Driving to Alaska

Fireweed along the Icefields Parkway north of Lake Louise in Canada

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During the Last Glacial Maximum, which waned about 19,000 years ago, so much water was bound in ice that a land bridge connected northeastern Siberia to Alaska. This and an ice-free corridor south of it known as Beringia opened the door to hunter-gatherers who migrated into what is now Alaska and Canada, eventually populating much of North and South America. Some of these became the Athabascan people, and around 1,000 years ago, a group of them moved to the U.S. Southwest to become the Navajo and Apache.

In August, Ellen and I drove north from Silver City, passing through historic Apache and Navajo lands in triple-digit heat, a far cry from Pleistocene times when mammoths scratched their backs on boulders in the Chihuahuan Desert, polishing them to a glassy sheen. We’d decided to head towards Athabasca in the face of another fizzling monsoon, the summer weather pattern that historically brings rain, moderating summer temperatures in the southwest. It’s hard to pin a few weak monsoons on human-induced climate change, but there’s no denying that the weather has been extreme in the last few decades. On our drive north, shrinking glaciers, vast swaths of burned boreal forest, and melting permafrost left no doubt that the climate is out of whack. Our purpose wasn’t to catalog climate impacts, but the farther north we went, the harder they were to ignore.

Unlike Beringians finding their way southward on foot or by boat, modern nomads drive to Alaska, and in the summer, the route we took to Anchorage is traversed by travelers in all manner of rigs including huge bus-like RVs, pickups with drop-in campers, converted vans like ours, sedans stuffed with gear, and a surprising number of motorcycles. At a laundromat in White Horse, Yukon, we saw a lovingly maintained yellow VW bug (from Denmark) equipped with a rooftop tent. At a long wait for road construction, I chatted with a German woman and her husband outside their rented RV. She’d been jumping rope beside the road to get a little exercise, and their kids were happily playing in the camper. She said with a smile that after weeks on the road, the kids didn’t feel much need to come out.

The Alaska Highway extends for over 1,300 miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks, where it connects to the Richardson Highway. Though much of it is in Canada, it was built quickly during WWII by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a supply artery connecting the lower-48 states to Alaska. Originally longer (1,700 sinuous miles) and rougher (unpaved with grades up to 25%), it’s now paved the entire way with services at regular intervals. We drove to Dawson City via the Canadian Rockies, traveling through Banff and Lake Louise, up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper, and then north to Dawson Creek. Other travelers get to Dawson Creek from farther west (Vancouver, etc.) which is also reported to be a beautiful trip. From there the route crosses into the Yukon before finally entering Alaska on frost-heaved asphalt.

Naively, we were surprised by north-country weather. Rain began just before we crossed the Canadian border and for most of the rest of our trip it was wet. Very wet. At first, we welcomed rain, hydrating our parched southwestern skin and cooling temperatures to the delightful 50s. For a time we were loath to wander in it, but eventually, we learned to hike in the rain, like the hardy Canadians and Alaskans, encasing ourselves in rain gear and walking into the mist, bear spray at the ready even though seeing a grizzly through fogged glasses in time to spray it might be a fantasy. In the Yukon, we asked a woman working a Visitors’ Center desk if it was normal to have this much rain. “This summer has been shit, shit, shit,” she replied immediately. “We’ve had 11 days of summer and none of them in a row. I can’t even get my garden to grow—there’s not enough sun, and now it’s fall. I can’t wait to get out of the Yukon.” It’s possible that a Visitors’ Center job wasn’t the best fit for this woman, but she was friendly.

Despite the rain and all the driving (it’s a long way from Southern New Mexico to Alaska), the trip was well worth the effort. We saw spectacular landscapes, enjoyed brilliant fall color in forests and on the tundra, made new friends, and expanded our mental geographies almost to the Arctic Circle. I’ll post separately about specific places we visited, a tiny fraction of mountain ranges and coastal forests where one could spend lifetimes exploring. After seven weeks on the road, it was with reluctance that we turned the van towards home. 

The annotated photos below describe a few highlights from the drive, and I’ll follow them with some very brief logistics since there is no shortage of information already online.

Grain elevators in Warner, Alberta, along the road north of our border crossing at Sweet Grass, Montana. 

A peak in Kootenay National Park viewed from the Numa Creek Trail where we hiked after being stymied by the crowds at Lake Louise. Banff and Lake Louise are overrun by tourists in summer and even getting to trailheads can be impossible.

Looking north along the Icefields Parkway. Throughout the trip we were awed by vast mountain ranges that seemed to go forever into the distance.

Ellen at Mistaya Falls along the Icefields Parkway. Rivers, like mountains, were innumerable in the north. We crossed many huge rivers that we'd never heard of, though each would have been famously historical farther south.

Athabasca Falls off of the Icefields Parkway. Many of these violent falls punctuated otherwise tranquil stretches of river, and it's easy to understand how they terrorized early explorers and trappers.

One of many huge burns that we encountered throughout Alberta, BC, and the Yukon. This photo is from our stop at Athabasca Falls. The town of Jasper was devastated by fire last year, but the downtown is thriving and visitors are welcome.

Western bunchberry (I think!) at Yellowhead Lake west of Jasper.

Kinney Lake in Mt. Robson Provincial Park. Mt. Robson is shrouded in clouds to the right, but it revealed itself to us by the time we returned to the trailhead.

The landscape east of Jasper. Limestone mountains and broad valleys extended away from the highway in all directions.

A giant beaver in Beaverlodge, Alberta. 

A First Nation church at Prophet River. In Canada, indigenous people are referred to as First Nation.

Sleepy wood bison near Muncho Lake in northern British Columbia. Despite a constant barrage of signs warning drivers to watch for animals, we saw almost no wildlife on the trip, which is not that unusual. A dogsled guide in the Yukon told us that it is so vast that animals have no reason to congregate near humans. 

Liard Hot Springs, a famous stop along the highway. The campground here is surrounded by electric fence to keep the bears out, and we passed two shotgun-armed rangers on the boardwalk leading to the pool who said that there'd been some "bear activity" the night before. 

A memorial plaque near the start of a hike (Sheep Creek) at Kluane Lake in the Yukon. A hiker on the trail had been killed by a "young male Grizzly Bear" in 1996. At this stage, we were still very nervous about hiking in grizzly country but as time went on we came to take it in stride, always with a can of bear spray at our side.

Ellen on the Sheep Creek hike where we passed a young woman hiking alone who told us that she stopped carrying bear bells after hearing them described as "dinner bells."

A dispersed (free) campsite beside Kluane Lake in the Yukon. 

A lake near Tok, Alaska.

View from Near Point on the Chugach Front Range above Anchorage where we hiked after arriving at our friends' house there. 

Ellen and Robin Moore descending from Near Point towards Anchorage. Robin's son, Adam, lives in Anchorage with his wife, Allie, their new daughter, Juniper, and two excited dogs, Echo and Norma.

Brief Logistics

There are many resources online for planning a driving trip to Alaska from the lower-48. I'll bullet a few useful tidbits below:

• Buy a copy of the Milepost, an annual publication that has mile-by-mile information on many of the routes through Canada and within Alaska. It's ridiculously detailed and especially useful if you have someone traveling with you who can read from it as you go.
• Be prepared for wet weather. At least on our trip, it rained a LOT. Don't let the rain stop you from getting out and doing things. Bring good rain gear.
• Carry bear spray almost everywhere. You are not allowed to cross the border into Canada with pepper-spray, mace, etc, but you can bring bear spray. We had no bear encounters, but they are out there.
• Gas is expensive in Canada and Alaska. Budget for it.
• There's no need to carry an extra gas can unless your car has a very small tank. Pay attention to filling up, but there are plenty of gas stations. 
• Give yourself LOTS of time for the drive. We spent about 11 days getting from the Canadian border to Anchorage and could easily have taken many more. 
• There are many campgrounds along the route and many options for dispersed (free) camping. We used an app called iOverlander to find campsites. It maps paid and free campsites as well as places for water, wifi, car repairs, etc. For $9.99/month you can subscribe and download unlimited states or provinces ahead of time (recommended) so that you aren't reliant on cell. 
• Cell coverage was spotty but surprisingly good a lot of the time. We have Verizon.
• If you camp outside of campgrounds, please learn to properly dispose of toilet paper! Many dispersed sites where we stayed were tainted by visible TP. You can put it in a small zip lock and throw it away at readily available trash cans or burn it (if you are extremely aware of fire danger). At the VERY LEAST, bury it rather than leaving it on the surface or draped in vegetation. Carrying a small shovel is useful. 

Northern New Mexico Exploring

The Penitente Morada in Abiquiu, built in the 1700s but restored more recently. 

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New Mexico is the fifth largest state in the U.S., behind Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana (Wyoming is 10^th). I’ve lived in Silver City for not quite two years and have barely begun learning the geography during local excursions (link, link, link), a short trip to east central New Mexico, and a little exploring in the Farmington area in the northwest (Bisti Badlands, Navajo archaeology, etc.). The area north and west of Santa Fe, with its long history and classic adobe architecture beckoned, and my friend Ed Sherline suggested meeting to have a look around. He’d planned a point-to-point bikepacking trip from Cumbres Pass, on the Colorado border, to Bandelier, south of Los Alamos, and needed someone to help shuttle his car, so I agreed to do that after a few days of photography. 

If you search “northern vs. southern New Mexico” online, there are reports of a friendly rift, with northerners certain that theirs is the prettiest part of the state and southerners countering with its more subtle charms. That’s a little like arguing whether Led Zeppelin is better than the Beatles (we all know the answer, right?? right?). Northerners cite the alpine terrain and the rich cultural heritage and art scene. Southerners point to White Sands and Carlsbad (and mild winters), though for me the remote desert “sky islands” and abundant archaeology are equally compelling. 

As it turned out, we chose one of the hottest weeks of the summer to be out, with triple-digit temperatures in the lowlands driving us onto the Los Alamos plateau to camp under ponderosa pines and limiting our functional time to early mornings. Despite pre-dawn starts, we were seldom in the right place in time to catch good light. We visited Espanola, Abiquiu, the Ghost Ranch, and Taos, drove a few back roads, met a mud adobe artist, did a spur-of-the-moment ascent of Wheeler Peak, New Mexico’s high point, swam in the Chama River, and ate a few good meals, but we didn’t get any great photographs. The summer light was harsh, and by mid-morning it was too hot to wander far from the car.

One hopes for a few “keepers” on photos excursions, but it doesn’t always pan out that way. The trips are still fun, though, and usually you find places worth returning to in different light or different seasons. Each fills in another piece of geography, and as your mental map grows, so do ideas about where to go next.

 

A lanky coyote plods along in 100+ degree heat in the Bosque del Apache.

The abandoned San Antonio depot south of Albuquerque. 

Cave dwelling, Frijoles Canyon, Bandelier National Monument. 

Volcanic rock formations, Frijoles Canyon, Bandelier National Monument.

Fruit stand, Rio Grande Gorge.

Theater, Espanola, New Mexico.

Crosses and shadows, Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Wooden cross, Abiquiu cemetery.

Cross with beads, Abiquiu cemetery.

Metal cross, El Rito, New Mexico.

Pigs (for sale?). La Cuchilla, New Mexico.

Climbing in Spain 1996

 

Local women near Artesa de Segre dressed for a medieval festival.

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I recently bought a slide scanner (Plustek 8200i for anyone interested) and I’m digitizing old slides before they succumb to dust and time. I’ll post some of these from time to time as I work through the boxes that have been stacked in storage for decades.

 

In the fall of 1996, Ellen and I, not yet married, headed to Spain for two months to sport climb. In those days, trips were planned around hard-copy guidebooks and guesswork rather than the still nascent internet. Netscape, the main browser option, had gone public only the year before, and a Time Magazine article on “the best websites of ‘96” lauded the "innovative" Amazon.com where you could “search for books by title, subject, or author” (!!) according to an old Slate.com article. Thankfully, there were no “instagrammable” places on the world travel circuit. AOL was the go-to service for email, not that it mattered since we didn’t have cell phones, let alone smart phones while traveling, and we still sent hand-written post cards to friends and family. I shot slides on the trip with a new Nikon SLR that I was still learning to use, hoping my 35 mm slide film would survive the airport x-ray machines. I noted in my journal that on the plane I thumbed excitedly through Let’s Go Spain while sipping Bailey’s from a plastic cup, hoping to get some sleep. I probably even had a little leg room.

 

Unlike the internet, sport climbing was well-established in Spain in the 1990s, and we eagerly launched into our tour of Spanish climbing areas, working our way from the Pyrenees (Montgrony) in the north to El Chorro in the south before taking a ferry to Mallorca for an anticipated grand finale, only to be soaked there by pouring rain through which we walked wistfully above amazing limestone cliffs where deep water soloing (climbing without ropes above the sea) had already gained a following. Along the way, we visited Siurana, Montserrat, Villanova de Meia, Cuenca, and other crags, taking days off to rest only when our younger bodies insisted or when it rained, which was not infrequently. The rain, at least that autumn, did not fall mainly on the plain. 

 

It was on rest days that I engaged in photographing Spain--with mixed success. Other days I was too focused on climbing to even try to take good pictures. While “resting,” we wandered through villages, stopping to sip coffee in Spanish cafes, or we explored famous sites like the Alhambra in Granada, wishing that we had the means to stay at the pricey hotel there rather than in our tent outside of town. I snapped pictures of cathedrals, landscapes, and local people, stimulated by unfamiliarity. With film, you didn't really know how your pictures would turn out until you had them processed months later.

Street scene in Granada where we wandered around before visiting the Alhambra.

I kept a journal for part of the trip. A few excerpts give a taste of what travel was like for us then. We were much more spontaneous than we are now with no set itinerary, and while much of our time was spent climbing, most of my journal writing describes the days when we weren’t.

 

7 October 1996. Siurana.

 

We took showers last night in the climber’s “refugio,” a stone building literally built around a limestone boulder such that there is a significant bouldering traverse in the dining room. In our camp, a huge tent-load of Spaniards is camped semi-permanently, and they stay up late laughing with pure delight. It makes me smile just to listen to them, even though I can’t understand their jokes. 

Church on a clifftop at Siurana.

12 October. Artesa de Segre, Villanova de Meia, Lleida.

 

The grocery store, which was sort of like a combination of a Walmart and a Safeway, had an entire row of pig parts hanging from a rail. Apparently, they chop off the pig’s leg and a substantial part of the ham, dip the whole thing in wax to preserve it (though it didn’t smell that preserved), and then send it off to the supermercado. I saw one woman, presumably local, take a whiff of one of the pig legs and then wrinkle up her nose.

 

Locals taking a coca-cola break during a medieval fair near Artesa de Segre.

13 October. Villanova de Meia.

 

It is always somewhat strange to be trapped by rain on a trip when you are camping. We sat in the car for a while eating Lu cookies and surfing Spanish radio stations. Eventually when the rain let up, I went for a walk but got caught in a shower and hid out in a goat cave—full of goat shit. Ellen hung out in the tent and chopped veggies for dinner.

 

Ellen and our tent at Siurana.

17 October. Montserrat.

 

We washed our dinner dishes tonight and stretched while gazing out at the lights of Barcelona and the view towards the Med, enjoying the quiet that returns after the daily throng of tourists (mostly German) have left. The monastery is a peaceful and beautiful place. We climbed a couple of routes this afternoon on a rock called the “Vomitada,” named presumably for the stink coming from a pipe spewing raw sewage from the monastic complex above into the drainage below. Pretty foul. I guess even the most peaceful places have their effluent.

Montserrat spire with clouds in the valley below.

Ellen at Montserrat.

 

20 October. Montgrony.

 

We somehow became entangled in a big local climbers’ rendezvous here today and were included in the “historica” group photo on a hillside above the monastery, with much rushing around by the photographer and much saying of the Catalan equivalent (but not the direct translation) of “cheese.”

Local climbers gathered at Montgrony for a "historic" reunion.

Miguel, the "mayor of Montgrony," on one of the excellent tufa routes there (7a+).

27 October. Cuenca.

 

We climbed yesterday in the Sector Alfar [maybe -- can't quite read my handwriting] and got typically spanked. Although there is much steep rock here, we jumped on some recommended 7a (5.11d) routes that turned out to be hard, slabby, and quite sporty. One is regularly faced with crux moves on dicey thin edges with last bolt several feet below your quaking shoes and the next one a hard move or two out of reach. Miraculously, I avoided taking any huge falls…

A climber on one of the slabby routes at Cuenca. 

5 November. El Chorro.

 

The south of Spain is an almost continuous blanket of neatly spaced olive trees, but as we came down out of the mountains toward the coast, we began to see orchards of citrus trees—oranges, limes, and lemons. At one place a grower was pruning his fruit trees and tossing the branches down the hill to a herd of eager goats who set upon the branches with gusto, eating the green leaves which must seem luxurious in an otherwise dry landscape. 

The Camino del Rey (Walk of the Kings) near El Chorro as it appeared in 1996. This failing concrete and railroad rail traverse has since been repaired but still shows up in those annoying "10 Most Dangerous Hikes" articles. I traversed it wearing a climbing harness and clipping cables along the way, via ferrata style. 

After that entry, my journal inexplicably stops, and I can’t remember why. Ellen was suffering from a stomach malaise that we thought might be giardia, but we were still climbing hard most days, and we soon headed to Mallorca where we thankfully stayed in a cheap rented apartment while it rained fiercely for much of the time before we flew home. 

Ellen on a multi-pitch sport route on Mallorca during a break from the rain.

Trips for us today are less spontaneous and more expensive than they were in 1996, partly because we have the means not to camp in the rain, partly because we have the internet, and partly because it’s harder now to show up somewhere and expect to find a place to sleep. But something is lost when itineraries lock you into a schedule, preventing you from following your whims or the random recommendations of strangers, and the internet makes it a little too easy to know what you’ll find when you get there. Still, travel is exciting and invigorating. I usually take my best pictures when I’m in unfamiliar places. Mark Twain famously said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime” (from The Innocents Abroad: Roughing It, published in 1869). This is perhaps even truer today than it was in 1869, or 1996.

Ellen writing a postcard at El Chorro with the Road Atlas for Spain and the climbing guidebook on the table in front of her. 

Bisti Badlands, New Mexico

 

Ellen on a walk in the Bisti Badlands.

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The term "badlands" sounds harsh, but barren eroding landscapes have been called that for centuries. Here in New Mexico, craggy lava flows, though not erosional, are called malpaises (bad country or bad places). French trappers called badlands les mauvaises terre a traverser, meaning “bad lands to traverse,” perhaps the origin of the English term. The trappers were probably influenced by the Lakota (according to Wikipedia), who called these places mako sica (bad or eroded land). Regardless of language, it’s not hard to understand why landscapes nearly devoid of vegetation and animal life might have been considered “bad” if you needed to find dinner or get across them on a hot day.

But it’s all relative. If I were a French trapper, or Lakota, or a Spanish conquistador, or even a modern farmer (or an antelope), I might find the term appropriate, but as a wanderer camping in empty places with my camera, badlands doesn’t ring true. I’ve had some pretty good times in some pretty bad lands. 

Badlands National Park, by virtue of being a park, is probably the most recognized badlands site in the U.S., but it’s one among many equally spectacular places. If you saw the movie, Nomadland, you’ll remember that Fern, played by Francis McDormand, spent time working at a campground near the South Dakota Park and found herself calmed by its beauty, though she eventually moved on, as nomads do. Ellen and I visited colorful badlands in Oregon in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument on our first road trip after retiring in 2021 before moving on ourselves to float the John Day River in our packrafts.

Ellen in the Painted Hills at the John Day Fossil Beds, Oregon.

Wyoming’s Red Desert, where I spent lots of time before moving south, has national park quality badlands, though wilderness protection might be more appropriate for these remote places. The Honeycomb Buttes in the northern Red Desert and the Adobe Town and Skull Rims farther south are spectacular and little-visited, at least compared to the South Dakota badlands. I once camped on the Adobe Town rim with Ellen and Bei and discovered a family of coyotes with pups denned in an eroded hole just below our camp. They seemed undisturbed by us, maybe remote enough not to have been harassed by humans. On a hot day during another Adobe Town trip, I found a soapstone medicine pipe in the cool shade of a rock tower. 

A wash below the Skull rim in Wyoming.

New Mexico, where I live now, has more than its share of badlands. I’m just beginning to learn about them and have only recently begun to explore. Some of the most well-known, are the Bisti (pronounced Bist-eye, not Bist-eee) Badlands south of Farmington. The Bisti are part of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area surrounded by Navajo, BLM, and private lands. In recent years they’ve gotten increasing attention, probably because their weird erosional formations attract photographers, but when we were there in April (2025), despite a surprising number of campers in the main parking area, we mostly had the place to ourselves as we wandered among hoodoos, “cracked eggs,” and petrified wood. 

A downside of the term “badlands” is that some think that they are literally bad, with little value except perhaps for oil and gas drilling or other destructive activities. This, of course, is not the case. Badlands are beautiful and unique, deserving of preservation.

Early morning in the Bisti Badlands.

Bisti Badlands.

Bisti Badlands erosion.

There are a few hardy shrubs in the badlands.

Formations known as the stone wings in the Bisti Badlands.

The nearby Angel Peak area is also vast and eroded.