“If Not Now Then When?” - We’re Headed to Alaska and Canada!
Our planned route north
This summer, the rough plan is to drive from our home in Carbondale, Colorado to Alaska through Canada on a roughly 10,000 mile round-trip journey over the course of about 4 months. We will be working remotely from the road while we travel and feel so incredibly lucky to be able to do so. If you want to hear more about our plan and some of the backstory on how this trip came to be, read on below. :)
- Christina
For as long as I can remember, Brian has been talking about wanting to go to Alaska. The mountains have always been a central part of our lives and for Brian, Alaska has been that holy grail and ultimate destination. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in going to Alaska - it seemed amazing! I just didn’t share that same obsessive level of awe and desire to actually make a trip to Alaska happen amid all the other adventures on our bucket list in the lower 48. Brian would muse on and on about Alaska with stars in his eyes and I’d humor him and let him go on for as long as he held my attention. Then I’d roll my eyes and say, “yeah yeah maybe someday”. Planning a trip of that magnitude just seemed like such a massive endeavor that was too big to fit into our busy schedules.
Over the course of the past winter and early spring, we began renting out our guest room on the weekends to make a little extra money while we were out camping (and ended up spending 12 awesome consecutive weekends in our truck Dolores in the Utah desert). Every weekend that we’d open up our place it would book nearly instantly, so one day Brian decided to see what would happen if we opened up our place for all of July, and August.
One weekend, we happened to be in the middle of nowhere Utah on a narrow 4x4 road when we randomly got cell phone signal and our phones buzzed with a notification that our place had just been booked for all of July and August. Sitting in our truck, still with an adrenaline buzz from the rowdy 4x4 road we’d just had to reverse down, we stared in awe at each other, our minds racing with the near endless possibilities of what this lengthy booking offered us.
I personally sat there thinking to myself… should I voice this crazy idea out loud…?? Will I regret even suggesting it?? This rental booking suddenly meant that we wouldn’t be tied to our condo for the summer… and what better opportunity than this to go to Alaska…?
I turned to Brian and said… “Sooo, I think this means we can drive to Alaska this summer…!” I’ve never seen anyone light up the way that Brian did. It was like every exciting childhood holiday rolled into one moment.
“Holy shit, are we really going to make this trip happen??”
Early this year, after living through the past few years of Covid-19 pandemic times, our resounding life anthem has been, “just say yes to adventure and to the things that you’ve always wanted to do”. Life is too short to keep saying “someday” or “next year”. So we decided to say screw it… Here’s this opportunity, let’s see if we can make it happen!
We began taking the million tiny steps to get our ducks in a row to as quickly as we could to try to make this trip a reality. There were a lot of things to do to and inevitably last minute gear to buy. We gathered vaccination records for us and the dog, copies of all our important documents, and read through Canada’s helpful border crossing resources; not to mention renewing my passport and getting Brian’s very first passport!
There was a lot to do and not very much time but things were falling into place. For reference, that 62 night booking of our condo came through at the end of April and we departed Carbondale in mid June. Plenty of time to plan a roughly 10,000 mile round-trip journey across an international border and through very remote stretches of land… right?? :)
One of the biggest items to line up for our trip was our truck, Dolores. We had already pulled the trigger on a brand new Go Fast Camper back in February and we picked it up in Bozeman, MT in late May, more excited than ever because we knew where this awesome little truck and camper were going to take us!
In preparation for our trip we slept in our Go Fast Camper as many nights as possible to really dial in our systems and make sure we had everything set up just the way we wanted them. That even meant sleeping in the driveways of my family and friend’s homes whenever we visited them.
Packing for this trip and the gear we are bringing is a whole topic in itself, so keep an eye out for a blog post on that at a later date! The short of it is that we are not doing this trip in Peanut and we need to be very weight-conscious of our little Dolores’ 6,000 lb GVW for the sake of space, fuel economy, and mechanical sympathy. There was a lot of pairing down to be done and when we thought we had trimmed down everything to just what we needed, we still packed less. (We are quite thankful for this in retrospect!)
We will be driving the Stewart-Cassiar highway through British Columbia until it joins the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. From there we will take the Dempster Highway, north of the Arctic Circle, up into the Northwest Territories to Tuktoyaktuk and will get to drive to the edge of the Arctic Ocean! We are looking forward to experiencing 24 hours of daylight being so far north in July and then heading back a bit south to explore the beautiful landscapes of the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska for the rest of the summer.
We will be documenting our travels and sharing our experiences and recommendations for anyone else looking to do a trip like this so stay tuned for more! Life is too short to say someday, or next year. Take that trip!
