of the entrance to the road is Midway Store, where the friendly owners, Jay and Debbie, have outfitted an old bus for cyclists and other travelers to stay in.  Stop by and strike up a conversation; I'm sure Jay will be happy to have you.  FYI, if you want to see Chris McCandless' magic bus from Into the Wild, the Stampede Road runs west from the Parks Highway just north of Denali.  The original one is still there, somewhere.  We settled for seeing the bus that was used in the movie, which is at the 49th State Brewery in Healy.

The "magic" bus

Some nice roads will bring you to Tok, where you absolutely should not miss the unlimited pancake breakfast at the Sourdough Campground.  Southwest from there on the Alaska Highway are some free campgrounds at the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, and before you know it, you'll be in Canada!