Anand Shivalkar is a photographer and adventurer.

Biking is meditative for me. I don’t do it for exercise. It’s a means for adventure. My plan was to start at Dead Horse and go along the Dalton Highway and beyond, all the way to Fairbanks. I just knew there was this remote highway that was nearly 1000 miles long. The road was made for one purpose: to transport oil. I had looked at the elevation graph, and it didn’t look that intimidating. There was a big hill in the middle, and then there were some big hills later, but for most of it, it didn't look like that much.

I was carrying a shit ton of weight. The challenge with Alaska was that there was nothing in between places. There was no shop, there was no gas station, there was no restaurant, there was no repair shop, none of that. So I had to prepare. I had contingency plans for my contingency plans. I was carrying all my food in a full-sized bear canister. I had extra tubes, tires, and brake pads. I even got an extra chain and spokes. There were bags in between for my camera equipment, and I only had two sets of clothes, so I was wearing the same sweaty clothes. I had a rain jacket and pants. If it rains, it rains a lot.

My flight was on June 12. There are no direct flights to Dead Horse, so I flew from Virginia to Seattle, then to Anchorage, and finally to Dead Horse, where I spent the night, if you can call it a night, because it was bright as day. I started riding on June 13. That first day was boring because it was paved roads. It was just tundra, as far as my eyes could see. There was some snow, but it was surprisingly warm, even hot, while riding. You have to be careful, because even though you hardly see regular people, trucks are always there. Sometimes they're going really fast. Some truck drivers are dicks. Even though they see you and they know what can happen, they still zoom by really fast. But some would slow down, and some were actually really nice. One guy gave me an apple.

There was no flat place for me to pitch a tent, but there was a rocky side road leading to a site where I could see some trucks. It looked like daytime, but it was almost 11 pm. I was done for the day. I just pitched a tent there. It was hard because it was a rocky surface. Luckily, I had a sleeping pad, so it was comfortable. I still don't know how I tied down all the anchor points for my tent. There were no clouds in the sky, but that just means that the sun was beating down directly on you. Because of the mosquitoes, I was keeping my tent closed, but because of the sun, the inside of my tent was like a sauna. I was sleeping naked almost every day inside my sleeping bag, because it was just so fucking hot. I had a mask. You cannot sleep there without a mask.

The second day, the paved road finally ended, and I hit my first hill. I was like, “Oh, this is nice.” And then the hills never ended. They were not terribly big hills, but I was really tired by the end of the day. I camped by this river. A lot of people passed by that day. I met this guy from Germany who was motorbiking in the opposite direction, going towards Dalton. I think he was driving all the way from North Carolina and once he was done, he was going to drive all the way through Canada to New York City, because that’s where he could ship his bike back to Germany. 

The disappointing thing about the next day was that I was actually making good speed. By 4 pm, I had made almost 40 miles, and I was hoping to do at least 20 more that day. Then the road broke. The roads there have permafrost in the ground. The heat was so much that the permafrost melted and the road collapsed. This was extremely unprecedented. The entire thing washed off. I ran into a Polish couple who were also biking. We camped under the pipeline that night. The pipeline gave some shade to my tent, but as the sun kept moving, the shade kept moving. I saw my first caribou in the distance there. I also saw an arctic fox. 

There was a really cold stream by the pipeline. The next day, in the morning, I took a bath because I was getting extremely gross. Around 10 am, they let a small number of people pass, so that’s what we did. By the end of that day, I got into the second region. After the tundra, there was the Brooks Mountain Range that I had to cross. Suddenly, everything went from flat to these tall mountains. It was kind of beautiful. I somehow got through all those hills, but it rewarded me in one of my best downhills. It was at least two miles long, and it was steep.

The fifth day, this nice patrol car came at 6:30 am. Oil workers, who were patrolling the pipeline, would come and warn us if there were any bears. Apparently, there was a bear sighting right across my hill, so this cool older guy came to warn me. I’m like, “Yeah, I'm about to leave.” He had a bag of energy bars. He offered them to me and was like, “Take however many you want.” So I took a bunch. Then I got going. Along the way, this guy gave me ice cream. Even though I’m not a fan of the flavor of chocolate, that was the best-tasting ice cream. 

The sixth day was the day that I gave up. I came to this big mountain and stopped there. It was really intimidating. That thing just went up and up and up and up. There was no end to it. I’d been thinking about it before. I was going really slow. I had goals for myself: I thought that first day, before the hills start, I would do 60 miles. But I was consistently doing 40. All of that difference was piling up. By the end of it, I was around 200 miles. I had 300 more to go, and I knew that it was gonna get a lot worse after that. I had already used up half of my vacation days. I was not gonna make it through it all at the rate that I was going. The other reason for my tiredness was that my gears were gunked up. If you ask me now, it feels like I should not have given up. But at the time, I was mentally done.

I wanted to sleep on it. That night, there was a hailstorm. It was really weird. The clouds passed me, and they hailed over the road behind me. I could hear it hitting the ground 200 feet away from me. I was really lucky. My first ride the next day was actually hitching from the bottom of that hill to Coldfoot, which was about 60 miles and had the first hotel you’ll find down after Dead Horse. The ride was in this van with two polar scientists. They were field operators, so they would go and set up scientific equipment on the North Pole and also on the South Pole. It was a fascinating ride. They collaborated with the military, so they got to travel on C-17s all the way to Antarctica. 

I put all my stuff in their car and we went to Coldfoot. I stayed there for a day. My legs were dead. I had four meals over that day and a half. They had buffet-style food, which was amazing. I just couldn't make it any further, but I am definitely going to try to do it again in the next couple of years, because I want to finish it. I just need to be a lot more prepared.

Enjoying Drifter? Subscribe to receive a new story every other week. Want to hang out with other drifters and see how the newsletter is made? Join our Slack. Have a story to tell? Drop us an email.

Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu

Open Road Editor — Nico Lethbridge

Deputy Rails Editor — Connor Noble