Northern Lights: First Draft of Itinerary

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The first step in planning Northern Lights is to lay out the bucket list. This is really a pretty easy thing to do. First, we consult our main bucket list source, The Complete National Parks of the United States, put out by National Geographic. The last chapter in the book is all about Alaska and starts with a map of the state, highlighting, in green, all of the National Park Units. There are 19 of them listed in the book.



But that is just the starting point. The list goes through a series of steps deleting and adding items to the itinerary. For example, we already filter the Park Service lists to remove those units where it just isn’t likely that we are going to find things that we can see or do. Wilderness areas and scenic rivers typically require skills or physical capabilities (like backcountry backpacking or river canoeing or kayaking) that Joan and I just aren’t up for. While younger and more agile people might relish a week in the backcountry, that just isn’t our style. So pretty much any park unit designated as a ‘wilderness’, ‘scenic/wild river’, or ‘reserve’ is beyond our pay-grade. Similarly most ‘recreation areas’ are for people with boats, and we don’t own that kind of thing, so those areas usually don’t work well for us either.



Another filter is anything called an ‘Historic Site’. While we are almost always able to visit historic sites, there are more than 90 of them in the system and they are usually places where you can see everything there is to see in just an hour or two. The problem for us planning major travel trips is that it doesn’t seem profitable to drive for a day or more and camp overnight somewhere, just so we can take a one hour tour. Unless we are going to be in the area for some other reason, historic sites don’t make it onto the bucket list.



Once we apply the above filters, we eliminate 7 of the 19, bringing the Northern Lights Bucket List down to just twelve locations. Since my master list book was published in 2009, I check for new or updated listings of parks by using the Chimani National Parks app and the NPS website. In this case, no new national parks have been added in Alaska. So the Northern Lights Bucket List contains just 12 National Parks and Monuments.



The next steps in the process involve fleshing out the bucket list by doing some basic research into each park, identifying what there might be to do and how much time we should allocate to a visit there. In addition to the sources cited above, National Geographic also publishes The 10 Best of Everything - National Parks which we find very valuable. NG writers and photographers who have been to lots of these parks, have compiled around 80 ‘top ten lists’. These lists identify everything from the top ten waterfalls to the top ten sites preserving colonial history to the top ten RV campgrounds. In addition to the list of parks making each of the top ten lists, they outline why it deserves that ranking and, where appropriate, contact data to get more information.



The value of this information is that it helps define what some of our options might be in each of the parks. Some of these activities are things we can do, some of them, like climbing Mt. McKinley, are things we can’t. But having these lists of opportunities in each park helps us determine what we would like to see or do while we are there. That, in turn, helps us decide how many days we should allocate to visit that park. We know, for example, that if there is an attractive hike in a park, that we should allocate a day for that. Similarly if a scenic drive is identified that looks like fun, then there is another day. Some items, like a stay at a lodge up in the high country, look very attractive until we find out that it takes a twelve hour hike up 3000 feet to get there.



Three of the parks (Cape Krusenstern, Kobuk Valley, and Gates of the Arctic) lie above the arctic circle and there are no roads into them. The normal mode of visiting these three parks is by small plane, landing on or near a river where the visitors raft down to a pick-up point. There are no campgrounds, trails, or visitor facilities of any kind. Clearly, that kind of park presents a severe challenge to those of us with more limited backcountry skills or experience. One of the biggest dilemmas we have right now, is how to include these three bucket list items. (There is also a fourth one, Aniakchak National Monument, which, even though it is located on the peninsula way south of Anchorage, is so out-of-the-way that it only had 14 registered visitors in all of 2009).



At this point in time, we do not know how we are going to do these four parks, if at all! Final decisions will require more information. We do know that various small airplane companies provide air taxi services into and out of many of these parks and that they will provide ‘flightseeing tours’ tailored to our expectations. These customized tours will not come cheap, though. But they provide a way of seeing the park when other options aren’t real attractive.



Another important planning component is to understand the geography of where we are going and how the roads (or lack of them) are going to constrain the trip. Once I looked at the map, I understood that there were four basic clusters of the parks. Three of them were in the panhandle, more or less around Juneau. Two of the biggest ones were on a circular set of roads that go between Anchorage and Fairbanks. One more appears to be centered out of Seward. Three of them appear to be accessible, by boat or plane, from the tiny town of King Salmon.. And the remaining three (all above the Arctic Circle) have visitor centers in the towns of Bettles and Kotzebue, towns reachable by commercial airlines from either Anchorage or Fairbanks. Clearly, there will be a lot of flying on this trip.



Although the exact order isn’t clear yet, the overall plan notes look something like this:



From Juneau -



Sitka National Historical Park (1 or 2 days) - tour historical district, Bishop’s House, hike around town.



Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (2 days) - tour Skagway, exhibits, hike around town. Camping at Dyea CG?



Glacier Bay National Park (3 or 4 days) - Explore Bartlett Cove, 9-hour tour boat on Glacier Bay, hiking, ranger led program, Grand Pacific Glacier, sea kayaking??(maybe)





From Anchorage/Fairbanks area -



Fly to Bettles and/or Kotzebue -



Cape Krusenstern National Monument (1 day) - Flightseeing and/or hike on beach




Kobuk Valley National Park (1 day) - Flightseeing (especially the sand dunes), possible hike



Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (1 day) - Flightseeing, caribou herds, tundra, possible hike





Drive scenic circle between Anchorage/Fairbanks -



Wrangle - St. Elias National Park & Preserve (4 or 5 days ) - McCarthy Road, McCarthy Lodge, Malaspina Glacier, Kennicott Mine, Kennicott lodge. Huge park, may require flightseeing.)



Denali National Park & Preserve (4 or 5 days) - Camp Denali, 92 mile Tour Bus, Dall Sheep, Views of Mt. McKinley, Glacier Creek, possibly stay at Savage River CG,





From Seward -



Kenai Fjords National Park (4 days) - Exit Glacier, Harding Ice Field Trail, Resurrection Bay Boat Tour, Stay at Wilderness Cabin?





From King Salmon -



Katmai National Park & Preserve (3 or 4 days ) - Brooks Camp, Brooks Waterfall, Bear Viewing, Valley of 10,000 Smokes Tour, Stay at Brooks Lodge?



Lake Clark National Park & Preserve (2 days ) - Tanalian Trails, Cook Inlet sites for bear watching, flightseeing?



Aniakchak National Monument & Preserve (1 day) - Flyover the caldera and lake.







So there you have it! The first steps in building the Northern Lights Itinerary. Add it all up, and there is about a month of sightseeing days. To that, we have to add travel days, down days, and more stuff for Joan’s rebellion items. Stay tuned for more detail as we do more research. We have some time but this promises to be one huge trip. Anyone want to join us?

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