Alaska Blog 2

Alaska Blog 2- Due to limited internet and electricity access, these blogs have been written hastily with no editing. Please pardon all typos and grammatical errors.

My buddy’s car was the perfect vehicle for a trip like this. Part of the front fender was missing, one of the turn signals didn’t work, the radio had been busted out, the passenger side mirror along with the rearview were missing altogether. But the little stick-shift Nissan drove just fine and was such a cheap buy (under $500 when he’d purchased it a few months earlier) we didn’t have to worry about devaluing it. In any worse case scenario we could abandon the vehicle altogether and make camp until a vehicle picked us up as hitch-hikers. That, afterall, appeared to be the type of trip we were on – a 1,000 mile roundtrip drive across unpaved rural roads in the weeks just before an annual statewide hibernation.

When we left his cabin at the hostel I’d had so little idea as to his plans that I’d only brought the clothes on my back along wth som bare bones writing material. We’d stocked the car with a tent, two sleeping bags, and a gas stove, and we’d taken off due north. “North! To the future!” we’d screamed, repeated Alaska’s strange state motto. Indeed, as I was to find out, we were going north, all the way to the Arctic Circle, a meandering journey through gravel and dirt roads, around some of the nation’s tallest mountains, across a few frostbitten small towns, finally delvering us smack dab in the middle of nowhere – in the cold Alaskan bush of the Arctic Circle where we hoped to catch a good glimpse of the Northern Lights.