If you have a month you can too!

We packed up our F150 in North Carolina on July 1st and drove to Alaska to see all 8 Alaska National Parks! We took 18 days just to get there. More on that in a later blog post. I will also do a separate blog post with more detailed descriptions of each park with more suggestions. This blog is more about the big picture planning.

Five of the Alaska National Parks require a boat or plane to get to. Weather affects everything. We built in a lot of extra days in case our first attempt was a bust and we definitely needed them.

We were super excited for this trip and had been planning for about 9 months. If we knew how it would end we may have skipped the last two parks. Spoiler alert—it ended like this ⬇️ but we are still alive and moving after some major surgery. More on that in a bit!

Alaska National Park visit #1

Wrangall St. Elias National Park

To get to Wrangall St. Elias National Park you need to drive down a 60 mile dirt road. The conditions can vary depending on the time of year but when we arrived it was in great shape. Just about any car could do it. You can also fly in the small town of McCarthy.

We spent 3 days in Wrangall St. Elias National Park, had amazing weather and did three awesome adventures with http://steliasguides.com. So much more about those tours in my next blog post.

Alaska National Park visit #2

Denali National Park

After Wrangall St. Elias National Park we regrouped in Anchorage for 2 days and headed to Denali. You can drive a little ways into the park and take a bus to see more. We flew 90 miles in to http://campdenali.com for 3 days. This was an amazing adventure that I am so glad we go to experience.

Alaska National Park visit #3

Glacier Bay National Park

After leaving Denali we drove back to Anchorage and flew to Juneau. We spent a couple days there before flying in a small plane to Gustavus and getting a shuttle to Glacier Bay National Park. We spent 2 days there and hiked and took their famous day long boat ride to explore the park which is just stunning.

Alaska National Park visit #4

After flying back to Anchorage (seeing the theme here?) we drove 4 hours to the awesome small town of Homer. We loved exploring here. Homer is a jumping off spot for flights to both Katmai National Park and Lake Clark National Park. We made it to Katmai but weather kept us from Lake Clark. We used make up days in Anchorage to finically get to Lake Clark.

Alaska National Park visit #5

Kenai Fjords National Park

We left Homer and headed back to Anchorage. We detoured and flew to Kodiak for 3 days which will be a whole separate blog. It’s awesome.

The day after we returned from Kodiak we drove 2.5 hours to Kenai Fjords National Park and took their all day park boat tour which showed us so much of the park. We toured with http://kenaifjordstours.com and they were excellent.

Alaska National Park visit #6

Lake Clark National Park

We missed our trip to Lake Clark National Park from Homer because of fog. Thankfully I had built in days in Anchorage that allowed us to find http://lakeclarkair.com which flew out of Anchorage on day trips to Lake Clark. The flight was a treat itself because of all the glaciers we passed and the hiking in the park was excellent.

Alaska National Park visits

#7 & 8

Finally we drive from Anchorage the 6 hours to Fairbanks. We flew from Fairbanks to Bettles for the trip to the last two parks. Bettles is home to less than 20 but is one of the starting spots for your flights to the last two parks.

We left around noon and flew an hour to Gates of the Arctic National Park where we landed on Walker Lake. We got to hike for an hour or so and then headed another hour further to Kobuk Valley National Park where we landed on the Kobuk River. We had about 45 minutes to explore before we headed out for the two hour flight back to Bettles.

We were about 20 minutes short of Bettles when our plane ran out of gas and crashed. It was terrifying. My seat belt came loose and I was tossed around and was injured pretty badly.

We were truly in the middle of nowhere and after 4 hours we were rescued by an Air Force Blackhawk helicopter and some of their amazing parajumpers. They were amazing! I went up in one of those baskets and we flew 3 hours back to Fairbanks and their ER.

There was going to be more but it didn’t happen!

We had two weeks left in Alaska when we crashed so we missed some side activities at a couple of the parks we were going to go back to.

We flew home (scary) and I had cervical spine surgery which relieved the pain. When I hit the seat in front of me I shattered or in the words of my surgeon destroyed my disk and broke little pieces of the C6-C7 vertebrae which all had to be repaired.

Now I am recovering in my neck brace and anxious to be cleared for activity and travel again.

Don’t let our experience scare you. Alaska is amazing and we will be back to see more. But we may ease back in to small planes.

Now that we’ve finished all the National Parks we are pondering our next adventures. What should we tackle next?

Stay turned for detailed info on each parks planning!

We would love to hear from you about your Alaska adventure in the National Parks or elsewhere.

You can following all our adventures on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/seymoreoftheworldwithme?stkn=MW1ja2dpM2RlMWZoaQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Or you can follow us on Facebook at Seymore of the World with Me

Happy Travels,

Stephanie