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Leaving Alaska: Fairbanks to Wisconsin
We spent our last workweek in Alaska in the Pioneer Park parking lot in Fairbanks. It was not the most scenic spot but the price was right and there was access to the Chena Riverwalk and everything we needed to prepare for our long drive south. We were surprised by how fast the weather was changing. We had seen termination dust (the first snowfall) on August 11th in the mountains near Denali. It was so cold we were running our furnace during the day. Fireweed is Alaska’s summer calendar as the blooms move up the stems. And we finally understood the saying “When the fireweed turns to cotton, summer is…
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Alaska Bound: British Columbia & Yukon
We crossed into British Columbia on the 1st weekend of May. BC has chain laws from Oct 1 – April 30, so we started our trip north through Canada as early as we could. There are plenty of worthy stops and side trips along the way, but because we wanted to maximize our time in Alaska, we spent most of our weekends behind the wheel. The first day of our drive took us through the Fraser and Thompson River Canyons. We stopped at the Dugan Lake Recreation site for the night. Then continued driving through small First Nation and logging towns of central BC to our first workweek destination of…
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Banff, Canada
I don’t have too many photos to share of our 2 weeks in the town of Banff. The best thing to do is visit Moraine Lake and Lake Louise, and we’d been there the week before. There were a few days of smoke and/or rain and Michael took a work trip out of Calgary. Banff is the main food/lodging hub for Banff National Park visitors. The Tunnel Mountain campgrounds have over 1000 RV/tent campsites and are so popular that our entire Canadian Rockies route was planned around the 2 weeks I was able to book at the end of our trip only after school was back in session. The Trailer…
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Lake Louise, Banff National Park
Our 6th week in the Canadian Rockies was a vacation week for Michael. We were in Lake Louise, the most iconic and most popular area of Banff National Park. Lake Louise is a teeny tiny village with a huge campground, a ski resort, and a stunning turquoise lake with a resort-style hotel. There is an even more stunning lake named Moraine Lake (cover photo) nearby that is one of the most photographed sites in all of Canada. We stayed at the Lake Louise Hardsided Campground, which has been our least favorite of the amazing Parks Canada campgrounds we’ve stayed on this trip. It’s an electric-only campground and 99% of the…
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Jasper National Park
Weeks 4 and 5 of our Canadian Rockies road trip were spent at Jasper National Park. We felt like we’d won the campground lottery getting a 2 week reservation in a full hookup site at the recently renovated Whistlers Campground in Jasper. A lot of trees in this area have been wiped out by pine beetles, but the openness of the campground gave us mountain views and a great Starlink signal. The campground was a 5-minute drive from the cute mountain town also named Jasper. And there were seemingly endless beautiful sites close by that we could visit in the afternoons after work. Jasper NP is huge and we ventured…
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Icefields Parkway
We spent our third week in the Canadian Rockies on the Icefields Parkway, the very scenic 144 miles of Alberta Highway 93 that links Lake Louise in Banff National Park to Jasper National Park. It’s known as one of the most stunning drives in the world, lined with mountain peaks, glaciers, and glacier-fed lakes and rivers. We’ve wanted to visit this area for a long time and it is just jaw-droppingly beautiful. We stayed at Silverhorn Creek campground. There were no hookups, no water source, no dump station, and no cell service. But our solar panels and Dishy worked great with the open sky. And we had views of glaciers!!…
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First Two Weeks In Canada
After loving the beautiful mountain scenery of Glacier National Park last summer, we were excited to visit the Canadian Rockies this year. Months before I had somehow managed to get 8 weeks of reservations in various campgrounds in 4 Canadian National Parks. It’s a chaotic lottery system, with up to 50K people on the website trying to make reservations for the entire season at the same time, so we felt very lucky with what we got. Our luck ran out in Montana when we noticed a heavily worn trailer tire and had to limp across the border on our spare. Besides that problem, the actual border crossing was a breeze.…
