Bikepacking Alaska 5 - Into the Wild

This is Alaska, the last frontier, a region we've spent more than two months exploring on our bicycles. In this final episode, we say goodbye, cycling through vast areas of breathtaking beauty as we make our way out and over the border into Canada. This is Bikepacking Alaska, episode five. Into the wild. We'd covered a lot of ground in Alaska, Starting in the Kenai Peninsula, just south of Anchorage, we'd cycled north for more than 2,000 kilometers, or 1,200 miles, all the way up into the far north, deep inside the Arctic Circle. The summer was starting to run out, so we'd come south again, and it was time to turn east for the final section of our Alaskan adventure, riding hard into the rising sun towards Canada. The first part of our journey was a road called the Denali Highway, a section Khloe and I had both been greatly looking forward to. Promising little traffic, a mix of pavement and gravel, and some of the most striking and spectacular landscapes to be found in Alaska, the Denali Highway more than lived up to the hype. We were blessed with good weather and few mosquitoes, so cycling the Denali Highway was, for us, about as idyllic and peaceful as Alaska got. One of the best things about Alaska was the ease of wild camping, and we pitched our tents in some incredible spots as we made our way east. Mosquitoes continued to be a frustrating problem, especially when combined with bears, as we could never cook or eat food in our tents, which would have been the usual solution to bug problems. It was nowhere near as bad as it had been in the Arctic, though, and the mosquitoes eased off significantly as the summer started to wane. Passing through towns in Alaska was always an interesting experience. Settlements were quirky, strange, functional places, generally rather ugly. Focusing on practicality over style, they offered invaluable opportunities for rest and resupply. We decided to take Alaska's northernmost border crossing, the Top of the World Highway, heading to Canada's Dawson City in the Yukon. The final section was impressive and challenging, with endless climbs on dusty dirt roads, with temperatures pushing 30 degrees Celsius around 85 Fahrenheit. The undulating landscape gave us a true sense of scale. We were little more than tiny specks, inching across a wilderness that seemed to go on forever. Just short of the border, we encountered our first wildfire in Alaska. Temperatures had been high for weeks, so we'd been lucky to avoid the fires for as long as we had. We stayed in a cabin at the tiny settlement of Boundary, just short of the border, paying $5 each, the first time we'd paid for any kind of accommodation in two months of traveling through Alaska. The wind was blowing the fire away from us, but it was still eye-opening, watching the flames burn just across the road from where we were sitting. The fires were still burning by the morning as we got back on our bikes and made our way up our final climb in Alaska, up to the Canadian border post, up and over into Canada.