Bicycling Southcentral Alaska, 2021

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Our family is about to spend six weeks biking, hiking, and boating in southcentral Alaska. We flew to Anchorage on Friday and spent the weekend visiting museums and preparing our bicycling gear. This is the first trip that Daniel will ride his own bicycle instead of riding a tandem bike with me. A large part of our trip will be on gravel roads, which is also a first for our family. The remoteness of our route and the potentially harsh northern weather might be difficult to handle, but we've prepared for it. We are here to see the wild landscapes and animals.

The opportunity to take this trip appeared last year. I took no vacation in 2020, but I did travel for work - I spent 6 months in Germany developing a machine for my employer. In return for long work hours and missed holidays, I've been given nine weeks off this summer. We're spending the first six weeks in Alaska, and I haven't planned the last three weeks. I was tempted to plan a nine week bicycle trip, but I need to give the kids a break at home before they return to school in August.

Preparing and packing for this trip was demanding. Over several months Kathy dehydrated and vacuum-sealed almost 100 pounds of meals for us to eat while camping. I built custom cardboard boxes to carry our bicycles and food onto planes. Daniel practiced long rides on his bicycle, going as far as 60 miles in a day.

Here in Anchorage, I shipped a 50-pound box of food to a campground in Glennallen, near the halfway point of our trip. Tomorrow I'll rent a minivan to take our family and gear north to Denali National Park, where the real bicycle trip will start. We will bike within Denali National Park, then ride east to Wrangell - St. Elias National Park, then ferry across Prince William Sound to the Kenai Peninsula and Kenai Fjords National Park. From there we will bike back to Anchorage. There's much to see along the way, so only half our days are for biking.

To get some context for what we will see, yesterday we visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center and today we visited the Anchorage Museum. The Heritage Center has example traditional dwellings for each native nation, filled with traditional clothing, tools, and such. The Anchorage Museum also has exhibits of native culture.

I worked late the last two nights preparing our bicycles, but I had plenty of sunlight to help me. The summer solstice is just one week away, and the sky does not go dark at night. That will be interesting while camping.

I rented a minivan and took my family to Denali National Park, five hours away, then drove myself all the way back to Anchorage to return the van. This was the simplest and most affordable method to move us to Denali. Most people going to Denali either take a bus, take a train, or rent a car for the whole trip. But bus and train tickets are expensive, and putting luggage on the bus/train is also expensive. The bus companies could not guarantee that they would accept our bicycles as luggage, and the train company was clear that it would not accept them. So I rented a van and spent the day driving, returning the van after midnight. Now I just need to stay up all night and catch a 6:30 a.m. bus back to Denali.

We got our first view of Denali (the mountain) as we drove north on this clear day, and it looks huge from more than 100 miles away. I was surprised by the warm weather at our campground, more than 70°F.

After returning our rental van I stayed awake at the airport until 4 a.m., when I started walking to downtown Anchorage to catch a 6:30 a.m. shuttle back to Denali. With my backpack and plastic grocery bag I must have looked like one of the many homeless people wandering around in the early morning. "Hey, do you smoke weed?" a woman called out to me from across the street. "No," I answered. She probably wanted to bum a joint off me. I was back with the family around 1 p.m., glad to be done with rental cars and buses. Next we had to resolve a new problem - there is a wildlife closure on Denali Park Road between us and our next campground. A grizzly bear killed a large moose right next to the road, and several large grizzlies will continue to eat it for about a week. No one is allowed to hike or bike through that area. We would take a bus instead, but the park's buses can't handle all our biking gear. The kind park rangers decided that they will let us ride past the dead moose while they escort us in jeeps. That will happen on Thursday, but it was good to solve the problem today.

We took a short hike to Horseshoe Lake with our remaining afternoon. I wanted to go into the visitor center, but it is closed to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The closure seems overly cautious to me since most Americans are already vaccinated and private businesses have been open and mask-free for weeks. At least the visitor center staff were standing outside to answer guests' questions.

Getting ready for bed is interesting so close to summer solstice. We played cards before bed with no need for headlamps, and we wear eye masks to help us sleep in the bright light. I set an alarm to let us know when it is morning, since we can't use the rising sun.

We biked just four miles from camp this morning to visit the park's dog kennels. To preserve Denali's wilderness character, the Park Service uses dog sleds rather than snowmobiles for most winter travel. Employees and volunteers work with the dogs during the summer to keep them fit and ready for winter, and the public can visit and pet the dogs. The kennels are popular with children.

In the afternoon we hiked one of the park's few maintained trails, climbing to an overlook on Mount Healy. There was a storm warning in the forecast, but it never came. There was a short rain shower this morning and then the sun came out for the afternoon.

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