Heading to Alaska

In  June of 1996 I'll be leaving Maine on a major  5-week  trip  that will take
me above the Arctic Circle as I explore Alaska and the Yukon.  I have never
ventured further west than Albany, New York, so after about a day on the road,
it'll all be new to me.   In my upcoming columns  I plan to share some of my
experiences preparing for this trip. I am obsessed with traveling north on a
motorcycle.  The solitude, cooler temperatures, and starkness of the landscape
are features of northern travel that make me a yearly return visitor to the top
of the world.  Each July for the past half-dozen years, several good friends and
I spent a week to ten days riding our bikes toward the end of the pavement in
Labrador, Newfoundland, and northern Quebec.  Each year we pushed further north,
 until one morning  my friend Alan McKinnon and I just decided that we were
going to ride to the Artic Circle.    Each of us required some time to get our
respective acts together.   Alan needed to build up his sales stock and find
someone to help his wife run the leather shop while he'd be away, and I wanted
to wait until my youngest son had his driver's license and a summer job. Alaska
is the last great American wilderness, with only a half-million residents living
on a land mass one fifth the size of all of America.  It has a national park
twice the size of Massachusetts, yet I've only been able to account for less
than 4,000 miles of road in all that expanse.   June travel reportedly brings
mud, dust on hotter days, and sore shins from rocks kicked up by logging trucks
on graveled sections of the highway. A trip of this size needs to be respected
in terms of preparation, with cost a major factor.  A fellow Mainer who rode to
the Northwest Territories last year told me that he averaged  $36 a day while
camping as much as he could along the way.  I'm planning on the high side, 
budgeting $50 a day, including motorcycle maintainence, tires, and service in
addition to food and camping fees.  Mileage will be fierce.  It's about 4,600
miles from my spot on the Atlantic just to reach the border of Alaska.  So with
exploration of parts of the Yukon and Northwest Territories and the return,  I
expect to rack up around 13,000 miles in the space of  five to six weeks.  I'm
definitely going to budget an extra hundred dollars to charter  a flight over
Denali, whose 18,000 feet of rock comprises the greatest vertical relief in the
world, exceeding Everest's by 7,000 feet.  I've heard that one of the charter
pilots is able to land on a glacier a third of the way up the mountain. I don't
forsee a great degree of specialized motorcycle preparation for the journey.   
Our bikes survived hundreds of bone-jarring miles through Labrador last summer
with little modification.    We'll be covering our headlights with wire screens,
and we'll each be lugging a spare tire.   There are no specialized medical
procedures such as shots needed to enter the Northwest and a driver's license
and voter registration card or birth certificate will be all we need to cross
borders. The weather will be the one factor that could bring us grief.  We plan
to leave Maine in early June with hopes of being above the Artic Circle in time
for the summer solstice on June 21.  My phone calls to the Arctic Hotline have
been sobering:  expect snow, occasional freezing temperatures, and the liklihood
of mud or ice on the Dempster Highway. This 460 mile gravel road traverses two
mountain ranges  before reaching Inuvik, close to the Arctic Ocean. What's the
most important thing I've learned about preparing for a long trip?   Deciding to
do it. Part of doing it involves deciding that it is allright to give yourself
permission to be away from your responsibilities.  For me, being away from my
family for over a month will be difficult.  I've been married for twenty four
years and have two sons, one eighteen and leaving for college next year, and
another fifteen year old.  We actually like spending time traveling together and
I'm going to miss sharing this experience with them.  My decision to do it is
maintained by  reading books on Alaska, pulling out maps, measuring mileages,
requesting triptiks, writing to chambers of commerce, phoning provincial and
state tourism bureaus, looking at pictures, and telling just about everybody
that I meet that I'm going.  It's my way way of making the trip real. Every day
I run into people that tell me they wish that they could see Europe, take a
cruise, buy a motorcycle, change their jobs.  Hey, haven't we  regularly jumped
into things (marriage, having children, choosing a college) that we knew little
about in the past?  Do the same with that tour that you wonder about when you
are back at your job this week.  Move your dream onto the front burner this year
and turn up the heat. Take a long ride.