It started with an ad on Facebook this morning for the Chicken Gold Camp. Oh! Do I need to add that to our 2024 Alaska Road Trip? I’ve been planning this camping trip for about 6 months now and thought I had totally dialed in our trip north.

If you know anything about me at all, it’s that I love to plan trips. The year before retirement I spent months planning a trip to Africa that included 23 plane flights and 23 different places to stay over a period of eight weeks. I also am an old girl who still loves paper maps, and have been collecting maps and brochures since this idea to take Nonnie’s Diner north to Alaska first began over a year ago.

You’re driving to Alaska, ok that sounds simple enough. But of course there are some complexities to this trip planning. First one is which route north to take? Google Maps says they’re relatively the same time and distance. One route goes across and east of the Rockies and looks like a possibly less mountainous route with less climbing, but the mountains are pretty aren’t they? After a little reading I decided the mountain route on the left (the Cassiar Highway) wasn’t guaranteed to be as easy of a drive, so we chose the outside trip on the right.

So we’ll add another complexity to this trip, we’re taking handguns. Rob and I each have a Glock, and we take them when we go into remote places. We won’t get much more remote than Alaska, so this is a great trip to bring them along. The problem there is that Canada is 100% No Bueno for handguns. I’ve done all that research now, and know how to transport the guns north. We could ship them to a gun dealer in Alaska, but that’s very expensive. So we have the forms ready to fill out for the Canadian authorities. The guns will be locked in a gun safe in the trailer when we cross the border. We submit an application in writing and give the EXACT date that we’ll be making the border crossing. We can’t come early, and if we’re going to miss that date we have to let them know. Then we have EXACTLY seven days to be out of Canada on our northern crossing into Alaska.

Since we only have seven days and we are traveling during the busy season, I thought I’d look at where we will be staying. I’m never a fan of an RV lot, sitting on a concrete pad six feet from some huge monstrous rig with quadruple slide outs and yappy dogs (oops, out loud voice there). I’ll always look for a National or Provincial/State Park with some resemblance to an actual campground. So I figured out how to identify all those parks along our route and plotted them in a custom Google Map, noting which we can reserve and which are FCFS.

So now we know the route north through Canada. On the way home I may send the guns back a different way so we can linger a little longer and take our time, but that planning is a long way off. Another complexity is that we’re traveling in the company of friends. In the sailing world we call it “Buddy Boating”. I’m not sure what it is in trailer life.. But this trip was dreamed up with our pals Jon & Lynn and we’ll travel together. Except Lynn isn’t making the transit north, Jon’s friend from Northern Cal is coming and he has a time limit and needs to buy plane tickets to SEA and back home from Anchorage.

So where do we want to go in Alaska? It’s a HUGE state, but very little is actually accessible by road. This clockwise circumnavigation will take us to most everything we can drive to. There are some particularly important stops for me, some to revisit from my old pipeline and construction days, and some new spots to explore. Valdez is a must revisit, after spending a summer there working at the pipeline terminal. Homer and Seward are too gorgeous to miss, and Homer was another spot from construction days. We’re going in to Denali National Park for a week, someplace new I’ve never been. And just for fun we’re going to fly into my friend Debby’s hunting camp south of Fairbanks for a few days! I’d also love to drive north to Atigun Pass and have a look out over the North Slope, although driving all the way to Prudhoe Bay is not necessarily on my need to revisit list.

In Nonnie’s Diner there is a scratch off map of all the US National Parks, and I would love to see them all. Eight of those are in Alaska, but unfortunately only three of them are accessible by automobile. We’ve been to Glacier Bay in the boat, so that’s one checked off. On this trip we’ll see Wrangell-St. Elias, Kenai Fjords, and Denali. Our drive north to Atigun Pass takes us right next to the Gates of the Arctic NP, but there is no road to get us there. Kobuk Valley would be interesting to see, as that’s the home territory of my sister-in-law’s relatives, but it’s a flight seeing adventure and likely not in the plans this year. Lake Clark is just across Cook Inlet from where we’ll drive down the Kenai Peninsula, but again likely not a year for flying into parks. And Katmai NP is just too far away from everywhere.

Turns out the first NP on the trip, Wrangell – St. Elias, is America’s largest National Park. Here’s what one trekking website says about it: “Throw in four mountain ranges (and some of the tallest peaks in North America), massive glaciers, wildlife, more than a few mosquitoes, and 100 miles of road, and you have a rugged, remote, spectacular wilderness to explore. ” We’re definitely not going to drive right by and miss that. I’ve researched and planned a week in the park on our way between the Canadian border and Valdez.

So now we have the first week planned driving north through Canada. The second week is planned in Wrangell-St. Elias NP. And the third week before Peter goes back to Northern Cal will be spent in Valdez fishing, kayaking, bike riding and hiking. But now, what about Chicken? Because that takes us right back to the beginning of the planning, darn it!

Which route do we take from Watson Lake to Chicken? The upper route is only open seasonally, and the crossing isn’t open 24×7 so we need to time our arrival and not be stuck at the border overnight. Is the trip to Chicken worth the time to do the research? Unfortunately the internet is a wealth of planning tools and rabbit holes. But the good news is I still have almost four months left.