Cycling Alaska to Patagonia: Route Planning and Timing
We’ve decided the time is right to begin another long bike tour.
Everyone has their own idea of what qualifies as a “long” cycling trip. But a person’s notions about length are not necessarily static, and can change over time as they take more and more trips. Overnight and weekend outings turn into week-long vacations, which later expand into multi-month tours.
Eventually as the distances increase, the cycling trips evolve into journeys. For us, this transformation happens when our emphasis shifts away from the bike. The experience, the people around you, the landscape, the plants and animals you see, take center stage. It becomes less about the typical questions posed by people you meet, like: “How far do you ride in one day?” “How much weight do you carry?” “Where do you sleep?” And instead, it’s more about being present and enjoying the moment, whether that’s a huge headwind you have been riding into for hours, a pleasant sunset at the top of a mountain, or a fun conversation with the proprietor of a local country store.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest joys and benefits of cycling - it makes you focus on the present. Gone are the unpleasant thoughts of politicians with their foolish games and divisiveness. Gone is the next home repair that needs to be made. No longer do you agonize over the many fabricated worries that we create everyday. Instead, the emphasis shifts to seeing what the world has on offer all around you. Every day is an adventure, while at the same time life’s needs are reduced to their most basic form. Perhaps that is where some of us are the happiest. Few find out if this is true. But those who do, often return over and over to long cycling journeys.
That is part of what motivates us to start our longest journey to date, Alaska to Patagonia… the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America… the farthest north to the farthest south (by land and road), one side of the world to the other. It feels daunting no matter how you say it.
We don’t know precisely how long it will take. We don’t know exactly where we are going to go. The map below is a guess at this point, and deviations are to be expected. Typically, we will know more-or-less where we are going to be about a week in advance - a time frame we have found to be most reliable while out on the road.
Nonetheless, we will not necessarily be free to come and go “willy nilly,” as they say. To avoid snow in the Arctic, life-threatening hot temperatures in Baja, the unpleasantly wet rainy season in Ecuador, and a few other seasonal inconveniences, it is best to not be in certain places at certain times of the year. That is the focus of the rest of this post: What are the general outlines of the weather, routes and other constraints as you travel from the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America?
A Route to Fit Our Cycling Style
Alaska to Patagonia is one of the longest bicycle journeys in the world, crossing two continents. Of course, the length of the trip varies a lot depending on the route taken. The shortest, fastest path follows the Pan-American Highway, which is mostly paved and more-or-less a straight shot. At just 18,640 miles (30,000 km) the Pan-Am Highway can be covered by speed demons on bikes in approximately a year. On the other end of the spectrum, by choosing some interesting paths less taken, the route can easily be stretched to 30,000 miles (48,300 km). By comparison, one could cross the United States from east to west and reverse ten times, and still not travel that far.
Given all the options, we had to make some decisions about what type of journey we wanted for ourselves. We’ve never been inclined to rush a bicycle tour. Besides, there are so many amazing experiences to be had in the 14 countries along the way that it would be a shame to hurry through. Furthermore, our experience on the Western Wildlands Bikepacking Route in 2021 whetted our appetite for off-pavement bikepacking. So we ruled out a rushed ride down the Pan-American Highway pretty quickly.
It was important for us to aim for a good mix of quiet dirt roads and backcountry tracks in addition to some paved roads and highways. We finally settled on a tentative route (subject to change as we go, of course). It covers roughly 22,000 miles (35,400 km), which feels like a happy medium between the two extremes mentioned above.
Here’s our planned route from Deadhorse, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Patagonia. (Click on the image to open an interactive map of our route.)
Blowing Snow, Bracing Wind, Baking Heat, Caking Mud and Hurricanes
Besides choosing a route, the other big decisions have to do with timing. A north-to-south direction of travel adds a quite a few complications related to the weather. In addition to the usual change of seasons and altitudinal variations, we will be traversing arctic tundra, boreal forests, temperate rain forests, maritime coasts, scorching deserts, tropical jungles, and significant stretches above the tree line in the Andes. Many sections of the route have limited seasonal windows for sensible travel, which dictate the pace of the cycling, and sometimes even the route we will take.
Yet information about the most critical seasonal details is scattered around the internet, and it can be pretty confusing to try to get your head around it all. So we’ve put together a summary map (below) with the most salient seasonal information. And we’ll describe how we used this knowledge to guide our planning.
Map of Pedals and Puffins’ planned route for cycling from Alaska to Patagonia, with notes about seasonal limitations that are relevant to bicycle touring. Click on the image to expand it to full screen.
The Big Picture
At its most basic, the Alaska to Patagonia journey has two, unequivocal constraints: you must begin in the northern hemisphere summer in Alaska, and finish during the southern hemisphere summer in Patagonia. As a practical matter, because of weather conditions, any of the other seasons are rather inhospitable for long-distance bicycle touring when you get that far north or south.
Once we decided that we weren’t going to try to hurry across two continents in 10 months, we set our sights on the next most appropriate window for the duration of this trip: 21 months. In that amount of time, we will be able to have a June departure in Alaska, and complete our journey by March of the second year. Even with all of that time at our disposal, we will need to keep an eye on the calendar because there are so many wonderful places to visit along the way. If we fall too far behind, we would then have to slow way down - literally adding another year to our schedule in order to hit the desired weather windows.
When to Start
Our journey begins in Deadhorse, Alaska, the northernmost town in North America that is reachable by a dirt road. The town lies far above the Arctic Circle, adjacent to the Arctic Ocean, where it serves as a base for about 3,000 oil industry workers in the summer, and 25-50 hardy, year-round residents. If you want to avoid snow and very cold temperatures, the narrow cycling season for the Dalton Highway (a.k.a., the Haul Road) which connects Deadhorse to Fairbanks, Alaska, runs from June to August. However, if you want to have enough time to cycle all the way down through the Canadian Rockies, you pretty much have to depart in either June or July. August just doesn’t leave enough time to make it before the end of the short summer and snow fall. Furthermore, there’s a big difference in comfort between leaving in either the first or the second half of June. Before June 15, snow and sleet are much more likely. Also, in the first half of June, the average temperatures hover around freezing. But by mid-June, high temperatures are closer to 50 F (10 C) on the Arctic tundra. As a result, we’re aiming for a launch date later in June.
Reaching the British Columbia / Montana Border
We hope to cover a lot of ground in Alaska and Canada. Several choices we’ve made about our route will add extra time to the trip. For example, we want to spend some time in Denali and Jasper/Banff National Parks. We also will ride several unpaved and rough roads, including the Dalton Highway, Denali Highway, the Top of the World Highway, and the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. (Yes, there is some irony in calling rough dirt roads “highways”). But regardless of how much we may want to linger, we’ll need to reach the border between Canada and the Continental USA by early September. That will keep us ahead of the mountain snow season (which is in full swing by October). Even so, our camping options will dwindle in southern British Columbia, Montana, and Washington, because many campgrounds in this region close for the season after the first weekend in September (the Labor Day holiday in both Canada and the USA).
It’s worth noting that the early arrival of winter in the mountains is the main reason we are not planning to continue south through the Rocky Mountains after reaching Montana. Although we will pass through Banff, British Columbia, where the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR) begins and then winds it way though the Rocky Mountains, it will already be the beginning of September or later. And while it’s theoretically possible to start the GDMBR southbound in September, we would run the risk of encountering mountain snowstorms and closed mountain passes. So in the interest of making it to Baja, Mexico, during the best riding season for the desert, we’ll be heading westward over the Cascade Mountains in Washington and following the Pacific Coast southward to San Diego. This is the longest section of the route where we expect to prioritize speed over scenery and pavement over dirt roads and paths.
But the choice to head down the Pacific Coast adds another climatic wrinkle, because western Washington and Oregon are blanketed with temperate rainforests. As it turns out, the rainy season along this stretch of the coast kicks in by November, with the chance of rain increasing dramatically throughout October. So we’ll want to make it through this section and into California before Halloween.
Fire and Smoke
Unfortunately, there’s no way to avoid cycling through the North American forest fire season along this route. In fact, the fire season effectively coincides with the entire period of decent cycling weather in Alaska, Canada and the northwestern continental USA. There’s no use worrying about it - you just have to be willing to adapt. When we rode the Western Wildlands Bikepacking Route in 2021, we had to make a couple of significant detours as a result of road closures related to forest fires. As a precaution, we’ll be keeping an eye on any reports of forest fires along our planned route, and adjusting our path as needed.
The Deserts of Baja, Mexico
Keeping Covid in mind, if things are still looking good for international travel by the time we reach San Diego, the next leg of our journey will take us onto the Baja Divide in Mexico. This route covers 1,675 mi (2,700 km) of remote desert country, where the biggest concern is brutal heat. The recommended cycling season for the Baja Divide is in the winter, from November to March. We should be on this section from late November through the beginning of January, right in the sweet spot.
Mainland Mexico and Central America
Once we exit Baja, we plan to leave the coast and climb into the highlands of central Mexico. Here we may encounter freezing temperatures in January and February, although things should warm up by March. We hope to make it to Oaxaca, a magical city in south-central Mexico some time in late February. Ideally we will be heading into Guatemala by March. That will set us up for traversing most of Central America before the start of hurricane season in June. We hope to have a few weeks to linger at one of the well-regarded Spanish language schools in Guatemala.
As we depart Honduras to cycle through Nicaragua and Costa Rica, our route will bring us closer to the Pacific coastline, where there is less chance of being impacted by tropical downpours. We should be able to make it to Panama City some time in June, allowing us to make the leap to South America before the threat of hurricanes increases too much.
Minding the Gap
The border between Panama and Colombia presents the only section of the journey where we will have to travel south by means other than than our bikes. That’s because the road literally ends about 150 mi (250 km) south of Panama City - well before reaching the Colombian border. In this no-mans-land, known as the Darien Gap, there are no formal roads - just unmarked trails and meandering rivers that traverse treacherous swamps and jungle-shrouded mountains. Crossing the lawless Darien Gap is generally not recommended given the significant risk of encountering armed guerrillas who don’t appreciate guests, undocumented migrants in the company of unscrupulous human traffickers, drug runners, smugglers, and bandits who are eager to separate you from your gear and cash.
If all of the above is not discouraging enough, it is, in fact, illegal to cross the international border within the Darien Gap without special permission. This must be secured from multiple levels of government, where officials are very motivated to discourage crazy tourists from attempting the crossing. In return, locals may demand payment of steep, informal cash “fees.” And upon arriving in Colombia, you’re likely to face a tangle of bureaucracy that could easily bring any adventure to a screeching halt with a stiff fine, or deportation for trying to enter the country at an unofficial border crossing.
Not surprisingly, travelers generally take a boat around the Darien Gap on either the Atlantic or Pacific side of Panama, or hop on a plane. We haven’t decided yet how we will hurdle the gap.
Rain in the Andes
We will probably have to endure some rain in Colombia. June falls within the tail end of one of Colombia’s two rainy seasons. But there’s no getting around cycling in June in Colombia if we want to avoid tropical storms in Central America, and also if we want to make it to Ecuador and Peru before the rains begin to fall there. We are hoping to cycle the Trans Ecuador Mountain Bike Route and the Peru Great Divide, and all sources warn against tackling these dirt trails in the rainy season when they can become impassable. We should be able to cross Colombia in June-July, Ecuador in July-August, and Peru in August-October - with the goal of staying as dry as possible.
The Southern End of the World
Patagonia isn’t just the southern tip of South America. It’s actually a huge region, covering roughly 260,000 square miles. As a result, we’ll be cycling across it for a while. The key consideration in terms of timing is that Patagonia, much like northern Alaska, has a very limited bicycle touring season. With a bit of luck, we will cross Patagonia in January to March of 2024 and reach the southernmost city in the World, Ushuaia Argentina, before the snows begin to fall in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Best Laid Plans…
Of course, on a trip this long many things can throw a wrench into even the best laid plans. We may find that the allure of some of the places we visit entices us to spend more time there than we have allotted. Or, on a less positive note, we could run into any number of difficulties (mechanical, weather-related, medical, pandemic-related border delays, etc.) that could slow us down, requiring us to wait until the next set of weather windows. If we don’t fall too far behind schedule, we should be able to make up the needed time by using more paved roads for a while. We’ll just have to see how it goes, and roll with the challenges as they come.
