Two If By Land (2025)

09/01/2025

In 2009, I first scrolled those endless yellow pages ruthlessly typeset edge to edge, a relic even then of the brutal frankness of a simpler internet. I had just purchased my first motorcycle, an R65LS, and I was ignorant of carburetors and combustion chambers, to say nothing of viscosity, compression ratios, butterfly valves, or needle jet diameters. I would read late into the night an impenetrable prose stacked with research, old disputes, official measurements, unofficial amendments, records of past bulletins, snark (‘You probably don’t have a lathe. I have a lathe.’), and strongly worded advice typeset in all caps, bold and red. Since that time, the author, unknown to me, has been present with me on all my journeys. I can hear him rambling in my head, though I’ve never heard his voice. He’s probably leaning back in a shop chair in a garage somewhere with a thousand rusty airhead frames hanging from the rafters, gently clinking. Snow is falling outside, the faintly sweet smell of motor oil rises from his permanently embalmed hands like incense from a thurible. He’s going on about something only he grasps the importance of, his voice must be a little high pitched, filling with enthusiasm. He isn’t talking to me. His gaze is far away. Perhaps he’s lecturing an audience of angels in the digital plane. I can’t follow him anymore, I’ve lost track. What was it I asked him anyway?

RIP Snowbum, Airhead guru for the ages

10/01/2024

We have a little piece of exciting news to share. We’re in print! As a life-long lover of all things paper and ink, this is truly exciting. Go pick yourself up a copy on Amazon.

We are incredibly grateful to and the fine folks at for putting this book together. It is clearly a labor of love and we feel truly honored to be featured alongside the legends in this book—adventurers whom we admire and who have been longtime inspirations to us. It was fun to relive briefly that life-altering journey south and to try to encapsulate it in a handful of photos. I hope that some who flip through these pages will feel inspired by the stories and photos and advice and take their own fateful leap into the unknown.

28/09/2023

Around our dining table at home, in the months leading up to our departure, we leaned over a paper map. I read the unlikely names of the distant towns with bemusement. I recited them in my head, as if familiarity would provide a safe passage. Livengood. Coldfoot. Wiseman. Deadhorse. In the names there seemed to be a story or a warning—a mythology written in geography. Some image must have formed in my head as the names crossed my lips; a vague approximation populated with steel barrels, log cabins, and grizzled men with long gray beards and dirty flannel shirts. A parody of frontier life perhaps. But what I could not conjure in that imagined landscape is the spirit of the place. The phantom that is so difficult to capture in an image or convey in a story which might, in a moment of quiet, gracefully appear in the moss caulking the logs of an old church, or in the shaky lines of a hand painted sign, ‘Wiseman was established in 1908 and has been a viable town ever since’, or in the particular mosaic of objects collected or discarded, rusting and repaired, that form a map of a particular life. Deliberately these places were settled and with great effort they persist. From the crucible of the Arctic, from the edge of the human world, they seem to sing a song that can easily be lost in the drumbeat of modern life, I am here, by God, in spite of everything, I am here.

27/09/2023

The most frequent traveler on this isolated road is the trucker. Seemingly everyone we met warned us about them—hurling along at ungodly speeds, kicking up rocks the size of softballs, breaking windows, forcing riders off the road into the deep gravel. I made an effort to wave to each of them, hoping to demonstrate the fragile humanity balanced on these two wheels, and show respect for the driver who, at considerable risk, hauls supplies through this terrain. I felt no shame in pulling over and letting them pass when I needed to and they often thanked me with a wave or a toot of the horn. This is their road and I am just passing through.

20/09/2023

Rare capture of the three of us by the very talented

19/09/2023

We arrived early that afternoon not by our free choice, but according to our reaction to the conditions of the road and the weather, reactions that at the time disappointed us, having been forced to compromise when the weather turned and accept as a campsite the modest gift of flat ground a short distance from the road. Our intention on this short diversion to Galbraith Lake was to discover among the river rocks, so similar in our eyes, signs of life—the fossilized evidence of the once ancient seabed of the north slope, and to hold in our hands some earth-embalmed seashell, coral, or crustacean. But purposes are often hidden from us, and—although we found a fragment of ancient coral, a treasure for certain—we brought with us a gift we did not know we carried. Arriving into the storyline of another, riding right into their camp, we must have seemed an unlikely sight—a man and a woman on a motorcycle. Perhaps the significance of these choices and the forces that move us are mysterious and can only be glimpsed upon reflection. But we accepted that perhaps this was the truer reason for our being there and on the floor of that ancient seabed, deep within the Arctic circle, we sat around a stove with a fossil in one hand and a fried taco in the other and the warmth of human kindness sustaining us.

14/09/2023

eadhorse. While that would have been an interesting experience, it simply wasn’t within our budget. A oil worker told us a room could cost as much as $400 a night. That’s not a major issue, I guess, when you are pumping millions of dollars worth of oil out of the ground everyday. There weren’t many options to camp in the tundra, and polar bears (the only bear that will hunt humans) we’re known to occasionally wander around. We aimed for Galbraith Lake where there was a primitive campground. It would have been a long ride in the best conditions, but shortly after the oil fields faded from the rear view mirror, we were slowed down by rain and strong winds. Rain was the last thing we wanted, as it can quickly transform the dirt road into inches of slick mud. For a time, we pressed on, but what began as a light drizzle was approaching a downpour, so when we saw some tracks leading away from the road we decided to call it quits for the night. We were still several hours from Galbraith Lake.

10/09/2023

Weather conditions continued to be favorable on our second day on the Dalton, though the air was hazy with smoke from southern wildfires and cast an ethereal pall across the landscape. We had around 200 miles to cover to reach Deadhorse. We crossed the Brooks Range at Atigun Pass, ascending and descending the 12 degree switchbacks with much more ease than the heavily loaded supply trucks. The Brooks gave me the feeling of being incredibly remote and perhaps due to this it possessed a unique beauty. It was the final significant landmark we had identified on a map. At the time it seemed unfathomably distant, just barely nearer than Narnia or Mars. Beyond it lay a sprawling expanse of wild tundra, home to musk ox, grey wolves, dall sheep, grizzly bears, moose, half a million caribou, and even the occasional polar bear. With the exception of the road construction areas, which were considerable and in which we felt the most endangered as we had little control over the speed or the terrain, crossing the 140 miles of tundra felt like a dream—a passageway between worlds. Absorbed in my senses, alone with my mind, listening to the thrum of the engine, feeling the vibration of the road wash over me hour after hour, we drew ever nearer to our long pursued destination.

09/09/2023

We refilled our tank at Coldfoot and pressed on. The truck stop is roughly halfway between the beginning and end of the highway. It is the only place to get gas or food until Deadhorse. Most people stop there for the night, but feeling energized by the Arctic light we decided to continue. The sun, suspended near the horizon, cast a golden spell across the landscape. I felt we had the whole world to ourselves—the construction crews had left and there were no trucks in sight. Before us, the face of Mt Sukakpak glowed in a magical light.

06/09/2023

It is hard to look realistically at something like the Dalton Highway. Perhaps because it seems unlikely to even exist, reaching as it does across an incredibly lonely swathe of Northern Alaska, penetrating into a nearly inaccessible wilderness to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I felt a swell of joy and pride at the prosaic sight of the green road sign marking the start. Quite unintentionally, over the last few weeks, this road had become my white whale. When I was recovering from my concussion in Yellowknife, uncertain about the future of our trip, and uncertain, frankly, of the future of my brain, it seemed that the whale had gotten away. I eventually recovered and we continued our trip, but unwilling to confess my mounting obsession with the Dalton and unable to focus on any new destination, we drifted southward in a doldrum. Diana would have been content to bypass the route, but she must have seen what I had been unable to recognize. We need to have a serious talk about the Dalton. I thought I had given it up, but she knew I hadn’t. And as she did in Bolivia, she propelled me to act by believing in me before I could believe in myself. A week or so later we found ourselves standing beneath that impassive highway sign, about to embark on the road to Prudhoe Bay as we had long imagined. But we could not have imagined the circuitous path that took us there, the strange poetry of events, or the incredible kindness of strangers. We could not know how susceptible my brain was to another impact or how damaged my helmet was from the fall. We could not add up to a graspable sum all that we had learned and experienced. So, as was our ritual, we found an unclaimed space and laid our sticker, like a prayer, upon the cold metal. Then, grinning foolishly in our helmets, we snapped a selfie and set off down the highway.

04/09/2023

We would have preferred to change our tire in Anchorage, but we didn’t have time to wait. It would take a week for a tire to arrive. So we pressed on another 360 miles to Fairbanks, trusting in the reassuring words of a mechanic—it should get you that far no problem—and in the fates in whose sovereign hands we had grown accustomed. The k***s of the tire still had plenty of rubber left, but between the protrusions cracks had begun to form. The structural integrity of the tire, on which so much weight rested and on which everything depended, was suspect. Like shamans we try to divine significance from esoteric signs—the hue of the puff of smoke from the exhaust in the morning, the color of the oil on the dipstick, the shade and texture of the spark plug ceramic, the vibrations, the ticks, the flex of the frame. From the sum of these numerous and imperfect signs, a message comes, settling like a feeling—it is good enough or it is not good enough for now. We have learned to ride on compromises and caveats. We have observed that these seemingly inconvenient and premature failures have led us towards something good. We try not to complain. Like water we move where the earth channels us. In Fairbanks, we mounted fresh rubber on the rear wheel—a chunkier, more aggressive offroad tire. The start of the Dalton Highway was at hand. And this rugged road built to haul supplies to the northern oil fields can be treacherous, even for the most fastidiously prepared.

01/09/2023

I felt the wilderness was so close. We didn’t have hiking boots and we hadn’t done any research. The Denali Park bus let us out at mile 43 above a gravel bar near where the Pretty Rocks Landslide made the road impassable. As we climbed down some stairs, a park ranger casually reminded us that it was safest to keep our distance from the edge brush so the bears could see us. And make sure you tell me if you see a bear when you come back! I smiled and nodded uneasily. We trekked along the edge of the slope, crossing and recrossing the stream that braided through the valley. Every few steps I peered into the brush for a large black or brown object. The expansive gravel riverbed was the closest thing to a trail we had seen. More than a few miles from the visitor center, there were no maintained trails, no signs, little evidence of civilization at all, just a dirt road and a few old school buses. We were encouraged to simply set out in whatever direction toward whatever destination for however long we wished and to return to the road to catch a returning bus before the last one departed. In the distance we saw the ridge line of the Polychrome mountains, so we set off to find a better view. Climbing up a hillside on the spongy loft of tundra, the brush rose up around us. It was denser than it appeared from below. This would be a good place to stumble upon a bear. I tried to talk loudly but I could think of nothing to say. Nonetheless I began to yell whatever sprang to my mind. I hoped there were no other hikers around to hear the gibberish I was yelling. We came to the top of the hill. It rolled gently downward again toward the inverted image of the distant mountains reflected in the glassy surface of a pond. I stopped my nonsensical yelling and felt a tingling and engulfing stillness. My silence felt profane, as if I was taunting the wilderness with my too passive presence. I almost felt as if I should make myself known, to warn the wilderness that I was there witnessing it in a state of such uninhibited repose. A moment later gentle ripples appeared across the glassy disc, obscuring the image of the mountain and blending it with the sky below.

Two If By Land

09/01/2025

10/01/2024

28/09/2023

27/09/2023

20/09/2023

19/09/2023

14/09/2023

10/09/2023

09/09/2023

06/09/2023

04/09/2023

01/09/2023

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