John Thoreson survived some tricky moments on his 66-day solo kayak trip from Olympia, Wash. to Haines, but he wasn’t daunted.
The 33-year-old civil engineer shipped home his 16-foot plastic craft about a week ago and hopped on an adapted touring bike to pedal to Inuvik, N.W.T. By the time he makes it back home to Seattle in late September, he figures he will have pedaled 4,400 miles.
That will include Tok, Chicken, Dawson, Jasper, Banff and Montana’s Glacier National Park, as well as the 1,000-mile round-trip along the gravel Dempster Highway on his way to the Beaufort Sea.
Thoreson acknowledged that pedaling to Inuvik wouldn’t be the first choice for many. “That’s pretty far out there. But it’s kind of a little more exotic than riding to Prudhoe Bay.”
Thoreson has a slight build and a determined attitude. He went swimming for his kayak between Ketchikan and Prince Rupert when it blew offshore. In the mad scramble to keep from being stranded, he lost his eyeglasses.
Chilled to the bone after retrieving the boat, he dropped his contact lenses trying to get them on. He found one and was resigned to heading north with vision in only one eye when he noticed the other sitting on top of the boat while he was repacking it. “That had me a little nervous.”
Highlights of the 1,315-mile paddle included paddling amid humpbacks near Five Finger Lighthouse and making the entire, 56-mile Grenville Channel south of Prince Rupert in a single day. His previous longest kayak was 40 miles, he said.
One adjustment was loosening up gear around his waist, where chafing made it feel like someone was holding a blow torch to his side, he said. “A big part of something like this is making sure your gear fits, but you can only prepare so much. You just kind of learn as you go.”
A bicycle commuter back home, Thoreson expects to make between 80 and 110 miles a day on his 27-speed Surly Long Distance Trucker, a touring bike fitted with custom wheels and four saddlebags. “It looks funny but it’s a tank.”
He said he’s not trying to prove anything and was inspired by hiking the Pacific Coast trail from Mexico to Canada in four months in 2005. “It’s just an interesting way to see the world and meet some really cool people. When you’re going kind of slow you get to see the country and it’s gorgeous.”
On the kayak leg he met two people he later learned were childhood friends of his sister from Washington state. “I’m kind of on my sister’s reunion tour.”
He said he met a couple on the boat leg of his journey that was making his trip seem tame. They were kayaking the Inside Passage, before hiking to the Yukon River headwaters. After floating the length of the river, they were planning on dog-sledding from Alaska to Minnesota and kayaking through the Great Lakes to the Eastern seaboard, he said.
Their 11,000-mile trip can be followed at northamericanodyssey.com, he said.