After finishing up the Dalton Highway, we were able to meet up with our friend and his wife that have a truck almost identical to ours. It’s funny that the two trucks live only a handful of hours apart, but the first time we got the two trucks together was in Fairbanks, Alaska. Anyway, we had just finished the Dalton and they were about to start, so we didn’t get to travel with them, but it was nice to meet up and swap maintenance and road condition stories for a bit.
After Fairbanks, we worked our way to the Denali Highway. After spending so much time on our own up in the arctic, it was a bit of a shock to be around people. Even though it’s a 280-mile (round trip) dirt/gravel/mud/broken pavement road, there was an impressive number of people camped along it. It was definitely pretty, but I think we’ve been spoiled by some of the wilderness we’ve been in and it didn’t seem as scenic as we were hoping. Some of that could have been due to weather, but overall, it’s a neat area to visit and there are lots of great primitive camping options.
One thing that was kind of fun is that there were millions of blueberries along the Denali Highway. Most weren’t quite ripe, but it was still fun to forage for a bit.
Road conditions still seem like an odd topic to us. Like all the other “dirt” roads that we’ve traveled on our trip, they can be really quite good in one direction but a little bit of weather can make them a real mess when going back the other way. The truck does great either way.
We saw a good bit of wildlife through this area. We didn’t see as many caribou as we were hoping, but we have seen about 9 or 10. Still, wildlife viewing is often the highlight of our day. At one of our campsites we had a nice visit from a porcupine friend that hung out for a bit.
Despite all the hype of the Denali Highway, our favorite spot in the area was actually not on the Denali at all but just a bit north along the Richardson Highway: Gulkana Glacier. The Gulkana Glacier is a neat spot. Tons of primitive camping along a really rough road to get near it, and there is a really sweet hike all the way up to the bottom of the glacier including an interesting cable foot bridge. No one was there, primitive camping, and beautiful scenery: checks all the boxes for us!
Wabi-sabi Overland 