The 2025 Alaska Expedition

Betsy and I just returned from a 9 week trip to Alaska. Yep, over two months and lots of adventures. Betsy drove our van while I flew. Which means she did about 8,500 miles of driving during the trip and I did about 70 hours in the cockpit. I know. I feel a large amount of gratitude and guilt.

There were days she drove 5-6 hours on narrow gravel road while I flew for about and hour and half. With an autopilot. I mainly flew low looking for moose (I found 6).

However, she did have an adventure with some grizzly bears at a road turnout that I missed. Having both the van and the plane meant we always had a home-base and a bed ready, and in fact we spent many nights in the van parked next to the plane at an airstrip.

During the two months we had 15 different people that either came up to visit, traveled with us for awhile or we stopped to visit them while enroute. My entire family (grown kids with their spouses) went on a bear viewing safari. In fact it was more special having the family together in Alaska than seeing the grizzlies. We had two vans and one airplane traveling around south-central Alaska. We accomplished about a dozen adventures – flight seeing, packrafting, hiking, etc.  

It was an expedition.

I remember my first flying trip up to Alaska in 2016 and scouring the web for information on flying to Alaska. There just wasn’t enough. So I’m going to spend some time and a few posts on documenting the different routes up to Alaska and flying through Canada. 

Some of you will enjoy it but it may be a little boring for some of you. I promise I’ll get to the Alaska adventures.