A story about living in a camper in Alaska for about 9 months.
Introduction
First of all - how did I end up in Alaska?
It’s a long story, but it starts with a friend who I met during my motorcycle adventures in Florida. No lie, I met this guy at about 2am out by the coast of Florida. Man was out there doing wheelies up and down the A1A, and I showed up to Ormond Beach, which was my late night pit stop area, to view the stars. This was a common thing for me as I worked late at night, doing mathematics, playing CSGO, or listening to mixes on Soundcloud.
This was back when I was brand new to motorcycle riding, so I had no clue what I was doing. He noticed that my chain was loose, which I didn’t even know could happen. He offered to help me fix it in his garage the following day… or, that same day I suppose, and from there we became best friends.
At some point, he mentioned moving out of Florida, and him and his wife at the time bought a camper to make it happen. When I heard that they had decided on Alaska, of all places, I was surprised. Juneau is not accessible by car - only plane or boat - so they had to plan to put their camper onto a ferry from Scagway.
They invited me to come with them for the drive out there, and I seized the opportunity for adventure. I helped navigate because I was the only one whose phone plan had international coverage across Canada. After we got them all set up and explored a bit, I went back to Florida to finish my studies. A few years later, after I graduated, I ended up living with them while remote working.
I had visited before, but never stayed for more than a week. At some point they moved out of the camper into an apartment. Neither of them told me they had moved back into the camper a few months later, and I was not expecting to remote work from a camper. It was an adventure, as usual, and we made it work … I never told my boss, but I always wonder if the features of the camper behind me during video calls ever stuck out as a little odd. Oh well. I was 21 years old, and I wanted to explore Alaska.
Everyday Life
Life is a little different in Alaska. There is definitely a sense of ruggedness in the people, but they are inviting and relaxed. There really is the opportunity to live a frontiersman life out there. As I talked to people, I learned about the adventurous lifestyles they lived. People chartered aircraft to fly them into a remote cabin as a vacation, or even lived off-grid, only accessible by boat. But for most people, Costco trips were a regular event, and the center of town was only 15 minutes away.
In Alaska, the summers have over 20 hours of daylight. I’d wake up to a bright day around 4-5am to start work remotely (4hr time zone difference), work until noon or so, and it wouldn’t be dusk until about 11:30pm the same day. Basically, I lived two days in each day. I spent that second day that I got every day to do whatever - explore, fly RC, ride motorcycles, shoot at the range… it was a great experience. I lived out there for about 9 months or so.
The lakes were stunning! These sunny days were exceptional. It was absolutely beautiful when it was clear.
When I arrived around March, there was still snow on the ground, but it quickly melted as spring came along, and the days became longer and longer. I loved that fresh air and wide openness of the country. There is definitely something enchanting about Alaska - the mountains, the scale of the wilderness, the sheer beauty of it all in its humble glory. Flying above and seeing these places just hidden away in the mountains, in what seems like the middle of nowhere, is incredible.
My absolute favorite Alaska picture, taken from the road up to Eagle Crest.
Living in the camper was a unique experience. The whole thing was about 50 feet long and only had one bedroom, so we cut apart a bunk bed and fit it into the slide-out next to the kitchen. With two cats, three adults, and one dog, it was a full house. I would wake up, roll out of my bed into the kitchen, and then work from the sofa. Honestly, it was a pretty good set up.
The nights got chilly, but with a few blankets it was warm and cozy in my little slide bunk bed. I got a lot of exercise during the day - and the extra daylight tired me out - so I slept well at night. Outside of the occasional fruit smoothie, my diet sucked though - it was mostly Costco pizza, bagels, home made french toast, cereal, and popcorn chicken. At some point we got tired of using a counter-top dishwasher, and ripped apart the place to fit in a full-sized one. It worked, and it was glorious, but we still didn’t cook anything much better than before.
At one point we thought one of the cats had escaped, but he somehow had finagled his way underneath the bed and into the storage compartment down there, and we found him sitting there, clearly having given up on finding his way out. Cats are funny. The dog jumped on me one time during a video call with my team. She always had way too much energy, and that got us out to go for walks and enjoy the outdoors.
The Mendenhall Glacier from a distance.
Hiking & Locals
I hiked quite a bit. One adventure that I remember vividly is hiking up over the Mendenhall glacier. The trail takes you on the opposite side of the mountain before the glacier, so there was a moment at the end when I got to the top and fully felt the blast of cold air coming from off of the ice. I saw people hiking out on it too - but I didn’t have the gear to do that myself. I didn’t quite have proper hiking boots either and had to borrow a band-aid from another hiker to solve a blister situation on my way down. It was worth it, the view was amazing!
The weather seemed to flip-flop between either totally grey and drizzling or completely blue skies. Sometimes during the mornings and evenings it felt like the air was so misty that it might as well be raining. Along with hiking up smaller mountains, I hiked around different areas, sometimes just short walks to bring a chair and a book and sit next to a river. I read some chunk of a book by Carl Sagan, and took a lot of photography.
The thing to do in Alaska is to just get outdoors and enjoy it in the summer. I also spent a night tent camping! I struck up a conversation with a local at the campground because I wanted to try his binoculars, and he told me about how he lived “off-grid” and enjoyed the space from everything that it gave him. I overheard conversations of other locals that I wouldn’t hear anywhere else - people talking about the moose they have in their freezer, for example. I watched the locals play a baseball game too, that was fun to see. Although, my friend’s dog got off-leash and ran out into the field at one point, and we had to chase her down.
Hobbies
The beginning of going “up the road” on the motorcycle. Me with a big RC helicopter.
Motorcycling was fun, but, well, you’d run out of road pretty quick. Like I mentioned earlier, you can’t drive out of (or into) Juneau, the only transportation out is by boat or car because of the mountains to the east. The town is pretty small, and there’s one road that goes further north and there’s nothing much else out there - just wilderness, essentially. So the locals would literally refer to this area as “up the road”. I found it comical that you could say we “went camping up the road”, and everybody would know exactly what you meant.
Me in Douglass with my friend’s Yamaha. Right: a skier (bottom right) going across the frozen Mendenhall.
I fulfilled some of my R/C dreams while I was in Alaska. I built and flew a 700-sized helicopter for the first time, which was a big achievement for me as I had always dreamed of flying something that large. This is the SAB Thunder Goblin Sport above. It cost quite a bit to build it, but it was worth it for the sound and scale of the thing. It flew very well :)
Another R/C thing I was excited to build and get in the air out here was an FPV plane. I worked for days to solder the video gear and configure the plane, even set up pan and tilt on the camera so I could look down and around while flying. We designed and built up a whole encased ground station that I still own to this day - with all the bells and whistles. Like I mentioned in my drone business post, the stuff that I view as top-notch was probably considered antiquated at this point because I was an early bird in the FPV world.
Regardless, I had all the knowledge and more that I needed to set everything up and was eager to fly. Echo Cove, in the photo below, can be found all the way “up the road”, which is well outside of the airport’s airspace restrictions for drones. I flew here and fulfilled my FPV dreams.
God, I miss this setup. Although, the plane was a bit sluggish and I was stubborn in not using 4S instead of 3S
Echo Cove on the Fourth of July was the place to be - jetskis, ATVs, dirtbikes, fireworks, bacon, burgers, and all sorts of mayhem. I remember arriving and seeing the largest campsite setups I had ever seen in my life. The locals were using ATV trailers and bringing food and supplies out deep into the woods to spend the night, party, and eat. The fireworks over the water were beautiful.
The 4th before that I had spent in Boston, before COVID, and the world was much different.
End of an adventure
This whole Alaska adventure caught me at a weird time in life to be honest. I was stressed about a number of things in my life, including paying off my student loans - even though I was already halfway done. I didn’t want to lose the job, and COVID was shaking up the world. Looking back, I had no reason to worry, I was working hard and almost feel bad for myself that I couldn’t relax a bit more. I was anxious and didn’t enjoy living inside my own skin at times - insecurity, maybe. I had to really push myself to spend money on the hobbies I loved like the helicopter and FPV system… once I did though, I was glad.
All in all, it was a great experience. From remote working with a 4-hr time difference, the 20+ hours of daylight, hiking in the mountains, motorcycling, R/C flying, and just breathing in that fresh air, it was not only a great retreat from the chaos of the city, but a unique and enjoyable place to live and explore.
I flew out of Alaska later that same year before it hit the real darkness of the winter. Bye bye… maybe some day we will meet again.
Cheers,
Daniel
