Our 12,000 mile route from Colorado to Alaska and back. Red is the way up; blue the way back.
In June 2016 my wife Claudia and I took off on a summer-long road trip. Over the next 3 months or so we drove over 12,000 miles (19,000+ km), from Colorado to Nevada, northern California, Oregon, Washington, the Canadian Rockies, Yukon, Alaska, and back. In order to keep costs down – and just for the fun of it – we camped as much as possible along the way; in fact, over the course of the three months on the road we rented hotel rooms only four times, and stayed with relatives twice. So, we ended up camping about 90 days in total, either in the back of our Toyota Tundra or in a tent while backpacking.
I made a point of taking a camping picture [almost] every day, and here are all these photos. Some of them are creative and some are purely documentary, but as a whole I think they give a good impression of how we lived over the summer, and how much outdoor time we enjoyed!
Fort Seward in Haines, Alaska, with the Chilkat Range towering behind – August.
Four months or so after my week of heli-riding in Haines last winter, in early August I found myself back in Haines! I hadn’t planned to return here on this trip, but with a crappy weather forecast everywhere else in Alaska besides Haines, we figured it’d be a good place to hang out for a few days and wait out the rain. It was pretty cool to see these mountains again, though I must say I prefer them smothered in snow!
Celebrating our 4th anniversary with a gourmet dinner and some vino at Chilkat State Park.
A panoramic view from atop Mount Riley, looking northwest towards the town of Haines. The Chilkat Inlet is on the left, the Chilkoot Inlet on the right.
Campfire at Chilkoot Lake campground near Haines.
So, I have a funny story from our stay at Chilkoot Lake campground. On one morning we were sitting there at our campsite which was on a short but steep hill above Chilkoot Lake — pretty much the same place in the pic above. I hear lots of splashing down in the water and think: Uh, what’s that? I stand up and peek over the edge of the hill, and I see three big brown animals, one of which is heading up the hill right towards me. A bear, of course! I shout to Claudia and gather up my camera and the poundcake we were having for breakfast and stuff it in the back of our truck as quickly as possible. While I’m doing this, the grizzly (probably an adolescent, medium sized) has walked right past our abandoned camp chairs, about 20 or 30 feet from us, looking at me as if to say “What treats have YOU got for me?”. With the cake put away in the truck, I guess I looked like too much of a hassle for the bear, and it moseyed out of our campsite to check out more of the campground.
A glimpse of the grizzly bear that scared us out of our seats at our campsite above Chilkoot Lake.
As the bear wandered further through the campground, a women started screaming at the top of her lungs: “BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! BEAR!”. Meanwhile, the bears are overturning the campground host’s kayaks until he managed to shoo them off. The woman’s still screaming “BEAR! BEAR! BEAR!” and the camp host guy told me later he was thinking, “Ok, lady, we got it. There’s a bear, we know.”
With the campground situated right on the lake between the Chilkoot River and a salmon spawning creek, these bear encounters are fairly common. Our little brush with that bear was a great reminder of just how important it is to keep a clean and tidy campsite! It doesn’t matter if you’re there to watch, if you have a big spread of food laid out, the bear’s just going to scare you off and help himself!
Anyhow, after about four days in Haines it started raining there too so we thought we’d drive over the border back into the Yukon and see if we could catch some decent weather there.
Spawning chum salmon in Fish Creek, Hyder, Alaska.
After bailing from Jasper and the Canadian Rockies, three days of driving west and north through British Columbia brought us to the southeast tip of Alaska and the town of Hyder. At this point in the trip we hadn’t really done any planning or research beforehand, so didn’t really know what to expect as we rolled into Stewart and Hyder, two towns straddling the border of BC and Alaska. If driving through the nearly-vertical, glacier-clad gorge to get here wasn’t spectacular enough, we got to see some grizzlies feeding on spawning salmon at Fish Creek right out of town!
Fish Creek was plump full of spawning chum salmon; you could hear their splashing before you could even see the river. There’s an elevated wooden observation path where you can walk above next to the river and watch as grizzlies occasionally come by to snack on salmon. I’m not really a wildlife photographer but it sure was fun watching the bear!
Interestingly, grizzlies usually just eat the skin and eggs of the salmon, leaving the rest of the fish to rot or be eaten by other animals. Sometimes the skinned salmon is still flopping around as the grizzly walks off with its skin!
After watching the bears for a while we continued driving up the road from Hyder. A long winding dirt mining road took us all the way along and above the giant Salmon Glacier, the fifth largest glacier in Canada.
We drove down from the Salmon Glacier and stopped again at Fish Creek for one last look at the grizzlies, then returned to the Canadian side of the border, camped at a nearby little lake, and hoped that the grizzlies wouldn’t feed on us that night!
My buddy Mikel is working on the official video, but in the meantime here’s a quick cut of some of my own GoPro helmet-cam footage from our recent heli snowboarding trip in Haines, Alaska. The title of this video could also be: Steeper Than It Looks. 😉
On many lines in Haines the terrain oftentimes rolls off over knolls and you can’t always see what lies ahead. Sometimes the guide would be below on the walkie-talkie guiding us to the correct spines to drop in on; but mostly you just take it as it comes, making split decisions along the way. So much fun!
The glaciated and snow smothered Takhinsha Mountains near Haines, Alaska are amongst the most impressive mountains on Earth in the eyes of a skiier or snowboarder. In March 2016 I joined three friends for a week-long trip to Haines to go heli snowboarding in this legendary big mountain riding mecca. With perfect powder and stable avalanche conditions, we scored 4 days of good weather and a total of 18 lines — each line between about 3,000 to 4,500 vertical feet. The trip was a lifelong dream for me, and a pinnacle in my 20+ years of snowboarding!
