Pedaling the Arctic Ocean to SoCal

Every once in a while, you have this idea, and there’s no getting rid of it. This was one of those ideas that encourages everyone around me to question my sanity, but like I’ve always said- I don’t believe in dreams; the first step is the idea, and the second step is tackling it.

Six months of traveling by bike from the Arctic Ocean at the top of Alaska, to Laguna Beach in Southern California… distilled down to less than 40 photos for your enjoyment.

Our first glimpse of the tundra after dropping below the clouds on the approach to the oil-field airstrip on the Alaskan north coast of the Arctic Ocean. To say this was intimidating would be the understatement of the century. It’s one thing to see pictures of wilderness like this in books and magazines (this was before there were a lot of pictures on the internet)- it’s another thing entirely to view an expanse of thousands upon thousands of un-inhabited wilderness miles stretch out beneath you covered in snow. When we landed temperatures were in the teens and they told us that the ice pack had just broken two days ago. It wasn’t until several days later as we pedaled up the north slope that we realized the bears the local workers were so concerned about were white and not brown… but despite the millions of animals dotting the landscape, we wouldn’t even see a brown bear until we dropped down the south side of the brooks range and pedaled through the Ice Cut.
A Musk Ox herd on the tundra… one of my life long goals was to see these animals in the wild.
And so we travelled across the tundra not really knowing what we were doing; but fully aware of the gravity of the situation. Just the two of us, a million birds, several hundred thousand caribou, and no more than a single person for hundreds of miles.