Prius from East Coast to Alaska and back: Lessons Learned

We drove from Fairfax, Virginia to Alaska via Chicago , Duluth, Winnipeg, Dawson Creek, Alaska-Canada Highway, and Fairbanks to Denali National Park. We returned via Anchorage, Seward, Tok, Chicken, Top Of The World Highway, Dawson City, Whitehorse, Cassiar Highway, Prince George, Hope, Seattle, Olympic National Park, Portland, Boise, Rock Springs, Rawlins, Kearney, Iowa City, and Toledo to Fairfax.
Total miles: 11,054
Total Fuel: 205.2 gallons
Average mpg (calculated): 53.87 (But mpg per leg varied from a low of 49 mpg when using E10 and fighting westerly winds when crossing the plains of Canada, to a high of 65 mpg indicated at an average speed of 65 mph using non-reformulated Eo with bodacious tailwinds from Rock Springs to Rawlins, Wyoming.)

Lessons learned:

1. The scenery, the wildlife, and the people are truly fantastic. For heaven's sake, go, but take the time to do it right: We spent 7 weeks on this trip and WE HAD TO CUT PARTS OF ALASKA, THE U.S., AND CANADA OUT OF OUR ITINERARY. Sigh.

2. Camp or pay the price!
We used the Prius Super RV attached tent plus headboard, window screens, etc. to camp about 1/2 the nights because motels INCREASED in price as we went North ($80 in Lower 48, $100 in lower Canada, $120 in Yukon, $135 in Alaska) but camping DECREASED in price as we traveled North ($25-30 in Lower 48, $18 in British Columbia, $12 in Yukon, $10 in Seward).

3. Gasoline varies tremendously in quality and price:
Alaska: E0 cost just over $4 per gallon
Yukon: E0 cost $5-6 Canadian
Canada south of Yukon: E10 cost $5-6 Canadian
Lower 48 USA: E0 and E10 cost $3-4
(We found our mileage noticeably better on non-RFG E0 fuel. The 500-600 mile cruising radius of Prius is a godsend to avoid extremely high prices in rural , isolated places.)

4. Take a full-sized spare: I didn't, and the right rear tire blew out on the Top Of The World Highway in the northern Yukon. I was lucky the 60psi donut held up to reach Dawson City and that the RV repair shop had a Prius-sized replacement. Don't trust to luck. (I also carried a tire plug kit and Slime kit for small punctures, but our blow out was a 2-inch gash in the tread shoulder.)

5. Prepare for extreme weather and extreme animals: We experienced hot, cold, wet, dry, mud, dust, and some large hail that put a star crack in our windshield near Winnipeg . On the road shoulders we saw black and grizzly bears, buffalo, moose, and had an unexpected head-on confrontation with a migrating caribou on the highway near Chicken. Recommend clothing layers, warm sleeping bags and foam pads, mosquito net headgear , and bear spray.

6. If you want to really see Denali, you must carry or pack your camping equipment into the National Park sans Prius. Be prepared to wait out days of rain and thousands of mosquitoes, but it is a truly magnificent mountain.

7. If you want to see the Kenai Fjords, take at least the 7-hour or 8-hour boat excursions as you will then see 2 out of the 3 major fjords that way. We saw humpback whales, a pod of orcas, puffins, dolphins, a raft of sea otters, and several impressive glaciers calving ice floes into the ocean.

Did I mention take a camera?
(Pictures to follow.)

 

Prius vs. bear:



Prius wins!

 

^^^The astute Gentle Reader may notice that the above post has different bears in the two pictures. Without loss of generality, we can say that we and our Prius survived all encounters with black bears (relatively easy to scare away) and brown bears or grizzly bears (a bear of a totally different color and temperament), and did not have to use the bear spray, which is just as well as it costs about the same as a full tank of gas!

 

Caribou/reindeer vs. Prius:







Prius wins!

 

Whale versus Prius: (what???)


Prius wins!

 

^^^ The more skeptical Gentle Reader may well wonder whether our Prius was really encountering a killer whale, and well might he or she wonder that! As the nautical Prius model (Prius H2O) is not yet offered by Toyota, we left ours in the Seward campground and took a small sightseeing ship to tour the Kenai Fjords National Park for a day.

 

Prius vs swallows:



Swallow parent wins!

 

^^^need to get computer with pics on it back, so will post those Sunday or Monday.
Stationary orca pods eat fish, but the traveling orca pods like the ones we saw are mostly meat eaters--these were pursuing dolphins in the fjord. Dolphins took off like a bat out of heck to escape them.
Seals were out sunning themselves on rocks, so yes pictures, but their numbers are declining and no one is sure why--might be orca predation.
Decent glacier shots also.
Raft of sea otters and a shoal(???) of jellyfish eating plankton.
Pics of sitting puffins came out but the flying puffin pics all blurry--they have to beat their wings like crazy just to get airborne. Did you know a puffin can eat up to 40% of its body weight, but if it does it CANNOT actually take off, just kind of skids across the surface of the waves. We saw this as some tried to get away from the boat after eating and it was hilarious. More pics will come when I get my computer back.

 

Pics as requested!







There was a pod of orcas, but I never got a decent pic of the whole pod surfacing at once, even when I tried the magic signs I learned at Sea World!
'I Have to go look for glacier pics, so that will be next post.

 

The day we left our campsite on the bay in Seward, Alaska, to take the boat trip into Kenai Fjords NP, it was also calm. I have 100s of pics, so I just selected a short series to show what it was like in front of one glacier ( I will post more in Wanderung 29 on our wanderungs.com site this fall). I was most amazed by the "sizzling" or hissing sound of all the ancient compressed air bubbles, which you can clearly see in the last pic below, the air bubbles being released as the ice floes melted. Magical moment, really.