Researchng the Trip

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Why do Research?
• We’re anal retentive … we actually like making lists.
• Doing the research makes the journey last much longer. We can imagine what we’ll see and be thrilled when the reality is so much better.
• We (think) we’re only going to Alaska once, and we want to see as much as possible. (We welcome suggestions!) Some “must sees” require early reservations, so we must ensure that we can get from Tennessee to Denali (for example) and arrive there on time. We already know that we can’t drive 500 miles a day in Alaska if we get behind.
• If we have paid reservations for an activity, we hate stressing about where we’re going to stay the night before.
• We’re doing a lot of boondocking, so the nights before/after, we need a campground with services to prep the camper for the period when we won’t have hookups.

The Big Plan:
• Tennessee to the Grand Teton National Park
• North through the US and Canadian national parks
• Alaska Highway to Dawson Creek, Watson Creek, and Skagway
• Ferry from Skagway to Haines
• Haines to Tok to Valdez to Anchorage to Seward to Homer
• Homer to Denali to Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay
• Back to Fairbanks, then east to Dawson City, the Cassiar Highway, Stewart-Hyder, and Prince George
• Back across Canada, crossing into the continental US at Sault Ste. Marie

Getting to START (Tennessee to the Grand Tetons)
We plan to drive about 400 miles per day across the Midwest, stopping early each day so we can get some exercise in the late day. Since we’ll be driving the camper, meals won’t be a problem.

Going Through the Parks
We’re leaving Tennessee the end of April, so these parks may still be snowbound. We already know that some hiking trails will be closed, but we’re trying to get ahead of the school crowds, and are just beginning to look for information on hiking, biking, and whitewater. Depending on what we find, we may decide to come back through some of the parks in the late summer. Today’s plan is to spend three days at each park:
• Grand Teton
• Yellowstone
• Glacier
• Banff and Lake Louise
• Jasper

The Alaska Highway through BC, Yukon and Alaska
• Alternate routes. We’ll try to take different routes to and from Alaska to see as much as possible. (Again, suggestions are welcome!) Some things are seasonal (the salmon and grizzly bears in the Stewart-Hyder area, for example) so we’ll come home that way. The second half of the trip will offer us more chances to take spur of the moment side trips.
• Hiking and biking opportunities. We used www.trails.com for its excellent descriptions of all kinds of trails: hiking, mountain and road biking, paddling, snowshoe, etc. However, we also learned that there are NO good books on biking in Alaska. (There’s an opportunity for someone …)
• Good sources for ideas
o Trailer Life’s Campground Navigator, 2006. It’s a set of DVDs produced by Good Sam. Not always easy to use (still has some bugs), but a great place to start planning our trip. Note that it doesn’t list all campgrounds. See other sources below.
o KARO maps and directories, KARO Maps. These are great hand-drawn maps to show campgrounds, attractions, and RV parks, but they also have the clearest mileage and highway names. We used them first, and then moved to a detailed map.
o Denali. General information: Bill Sherwonit’s Denali: the Complete Guide. It’s only a start. We found much more about Denali on the web, starting with the Denali National Park Information Guide, and the National Park Service’s official site, National Park Service Denali. The only source we could find for Denali hiking information is Ike Waits’ Denali National Park: Guide to Hiking, Photography & Camping.
o Camping. Mike and Terry Church: Traveler’s Guide to Alaska Camping. Organized by Alaska Highway section, this book states that “Alaska is the dream camping destination.” The book contains no reviews, just descriptions, and we checked our KARO information for updates.
o Fishing. Gunnar Pederson: Highway Angler IV. Since we don’t know the area or the fish, this will definitely go in the cab of the truck.
o The Alaska Highway. Lynn and Ed Readicker-Henderson, Alaska Highway. Good general descriptions of locations on all the pieces of the highway system. If I were to take one compact guide, this would be it.
o The Milepost. This old standby is required reading, but the enclosed map is even more valuable. Ours is already held together with tape, and the 2007 edition of The Milepost is on order. It’s organized according to the individual pieces of the Canadian-Alaskan highway system, so you must know the name of the area you’re checking. The map helps.
o The ferry system, Alaska Marine Highway System. This site allows you to check locations, schedules and fares and to make reservations on line. When we’ve called, the staff members have been very helpful.
o Frommer’s Alaska 2007. With lots of general information and some reviews, this book is more oriented toward the urban traveler.
o Lonely Planet Alaska. More oriented toward the outdoors than Frommer, it’s another good general guide.
o Websites we’ve used so far:
http://www.haines.ak.us
Ft Seward Military Lodge
http://alaska.org/driving/magnificent-drives.htm
www.alaska.org
www.trekalaska.com
Alaska Outdoor Journal
o Internet forums. Here are our favorites. As usual, you will have to weed through personal opinions. NATCOA is the North American Truck Camper Association, a new group that’s oriented toward less complicated RV travel. We’ve found that folks taking big Class A motorcoaches envision a different sort of trip than we do.
www.rv.net
www.natcoa-forum.com


The Summer Season:
We began planning our trip knowing that we would need reservations at the Teklanika campground inside Denali. We originally planned to “free flow” with a flexible plan, a daily goal of about 150 miles and a two-night stay every three nights or so. However … we learned that during the short summer, everyone wants to go to the coast and Denali. Accommodations can be limited in the most popular areas, we don’t like stressing about where we’ll sleep (you heard that before), and we need reservations for some attractions: the thrice-weekly ferry from Skagway to Haines, camping at Teklanika inside Denali National Park, a glacier cruise in Valdez, a trip to Prudhoe Bay, and a couple of fishing trips. Hiking, biking and whitewater will fill any cracks in our free time. Denali and the Marine Highway System start taking reservations late in the previous year, and some campgrounds and attractions will take your reservation up to a year in advance.

The Mid-Point:
We’ve chosen our stay at Denali as the mid-point of our trip and (almost) the end of our planning. Our big blue planning notebook now ends in mid-July, and we’ll do more research on the second half of the trip in the next few months. We plan to make as few reservations as possible.

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