While I was sitting in one of my favorite classrooms in the agriculture building at Cal Poly Pomona after a plant pathology class had wrapped up, the department chair sat down and asked me and a few others if we were interested in going to Alaska for the summer to help a friend out with her cut flower farm. She knew I was willing to go the distance to make my own adventures happen but I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. I chuckled and said, “sure,” but quickly realized she was completely serious. I told her I’d have to call my significant other to see. I got up and called Hannah at work on the spot. To my surprise, Hannah was equally excited and willing to go on the adventure with me. Within a matter of weeks it was settled. Hannah and I were scheduled to drive to Homer, AK for the summer as soon as the Spring semester ended.
Realizing that we couldn’t continue to pay our rent and live in Alaska for a few months, we allowed our lease to expire, packed up our house, and moved it into a couple of rooms at my Aunt’s who had graciously agreed to let us stay there after our return from Alaska. We had little idea what we had gotten ourselves into when we had recklessly agreed to go on the trip. Packing up the house was exhausting but thankfully we had been thinking and planning for the trip over the course of about a month or so. It gave me the time to go over all of our outdoor gear as well as brew and keg a beer for the trip. I even got my amateur radio technician license to be able to play with a radio during the trip. I set up a couple of 144/440MHz rack mount antennas on the car. One for a standalone, message capable, APRS transceiver and the other for hooking up a handheld radio to chat with locals on repeaters while we drove through their towns. We surprisingly had APRS coverage all the way to Yukon with only 1W transmit power! Having the radios set up ended up being a fun way to share our location throughout the journey with family members as well pass the time while we were stuck in traffic.
I was definitely not the most fun travel companion during the first part of this trip. My uncle had just unexpectedly passed away and we had cut the trip up much too short to enjoy it properly. I had put far too much pressure on myself to fish areas I was unfamiliar with and it was a recipe for me to become a big spikey ball of anxiety. This is evidenced by Hannah’s displeased face in the Big Sur picture. I was a real asshole on more than one occasion. This kind of travel is definitely not for people who can’t handle being in close proximity for hours on end with little respite from the inevitable friction. We did manage to settle into a good groove after we made our way through Big Sur, the McCloud River, and the Yakima Valley.
We encountered probably the most wildlife either of us had ever seen on a consistent basis up until that point once we were in Yukon. It is also about the point that the immensity of the trip we had undertaken became tangible. My generation has had their heads filled with false map projections that do not allow for an accurate feel of how far away Alaska or Hawaii really are from the contiguous United States. Despite being connected by lots of land, the realization that most of Canada and Alaska is uninhabited drastically changed the way I think about it now. It’s more akin to an archipelago of urban areas connected by some of the longest, straightest, roads I have ever driven. The danger in a trip like this is really in falling asleep while driving or hitting a large animal at highway speeds. Hannah and I drove in 8-12 hour shifts as we made our way through some of the last natural beauty and old growth forests left in North America.
When we entered Alaska we were met with the realities of mega forest fires and the impact climate change is having in northern latitudes. Alaska is a place that has always been shaped by fire but the frequency and duration of these fires is increasing as summers are getting progressively drier and hotter year over year. Being from southern California we weren’t strangers to fire or the trend but the size of the fires here are about the size some small states. We drove through hours of fire scarred land. The forest fire we precariously drove through on the way down would be the same fire that nearly prevented us from leaving on time nearly three months later.
Arriving at Beth’s was an amazing feeling. I actually felt a sense of accomplishment upon arrival. I also had never felt I needed a shower more in my life. It’s fair to say that the car smelled like wild animals had been living in it for a week. Our Homer adventure begins in the next post!
Places: Big Sur, McCloud River, Yakima River, Yukon, Cooper Landing, Homer, Scenic Place Peonies