Episode 36 - Alaska 🫎
A week in the Final Frontier!
After my long and tiring internship at BCG, I wanted to go on an epic post-internship trip. My friend Emma was going on a 2-month Interrailing trip across Europe, Joe was living it up in the south of France, and I wanted to do something similar.
And so off to Alaska I went!
The plan was to go backpacking in Denali National Park for a few days in the Alaskan wilderness. Half the adventure was to be the actual backpacking, and the other half hitchhiking out of Anchorage to actually get to the park.
Let’s go!
Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
I woke up at 5:30 am for my trip to Alaska and immediately wondered how much I really wanted to go to Alaska.
Whenever I wake up early in the morning and dread getting up from the nice, warm bed (whether for a bike ride, travel, or something similar), I always wonder if it’s really worth it (it always is). When I win that battle, I get up, do the thing I go up early for, and never regret getting up. When I lose that battle, I go back to sleep and (usually) end up regretting not getting up early as planned.
Today, I won that mental battle, and was in the SeaTac airport in no time, eating breakfast at the delicious Centurion Lounge. I boarded the plane uneventfully and fell right asleep in no time at all.
When I woke up, I realized I was sitting next to these two rather talkative and nice ladies (who I thought were Alaskan) and was subsequently very impressed by Alaskans’ niceness. Turns out, they were from Louisiana (that made a lot more sense with their very Southern accents) and we chatted for a bit about their upcoming Alaskan cruise. They even gave me their extra pretzels!
After the chat, I started reading the book Into the Wild, which talks about Chris McCandless’s travels around the US before he starved to death by himself in the Alaskan wilderness. Gotta get in the right mood for the upcoming trip!
I had read that book in middle school, and the sense of adventure it shared was a small part of me going on this trip to Alaska all these years later. It was even better reading it a second time!
And before I knew it, I had landed in Alaska. Wow!
I took the bus to the hostel in Anchorage, checked in, and got a nice tour of the building (it was really nice, very clean and organized with a spacious backyard). I met my roommates (one Texan and two French, Pierre and Teofan) and discussed the different names for the pain au chocolat in French. I had heard that they called these delicious pastries chocolatines in the south of France, which we agreed was pretty strange.
I then learned that there is, in fact, a third name — petite pain (“little bread”) — which is used in their part of France bordering northwestern Switzerland. We all agreed that that made the least sense of all since a pain au chocolat is definitely not bread.
After chatting a little with another lady in the hostel (Kim, who was in town to run the Anchorage Film Festival), I caught a chicken outside (the hostel had a bunch of chickens running around in the backyard), rented a bike, and proceeded to bike around Anchorage on a grand tour of the city.
Alaska has a very small population (less than a million people), and around half of those residents live in Anchorage (making it by far the largest city in Alaska).
Despite this, I biked around downtown Anchorage rather quickly and made it to the BEAUTIFUL Coastal Trail that I was recommended by many folks staying in the hostel. Funnily, when I was reading about Anchorage before going on the bike ride, the Wikipedia article mentioned the tallest building was “anchoring the skyline”.
This building was only ~20 stories tall. That isn’t anchoring anything.
lol!
Along the Coastal Trail, I saw lots of greenery and ducks (I love ducks!). If you’re in Anchorage, be sure to rent a bike (there are plenty of places to do that) and bike the entire thing. It’s 100% worth it!
After finishing up the Coastal Trail, I biked over to the Mooses Tooth, a pizzeria I was recommended by a colleague at BCG. Turns out, it was ranked the third-best pizzeria in all of America. I waited about an hour for a table (quite a while but well worth it), and was reading about Denali National Park the entire time.
Eventually, I got a table and a pizza. It was AMAZING! The deliciousness of the pizza confirmed that the pizzeria was worthy of a top-3 ranking. I saved the leftovers for the next day’s lunch, biked back to the hostel, and went to bed.
What an Alaskan day!
Friday, August 23rd
I slept in this morning and proceeded to have a really slow start to the day. After an entire summer of very quick starts to the day, having a slower one was a much-needed change of pace.
The hostel I was staying at had a mini library, and I spent the morning exploring the different books and seeing if there were any that I’d like to read and take with me to Denali.
I started reading an autobiography called The Translator, which was about a Sudanese native who translated for international reporters during the Darfur Genocide. It was such a great book that I spent 2 hours reading it in one sitting while sipping some delicious (and free!) hostel coffee.
After I finished, I started chatting with a few different people in the hostel — one, an Israeli chick who gave me tips on hitchhiking (“be a girl”) and a kid from UC Santa Cruz that I spent 15 minutes trying to convince him to study abroad. I even took him to the UCEAP study abroad website, but by the end I think he was just agreeing with what I said so that it wouldn’t be awkward.
Eventually, I packed up my things in the hostel, took the bus to downtown Anchorage, and started looking around the “bus terminal” (just a random city block) for the Valley Transit bus, which I had read online takes you out of the city to the highway going north. It seemed like a much better location to start hitchhiking than a random Anchorage downtown street, where locals were probably just going around town, not all the way to Denali.
I really struggled to find the Valley Transit stop, asked around a few bus drivers where the stop was, received 4 quarters from a random kind lady for the bus fare (I only had $6 in cash and the fare was $7 for the 50-mile ride), got on the bus, and we were off!
The entire experience reminded me how much cheaper local buses are than the tourist buses. It seems that lots of tourists take charter buses that cost at least 5x the cost of the local transit rather than figure out how locals get around, which in my experience is a lot more fun and interesting anyway. It was the same thing in Morocco, when the local bus cost 5 euros to go to the Atlas Mountains and the tourist one, 50!
50 miles later, the bus dropped me off at its most northern stop (in a random dirt parking lot), and it was time for me to start hitchhiking to Denali. Hooray!
I crossed the highway, found a nice spot to stick my thumb out (based on my non-existent hitchhiking experience), and proceeded to procrastinate actually doing so for 20 minutes because I was so nervous to start.
Eventually, I got my shit together, stuck my thumb out, and…
Nothing happened for 30 minutes. Honestly pretty anti-climactic, if you ask me.
I felt pretty discouraged and started making plans in my head to take the local bus back to Anchorage and take the tourist bus to Denali the next morning. Not wanting to quit too early, though, I hiked another mile up the road to a major intersection, where I figured the stoplight would give more people time to see me and assess my friendliness.
I stood waiting for a ride at the new spot for about 30 minutes, and then SOMEONE PICKED ME UP WOW! I couldn’t believe it!
It was an elderly grandma, Christie, who drove me ~5 miles to her house on the side of the highway and stopped to pick me up because “I looked like a nice kid”. She smoked a cigarette, told me about her daughter who almost died on 9/11 (I didn’t ask but she was giving me a free ride so I listened), and gave me some posterboard to make a proper sign.
I was feeling so optimistic.
And then within 5 minutes of holding up the new sign, another car picked me up, and drove me ALL THE WAY TO DENALI. I literally couldn’t believe this hitchhiking thing worked so well!
The new car’s occupants were a Filipina mom and her daughter who were driving to the national park to spend time with family. Most of the drive was me asking them questions about Alaska and finding everything they were saying to be quite chucklesome.
It was mostly moose-related. I was very intrigued about moose(s?) (meese?), especially since I’ve never seen one myself.
Top highlights of things I learned:
Anchorage families can’t put out Jack-O-Lanterns for Halloween without the risk of a moose eating them
Sometimes moose just walk around the high schools
Ice hockey is the main high school sport, not football. The ice hockey captains get all the popularity and are the equivalent of the football captains in the rest of the US
The best part was that along the drive, we saw a moose! They made a huge deal out of it for me and even pulled over so that I could get some pictures with it :)
They found my surprise and shock at all these things to be quite funny since for them, it was all normal stuff. Eventually, I think they assumed that everything that happens in Alaska only happens in Alaska (based on my excitement), so they started telling me about very normal, this-definitely-happens-in-the-rest-of-America things like “also, you’ll find this crazy but the leaves fall off the trees in the wintertime” and “we have squirrels here that climb in the trees”.
So basically, very normal stuff. However, since they were giving me a free ride, I had to fake this excitement and be as polite as possible.
Once we got to Denali, they dropped me off at the Denali Park campgrounds, I reserved a campsite, set up my tent, and went straight to bed.
Hitchhiking, success 💪
Saturday, August 24th
After waking up, I headed over to the Denali Backcountry Information Center to get a permit from the rangers to go backpacking in Denali.
Basically, Denali NP is millions of acres in size and divided into several dozen backcountry “units”. A specific number of permits are given for these different units, with different quotas of how many backpackers can be in a given unit each night. Once you get your permit, you take a park bus (with a $33 bus ticket) out onto the only road into the park (creatively called the “Denali Park Road”) and are dropped off on the side of the road next to your unit.
Then you’re off!
The best part of the entire situation is that Denali NP is a pure wilderness, in that there is no infrastructure in the backcountry at all — not even trails. Once you’re dropped off by the bus, you have the make your own path through the woods, find your own camping spot, and survive completely independently of park facilities or staff.
I was tremendously excited about all this, especially the wilderness part. It was the main reason I came to Alaska on this trip.
The ranger recommended Unit 31 based on what I wanted to see (glacial river valleys and high ridges with epic mountain views), I got the permit, watched the safety videos, packed my backpack, and was off!
Once I got onto the bus, I said bye to my family and Brooke and completely turned off my phone. After an entire summer of being extremely digitally connected (at BCG), I wanted to completely unplug and take pictures only on Brooke’s small digital camera.
I ended up being the only passenger on the bus, so I got a private nature tour from the bus driver. He told me about the different types of vegetation, saw some super epic mountain vistas, and even saw a grizzly mama bear with her 2 cubs! The scenery reminded me a lot of Iceland, though with a lot fewer waterfalls — it seems the tundra is similar everywhere!
Eventually, we made it to the end of the road at Mile 43. I hopped off the bus, said goodbye to the last human I’d see for three days, and was off on my adventure!
I descended down to the river (East Fork Toklat River, for those that care) and began to navigate north to my planned camping spot at the confluence of 2 rivers. The river was “braided”, meaning there are a bunch of mini rivers from melting glaciers that twist and turn around each other, making a braided shape.
The bus driver told me I’d eventually need to cross the streams and have some “wet, cold boots”, which I really wanted to avoid.
I prefer my boots to be “dry and room temperature”.
I tried to avoid crossing the streams as long as I could, staying on the eastern side of the streams as long as possible. At one point, I scaled a very steep, gravelly mountainside a few dozen feet above the raging streams and was very relieved when I made it back to the gravel beds along the streams.
Eventually, I realized that there was no way to avoid crossing the streams, so I decided to suck it up and do it sooner rather than later. I found a large stick to use as a trekking pole, rolled up my pant legs, and started crossing.
The water was much colder and deeper than I’d realized, but I realized that I had to commit to crossing fully. The deepest water went up to mid-thigh, completely soaking the bottom half of my pants and being an altogether not-ideal situation.
On the other side, I decided to walk on the elevated plateau above the riverbed to avoid having to cross again. The brush was up to my knees, everything was very damp, and the thick moss covering the entire ground made my walking slow and tiring — definitely a Type-2 Fun situation. I told myself that on the way back, I needed to just stay on the firm gravel the entire time!
At long last, I made it to the confluence of the two rivers, found a nice campsite, and set up my base camp as it was getting dark. Ate a yummy Mountain House dehydrated foods dinner, satellite messaged Brooke and my dad, and went to bed. Without a trail, traversing 6 miles took me about 5 hours.
What a day!
Sunday, August 25th
I woke up to sunny weather (since I had my phone powered off, I had no idea what time it was!), read a little bit, and just generally felt in very high spirits. Gloomy weather makes me feel gloomy!
Made some yummy oatmeal and hot cocoa for breakfast, and then out of nowhere, it randomly started pouring. I rushed back to my tent and finished my breakfast there, hiding until the rain stopped.
I decided to stay in the vicinity of the tent in case more rain came that day, and just spent the day relaxing and reading my book, The Black Swan. The entire day was about an hour of rain, during which I’d hide in the tent and either read or nap. Then, there’d be 5-30 minutes of sunshine, where I’d walk around or read outside. Then, it’d start raining again and I’d go hide in the tent again.
This was repeated all day, and ended up being quite relaxing! Later in the evening, I went for a longer walk along the river, skipped some perfect rocks, and called it a day. Along the way, I realized that I had not spoken all day and spent most of the time just sitting in silence and listening to nature.
Monday, August 26th
I woke up to perfect weather, with bright sunshine and not a cloud to be seen in the sky! Cabin Peak, my planned hike for the day, was beckoning off in the distance, waiting for me to climb it.
It was oatmeal and hot cocoa for breakfast again, then I packed my day hike, and began my ascent!
Since there were no trails, it was slow going again (especially with the mossy ground and swampy marshes at the foothills of the mountains). I again chose the route to minimize river crossings, and this time succeeded in not getting my boots wet. I continued up to the foothills of Cabin Peak, and found…
SOME ANTLERS! It was crazy!
I had this irrational idea before the trip that I’d be walking in the Alaskan woods and would find some moose antlers just lying on the ground, and it ended up happening! There was one detached antler just lying in the stream and it was so so amazing. I already considered this trip to be a success!
I finally made it to the base of Cabin Peak and began the long and arduous climb up to the ridge. Climbing on moss uphill was even worse than walking on moss on flat ground, and it was extremely slow going. Fortunately, the scenery was wonderful, with epic views the entire way up. I eventually made it to the tippy top of Cabin Peak, where I could see all the surrounding snow-capped mountains, several marmots, and even Denali (the tallest mountain in North America) all the way off in the distance. It was so epic!
I celebrated with lunch and a Snickers bar, and then began the long descent back to the camp (I could see my tiny orange tent waaaay off in the distance). I chose a different route down the mountains and descended down this huge gravel slope, which quickly turned into a dense forest bordering a mountain creek.
I eventually made it out of the woods to see a super cool barren cliff face with folding rock layers (just like what I learned about in my UCLA geology classes!). Along the way, I stepped on a mushroom that launched all of its spores into the air in a poofy green mist. Very random but cool
I made it back to camp to find my tent blown over, thank goodness I made it back in time! Ate dinner and retreated to the tent again just as it started raining once more. Perfect timing, it seems!
What an epic day :)
Tuesday, August 27th
It was my last day in the Alaskan backcountry, so after waking up and making breakfast (funny enough, my propane canister ran out of gas as I was cooking breakfast, so it was definitely time to go!), it was time to head up the river valley back to the park road.
This time, I had mentally accepted that my shoes would get wet in the rivers, so I wasted no time in trying to navigate around the braided streams and barged straight across (I felt quite cool doing this). I did need to go up on the same plateau for some parts (as the river was quite strong in some parts), but still made it back to the park road in half the time it took me to get to the campsite from the park road.
Even after only three days, it was quite strange to see manmade infrastructure (the road) and so many people all in one place. I waited for a park bus to show up, got on, and napped/read for most of the bus ride back to the visitor center.
At the visitor center, I saw some Alaskan Husky sled dogs (that pull dogsleds in the wintertime) and saw a demonstration of their dogsled-pulling abilities. Basically, the park ranger harnessed some of the dogs to a go-cart and was pulled around the park. Epic stuff!
After the dogsleds, I walked ~2 miles to the nearest town to get a pizza at the pizzeria. Along the way, I called Brooke and my family to tell them all about my Alaska trip (crazy talking so much after all this time being silent!).
The pizzeria didn’t have any personal tables, so I sat with a few different parties around one large table and we shared stories of our different national parks trips while I made a hitchhiking sign with an extra pizza box. One retired couple was planning on hitting every national park in the US over the course of three years.
Walked back to the visitor center area after dinner, and camped in the same campground where I spent the first night in the park. Boy is it nice to be back in civilization!
Wednesday, August 28th & Thursday, August 29th
Wednesday and Thursday consisted of me attempting to hitchhike back to Anchorage (no luck for ~4 hours) and eventually giving up (everyone was waving hi but no one stopped). I decided to take the tourist bus back to Anchorage for $105 (ouch), chilled in the hostel, took my first shower since leaving Seattle, and caught up with the same French dudes I spent the night with the first night in the hostel. They had just come back from Nome and were renting a camper van for 3 weeks (and $3000) to drive to all the northern Alaskan national parks. Now that’s what I’m talking about!
In the morning, I took an Uber to the airport, got on my flight, and before I knew it, I was back in Seattle! On the plane, I watched Monkey Man, one of my new all-time favorite movies. Amazing fight scenes!
And so, the wonderful trip to the Final Frontier has come to an end. What a great trip!
Realizations I had on this trip:
Me time is not the same as solitude. I definitely like my fair share of me-time to rest and recover, but being all alone is very lonely and quite frankly, boring
Being unplugged is extremely nice — it was so wonderful to have my phone completely off so that I wasn’t even tempted to check if I had any signal
Bad weather definitely affects my mood — when it’s cold, wet, and gloomy, so is my mood
I need to get a bigger tent. My current one is too small for me (even when sleeping diagonally), and either my head or toes touch the tent wall. If the tent wall is wet, I get wet, and then very cold
Not knowing the exact time of day is quite cool! The only way I could determine time passing when I had my phone off was by seeing the sun move across the sky
what an amazing trip dennis :)