Season Four Recap of 2022 and Season Five Plans for 2023
Season Four: Alaska Bound was our best season yet. It fulfilled a long dream of ours, and so much more. Our plans for Season Five: Southern States is filled with some wonderful experiences that have us excited. It will be hard to beat Season Four, but we’re going to try our best during Season Five.
Alaska was a long time coming for us. We had plans to visit Alaska during the summer of 2002. However, life got in the way. The dot com bust hit us hard and we found ourselves looking for work instead of going to Alaska as planned. It took us twenty years to finally make the trip up north, and we made the most of every minute.
For Season Four: Alaska Bound, we were on the road for six and a half months. We stayed in 13 different states, two Canadian provinces (Alberta and British Columbia), and one Canadian territory (Yukon), covering over 17,000 miles. We visited six different U.S. National Parks and three different Canadian National Parks. We camped in numerous national parks, state parks, city parks, provincial parks, and territorial parks as well as private campgrounds. We rode numerous ferries, trains, boats, mountain gondolas, and planes. Our activities included hiking, biking, and kayaking. One of those hikes was on top of a glacier (Matanuska Glacier, Alaska - June 26th to 27th, 2022). There were scenic plane rides and wildlife cruises. We encountered moose, caribou, sea otters, whales, sea lions, dolphins, puffins, stone sheep, Dall sheep, bald eagles, trumpeter swans, bison, black bears and grizzly bears. We crossed the arctic circle, just briefly (Fairbanks, Alaska - August 15th to 19th, 2022). We even got a glimpse of some faint northern lights (Kinaskan Lake Provincial Park, British Columbia - September 5th to 6th, 2022).
Our route took us first from Colorado to Ohio for family and an event in Dayton in April (Kansas Backroads - March 31st to April 1st, 2022). Since it was too early to start heading north as many campgrounds were still closed, we worked our way west to the Pacific coast (Pipestone, Minnesota - April 23rd to 24th, 2022). We crossed into Canada near Vancouver, and spent over a week on Vancouver Island (Pacific Rim National Park, British Columbia - May 23rd to 24th, 2022). Then we started our trek north, starting with the Sea to Sky Highway (Squamish, British Columbia - May 27th to 28th, 2022). At the end of the Sea to Sky, we turned onto highway 97, what the Milepost calls the West Access Route, to reach Dawson Creek, the start of the Alaska Highway or Alcan (Alcan: Dawson Creek, British Columbia - June 2nd to 3rd, 2022).
We briefly left the Alcan before reaching White Horse, to head south on the Klondike Highway to enter Alaska for the first time, at Skagway (Skagway, Alaska - June 12th to 13th, 2022). From Skagway, we took a ferry over to Haines, Alaska (Haines, Alaska - June 14th to 15th, 2022). From Haines, we drove up the Haines Highway, back into Canada, then headed south on the Alcan to White Horse, in the Yukon Territory (Alcan: Whitehorse, Yukon Territory - June 16th to 17th, 2022).
From Whitehorse, we left the Alcan again and headed north on the Klondike HIghway up to Dawson City (Dawson City, Yukon Territory - June 20th to 21st, 2022). The George Black ferry took us from Dawson City, across the Yukon River, to the Top of the World Highway, which brought us into Alaska for the second time at the small town of Chicken (Chicken, Alaska - June 22nd to 23rd, 2022).
Then we spent the next couple of months in Alaska. The Taylor Highway, Tok Cutoff, and Glen Highway brought us over to Anchorage (Anchorage, Alaska - June 28th to July 4th, 2022). The Seward and Sterling Highways took us down to Homer, where we took a seaplane flight over to Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park (Katmai National Park, Alaska - July 11th, 2022). Retracing some of our route, we headed over to Seward, then over to Whittier, where we caught another ferry over to Valdez (Valdez, Alaska - July 20th to 25th, 2022).
Heading north from Valdez on the Richardson Highway, we took a side trip over to McCarthy (McCarthy, Alaska - July 25th to 28th, 2022). We returned to the Richardson Highway following it all the way up to Fairbanks (Pioneer Park, Fairbanks, Alaska - July 31st to August 1st, 2022). After a brief stay in Fairbanks, we took the Parks Highway down to Denali National Park, where we stayed for over a week (Denali National Park: Riley Creek, Alaska - August 2nd to 3rd, 2022). We then made a brief visit to Talkeetna (Talkeetna, Alaska - August 13th to 14th, 2022) before returning to Fairbanks for a longer stay (Fairbanks, Alaska - August 15th to 19th, 2022). Once again, we hopped on the Parks Highway, making our way down to Palmer (Palmer, Alaska - August 22nd to 25th, 2022) where we visited the Alaska State Fair.
Then it was time to leave Alaska and start heading south. The Glenn Highway and Tok Cutoff brought us over to Tok (Tok, Alaska - August 26th to 27th, 2022), where we picked up the Alcan. We crossed into Canada and stayed on the Alcan to Watson Lake, where we turned onto the Cassiar Highway (Tā Ch’ilā Provincial Park, British Columbia - September 1st-4th, 2022). We took a side trip from the Cassiar Highway over to Stewart, British Columbia, crossing back into Alaska one last time, at Hyder (Hyder, Alaska - September 7th to 8th, 2022).
At the end of the Cassiar Highway, we headed east on the Yellowhead Highway all the way to Jasper, Alberta (Jasper, Alberta - September 17th to 19th, 2022). From Jasper, we headed south on the Ice Fields Parkway to Banff (Icefields Parkway, Alberta - September 20th, 2022). Then we went east to Calgary before turning south, crossing back into the United States for the last time, and ending up in Great Falls, Montana (Great Falls, Montana - September 28th to 30th, 2022).
We had a few more stops as we made our way home to Colorado. One of those stops was in Fargo, North Dakota, to join the Best for Last Club, as we made sure North Dakota was our fiftieth state to visit (Fargo, North Dakota - October 7th to 8th, 2022). Surprisingly, despite the wildfires, accidents, flooding, landslides, and weather that closed some of the roads part of the time we were gone, our planned route did not change.
Of course, not everything went smoothly. We came down with COVID while we were in Seward, Alaska and had to cancel five days worth of activities and take it easy for another five days (Seward, Alaska - July 13th to 18th, 2022). But we are not complaining, the remaining six months of activities more than made up for those ten days. In addition to the posts that we linked to in this post, there were many other posts that we did not mention here. If you want to see them all, start with the first one (Kansas Backroads - March 31st to April 1st, 2022) and there will be a link to the next one at the bottom of the post. If you want a visual experience of our Season Four, check out the Season Four 2022: Alaska Bound playlist on our YouTube channel. We also post a video on YouTube at the same time we post a blog on our website. The YouTube playlist contains all of our videos from the whole season and there are links to the corresponding blog post in the video description.
Now that we’ve experienced the cold north and really didn’t experience summer weather during 2022, we’re heading south to warmer temperatures for Season Five: Southern States. We’ve also said goodbye to our beloved Red Tail Lodge, our VanDOit camper van, and are now traveling in our new rig, a Winnebago EKKO, Red Tail Lodge Two (more details are on Our Rig page).
If everything goes according to plan, Season Five will take us to 13 different national parks and through 18 different states, and probably covering almost as many miles as Season Four. We’re concentrating on the southern states from Arizona in the west to Florida in the east, along with popping up to Ohio to visit family. We’ll be on the road for seven and a half months, our longest season of travel yet. We even have a three day backpacking trip planned. We haven’t backpacked since we did the Rim to Rim in the Grand Canyon during Season One (Day One Below Rim: Grand Canyon - Sep 16, 2019). We’ve been on the road already since March 1st and have already reached the southern most point in the Continental United States, in Key West. We’ll be ending the season in New Mexico, at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta in October. And we can’t wait to share it all with you.
We also plan to put together a few Alaska follow up posts, covering things like Alaska tips, trip planning, and our expenses. If you want to follow along, you can either subscribe to our blog on our website, or subscribe to our YouTube channel, or both!
Check out our related video: Season Four Recap of 2022 and Season Five Plans for 2023
(Ann)