Alaska and the Artic Ocean or Bust

I've had a dream of driving the Alcan Highway to Alaska and seeing everything that the truly last American frontier has to offer since I was a little kid. My dad and my grandfather worked

together on a construction crew one summer building the Alcan highway the summer before my dad enlisted in the army for WWII. He had some of the craziest stories.... going bear hunting only to be chased up a tree by a Kodiak while their guns leaned against an adjacent tree, building a log raft to float the Yukon River only to have it break apart five minutes in and be holding on for dear life to a log getting washed downstream in the glacial melt waters amongst countless others.

I realized these stories built an early fascination with this wild frontier from a very young age. When I was in 6th or 7th grade I wrote a report on how they constructed the Alaskan pipeline. How they designed it to withstand the massive temperature swings and elevated it enough so as not to interrupt or interfere with the multiple wildlife migrations of caribou, musk ox, etc.

Then I applied to and was accepted into the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to their prestigious wildlife biology program when I was in high school. After acceptance I did more research on the school and discovered some interesting statistics...

Ratio of men to women - 50 to 1

Low temperature in the winter - negative 50 degrees

No sun at all for nearly six weeks in the winter.....

Needless to say, I started to look elsewhere for my college experience.

Now as I enter my late 50's I have a goal to see all the national parks and individual states before I turn 65. There are roughly 63 national parks currently. That number has been growing by one or two every couple years until now. The return of you know who with his rudimentary understanding of executive privilege may drive that number back down. In any case life is short and Alaska holds eight total national parks, over 12% of our nation’s total. I intend to visit all eight of those parks along with the Artic Ocean in this five and a half week adventure. Five of the eight require bush planes and boats to get into them. Some of them will require flights into remote villages or lodges followed by bush plane and boat tours into the backcountry to see the truest wilds that America still has to offer. At the end I plan to board a ferry with my truck and travel the Inside Passage from Juneau back to Bellingham Washington before the final drive back to Durango.

I recently discovered and connected with a gentleman by the name of Chuck Maas who knew my father when he was a late teenager, and my dad was in his mid-forties. My dad was a partner in a little silver mine back in the middle of the John Muir Wilderness in the southern Sierras. He was a teacher so he and a few buddies would head back into the depths of the southern Sierras for the summer via horse and mule to "work" this little mining claim just enough so the Forest Service couldn't shut them down and take it back. There are a ton of family stories surrounding this, but I'll save that for another time.

Chuck Maas came into the mine for a summer job, more so to learn about the mountains and have an adventurous summer break. He was a complete greenhorn when it came to the mountains and I heard my dad mention his name on multiple occasions. The main story that has stuck with me over the years was about one cold night when they all sat out around a big campfire one evening. They evidently decided on an "easy" meal of canned beans and whatever else they had at the time, like such delectables as SPAM "meat products". As the story goes Chuck put his can of beans into the fire but neglected to poke a hole in the can. For those of you who know how heat and expansion works you can picture the rest. His can of beans exploded and put more than a few burn holes through the wool blankets they were wrapped in.

Long story short, I found a letter that Chuck had written to my sister-in-law after my older brother Butch passed away in early 2020. Butch and Chuck were roughly the same age and had met and become friends back there at the mine. Chuck's letter had an email address listed. So, not knowing if he was even still alive, I reached out to him. Amazingly a reply came back nearly immediately. He was 81 and living in Anchorage as a semi-retired wildlife photographer. He and I are going to try and connect on this trip, so long as it doesn't interfere with his annual fishing trip on the Kenai which coincides with the annual salmon run;-)

Needless to say, this trip holds an amazing amount of meaning within it. I will be on somewhat of a breakneck pace to try and do and see everything on my list. My close friends and family know that this is what my spirit thrives on, and I can't wait to embark on this epic adventure. I hope to document it with lots of photos and brief stories along the way. For anyone who is interested in seeing whether I can avoid being eaten by a bear or the state birds (mosquitoes), trampled by moose, caribou or musk ox, flushed down a glacial melt river or whatever else may come my way I welcome you to follow along! (and I promise not to be so verbose in my following blogs;-))

The road into Denali National Park.