
This is expected to last several weeks, until the road is repaired. Due to a washout on the Alaska Highway in northern BC near the BC/Yukon border, the Alaska Highway is currently open to single-lane alternating traffic with a pilot car at Contact Creek, at km 900 for southbound traffic leaving Watson Lake and km 897 for northbound traffic leaving Fort Nelson. Whether you choose the Inside Passage Route, Gold Rush Route, or Rockies Route, you are in for an adventure of a lifetime on your drive North to Alaska.ĪLASKA HIGHWAY UPDATE, JULY 7, 2022: The Alaska Highway is open. Take your time on one of the three main routes and savor the journey. To top it off, your fellow travelers – the people you meet in the campgrounds, roadhouses, lodges, and restaurants – will become your adventure cohort, sharing stories and experiences along the way. You’ll find colorful towns and villages both large and small populated by warm, welcoming locals who love to share their stories and cultures, and discover the arts, customs, and history of First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Alaska Native peoples. It’s not just the scenery and wildlife that makes this trip so special. In Western Canada and Alaska, vast landscapes of mountains, dense forests, braided rivers, glaciers, tundra, and turquoise lakes are home to abundant wildlife including moose, bears, wolves, and bald eagles. Nothing satisfies the desire for adventure like hitting the open road, stopping whenever you want to experience new places and take in the views. Plus, you're getting to stay out in the wilderness overnight.Are you ready to embark on the Ultimate Road Trip? Driving to Alaska through Canada offers unparalleled scenery, national parks to explore, activities for every level of adventurer, and opportunities to learn about Canada and Alaska’s Indigenous cultures. You can watch them more spontaneously, and have quiet times when all of the day bear watchers are gone. You could also consider staying in a bear-viewing lodge. You'll fly over glassy backcountry lakes, cragged mountain peaks, massive ice fields, pebble beaches, golden tundra, and a wealth of rugged wilderness.

And usually, getting to a bear-viewing spot is an experience in itself. Many bears have become so accustomed to human presence they tend to ignore visitors and carry on with their normal routines. To see throngs of bears up close - belly - flopping into rivers, jaw-sparring for the best fishing grounds, or just napping in the sun - air - taxi operators can fly you to places with excellent viewing odds.Ī 5- to 10-hour bear-viewing tour offers a unique insight into the creatures' culture - in fact, you may end up witnessing behaviors that even bear-viewing experts have never seen.

One option is to visit Denali National Park, where your chances of seeing them, at least from a distance, improve. Unlike moose, you probably won't casually encounter bears on the road - you really have to go searching. More than 50,000 black bears and 35,000 brown bears range the state's untamed wilderness, lumbering through berry-covered hillsides and slapping at salmon-choked rivers. Skilled hunters and wild roamers, these creatures command our admiration, even as their sheer size and strength also evoke and stir our primal fear. A fly-in trip is not cheap, but if seeing bears in Alaska is a must on your agenda, then one of these tours should be as well. And instead of just eating berries, bears on these trips will likely be fishing or splashing in the water. Go with one of our picks and you'll get a virtually guaranteed viewing of anywhere between 4 and 20 bears at once, much closer up than you would in Denali, and usually for hours at a time. But going bear viewing at Brooks River Falls, Wolverine Creek or Katmai National Park is an entirely different experience. You may see bears in Denali National Park or elsewhere. And seeing a Bear, if even for a fleeting moment, is a rare and magical experience.

Strong, unbridled, and nomadic, bears are perhaps the ultimate symbol of the Alaskan wild.
