To Find There But the Road Back Home Again

Out of the Arctic, part 1

One stretch of the endless hours of nothing on the dempster Highway.

I’m alive! Barely… I’ve slept 48 of the past 72 hours.

Expeditions are exhausting.

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For those of you who haven’t read the previous piece, I’ve been on the adventure of a lifetime.

To Find the Hand of Franklin

134 hours of travel… nearly 24 by ferry alone. 26 days, Nearly a month of road and adventure… Toronto to Portland to the Arctic Ocean, down to Anchorage, and then back to Whitehorse now.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

The Most glaciated mountains on earth; remote offgrid private kingdoms; the remnants of a one man war and the largest manhunt in human history before Bin Laden; a cultural renaissance occuring in the remotest parts of America; a north-western frontier town that exists as a permanent, more remote Burning Man type gathering point for hippies and adventurers; the migratory mating habits of the most gorgeous birds and people on earth; the most daring (or foolish) motorcycle adventurers in the world; nearly a dozen bears, moose, and wolves; mile wide riverbeds run dry, and Pingos!

We encountered frost heaving the entire road trip up… Bumps and distortions in the road caused by frost releasing. “How bad are these going to get?” We thought… When you get far enough North the frost heaving forms small mountains. Frost bumps never stop growing.

This has been the most extraordinary month of my life. The generosity, creativity, daring, intelligence, and sheer physiognomy of the people I’ve met has been unbelievable.

The historical, social, political, spiritual, and personal journey has been as wide as the mileage. Indivdual days and sections of this trip are articles in and of themselves.

I have 30+ articles To write about this trip… observations and bizzare realities of Ameircan and Canadian life that I’ve never seen anyone else really explore to the depth I’d like… I’d be going through little town and think “I could write a short article just on this”… Trends and curiosities, and challenges and triumphs, all deserving of their own pieces that I just have burning in me demanding to be written…

And yet I couldn’t til now cause there was hardly a single spot of Wifi the whole trip.

YA THAT’S RIGHT! My first article back isn’t about the extraordinary natural landscape, the history, journeying into the halls of Wotan in the hyperborean north, the mad trapper, John Franklin, nor the ethnology of the North American Northwest Frontier, it’s not even about the president being shot.

I’m going to bitch about wifi. AND YOU’RE GOING TO READ IT!!!

Dial Up Nomads: Back on the Grid

At several Airbnb’s in a row… no wifi. Entire segments of the country where my phone plan couldn’t even connect for basic calling let alone data, (look this up before you go to Alaska… My prepaid US sim card would not connect to a single tower), a 17 hr ferry ride everyone on board paid hundreds of dollars to take? No Wifi. (this was uniquely infuriating… the one block I had budgeted 17 hrs of work, and I couldn’t do one hour. KNOW THIS BEFORE YOU BOOK A BC FERRY OF ANY LENGTH)

When I heard the president had been shot (the real one, not the fake one Kamala just couped), I was reduced to watching CNN as if it were 2001.

And of course once you get to a motel after days of camping out in blackfly infested Forests of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory… You want to sleep. back to back 15 hour days of driving doesn’t lend itself to all nighter writing sessions.

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This is very obviously a recurring problem for travellers. As soon as one gets into the Canadian north one encounters signs on the rare gas+restaurant+hotel+town super-businesses advertising “WIFI! $5 for 30 minutes, $30 whole day” (See Bell 2, British Coumbia, population 8. Or Rancheria, Yukon, Population 12. Though ironically not Eagle Plains Yukon, pop 6…. Despite being the northernmost of these resort/gas towns… their wifi was free, probably because you HAD to buy gas from them (2.50 per liter) if you were to make it anywhere)

But of course you don’t want to stop the whole day and get work done… you want to do 2-3 hours of work then keep going because you’re travelling with friends and you have timings to meet and hard deadlines so that your friends can make it to Anchorage and fly home on the dates they’ve booked, and nothing about the infrastructure lends itself to just stealing a few hours of work here and there.

This is a part of the world where every dinky stop still has payphones because reception is that spotty…That’s right. You pull out your cellphone to look up the contact number so you can physically dial the number into the payphone.

Even cafes in larger towns are rarely set up for the student/micro-office type coffee and work experience college students and any digital workers are used to… Almost the entire west coast, right up to Whitehorse, Yukon has embraced the soft “hostile architecture” of NOT having wifi, or if they do offer Wifi, plating over any electrical outlets so that you are limited to the battery life of your device (which you’ve invariably already drained if you’ve been camping out).

This is understandable given the rampant drug abuse and drunkenness on the west-coast and in northern communities, shop owners don’t want drug reeking homeless or derelicts setting up camp in their shop for 4 hours and driving away paying customers… and nowhere was anywhere near as bad as San Francisco downtown last time I was there, where Starbucks and other coffee shops have taken to stripping out all seating entirely and turning massive flagship stores that once had seating for 50 into takeout only, but all of this adds up and you have to know going into these places that you can’t just find a student cafe and put in 5 hrs of laptop time.

Of course all this sounds like 21st century gen Z griping. My friends and I started mocking the few of us who could get data as “Insta-gooning” (if you don’t know the origin of word “gooning”, don’t look it up, just accept that it’s an obscene and pathetic internet behaviour) for the obscene offense of obsessively checking Twitter or the news or group-chats whenever the slightest bar of reception was available, even as the most gorgeous landscapes in the world were outside the car window. And there certainly IS something pathetic to quickly loading a page of Twitter when you crest a mountain so you’ll have a guaranteed 15-20 tweets of news to scroll as you descend into the valley…

And indeed I mocked my friends mercilessly for this.

But this was supposed to be a “Work-Trip” that would allow me to travel and write about what I saw on the trip… It was supposed to be a test, a proof of concept for blending the 21st century digital nomad lifestyle of work from anywhere online jobs, with the American motor-gypsy lifestyle living out of your vehicle, camping out, and seeing the country…

i really wanted to answer the question: Have we reached the era when the Cyberpunk 2020 Nomad is no longer fictional character class, but a viable way to live?

And the answer is: Sort of? … but it takes way more planning than you’d think.

Contrary to what countless nomad youtubers and travel influencers will tell you, the “Digital” and “Nomad” parts of the Digital Nomad lifestyle are in a shocking amount of tension and unless you plan it out very precisely you can burn a ton of money ( and with it the viability of the lifestyle long-term) trying to bridge that gap.

Obviously you can just rent a hotel room with “Free Wifi” (Neither Americans nor Canadians seem to grasp that “Included in the price” and “free” are not the same thing)… But the marginal cost of a hotel is higher per day than even the most expensive cities. The daily cost of even a cheap $100 per day hotel translated to monthly rent is comparable to the most expensive cities on earth. Sure those hotels would give you massive discounts if you actually wanted to rent a month or more... but if you’re going Nomad you have camping kit or a trailer that’s cheaper to use, and the entire point is to NOT be tied down to one spot for months at a time.

Unlimited Data plans that you could actually hotspot your laptop to would work… but heaven help you if you’re Canadian cause you’ll be paying an arm and a leg, and then still have roaming fees the second you enter the US and won’t be able to connect with half of cell towers anyway.

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I’m seriously considering getting Starlink for future trips.

This is not an endorsement, I’ve never used it… But at about $500 for the base hardware and then $170 per month, PAY AS YOU GO (you can just buy an individual month) for the “Roam” package, that is way less headache than any other option. Hell if it saves you 1-2 hotel stays a month that you can wild camp instead, that pays for the monthly plan.

The big limitation however is it takes a 3 prong AC power cable. Obviously if you have an RV, that’s not a problem… but if you’re going ultra light on a motorcycle or in a small vehicle that is a major limitation.

I have an Eliminator Powerbox that at least hypothetically SHOULD be able to power a laptop, charge a phone, and power a small appliance like a starlink… but having worked with it and repeated had my friends leave the power switch in the ON position such that it trickle drained and needed to be powered back up from zero over DAYS… this would almost certainly be a headache.

Of course you can always simply buy a bigger power pack that might even have solar strips. Some are large enough and expensive enough they cost as much as a small motorcycle in and of themself.

But like everything in the modern world we’re limited by battery life or the cost of gas if you just want to go full 20th century and just run a gas generator.

Ultimately it’s a lifestyle that’s just currently on the edge of viable for a small car and still more a dream than a reality for a motorcycle, unless you want to wimp out and stay in hotels (burning any cost savings on rent you might have hoped to achieve by living nomadic).

And the second you add other people who have jobs to get back to, or hard timings to meet, the prospect of actually getting work done as you leisurely travel becomes a pipe dream.

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I’ve been travelling in a little Toyota Rav4 (which I 100% will write a piece on just the logistics of making a small economy SUV go to the Arctic Ocean across the worst road in north America with 4 passengers and luggage), and I’ve been so envious of everyone else in their RVs, camper vans, and pickups with top mounted instant tents.

My Car after 3 days on the Dempster Highway and a second flat tire. Complete with emergency supplies, camping equipment, and luggage for 4 people. Yes the suspension is sitting ominously low, we were right on the edge of the manufacture weight limit (one of the factors contributing to the flat tires)

If you want to do anything in addition to driving and camping, having shelter pre-arranged and instantly usable is so bloody useful. Especially when the alternative is setting up tents or hammocks in the middle of bug season… Every time you get devoured by mosquitos and black flies, everytime you decide to just sleep uncomfortably in your car or get woken up by sunrise at 3 am (midnight sun has crazy effects on you), every little bit of comfort lost, effort expended, and sleep you miss is one more thing you aren’t intentionally doing a few hours later.

I thought I’d be going on lots of hiking adventures this trip… I haven’t been on one.

I’ve been doing almost no purposeful physical work and yet I can feel an entire layer of fat missing from my body and vastly more defined ribs and muscles because I’ve probably lost somewhere between 5 and 10 lbs from the sheer exhaustion of it all. To have merely a pickup truck with a roof-mounted tent that didn’t need to be set up would probably have saved me dozens of hours of sleep and effort which could have gone into more interesting adventuring.

(I also need to write on lessons learned from camping in so many different environments… there’s a lot)

This would have been a dream, and would have saved so much even after the additional gas. Also underappreciated: managing luggage becomes vastly harder once you aproach the space limit… We had to fully unload and reload every time we had a flat or just needed to access something from the bottom of the pile.

But Ultimately…

The final few hours outside Anchorage

Despite all my griping and additional costs, and missed work hours, and paid subscribers who cancelled from the delay… It was a success.

After braving over 10,000 kilometers of the most extreme enviroments in north America, from high plains, to high mountains, to high deserts, to swamplands, 3 days up the treacherous dempster highway to the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyatuk, and then a day and a half back down, and from there over the gravel top of a mountain range on the top of the world highway… We made it to Anchorage, Alaska. And my 3 passengers were able to get their flights home. And now I’m back in Canada, with reception, and the time to actually write it all down along my (much more leisurely) solo route back to Toronto.

I’m still just a little over half-way.

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Oh ya, and the world almost death spiralled into sprawling international civil wars while I was gone, like the Crisis of the 17th Century, because international peace rests on the survival of one 78 year old man the most powerful government in the world is probably actively trying to kill, and the only thing sparing us is their incompetence and cowardice.

I need to write about that as well.

Man, to think that I was feeling writers block and ennui when i left home less than a month ago.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak