Haines High School students Arik Miller, Leo Wald and Dalton Henry completed an 800-mile bike ride from Canada’s Arctic Coast to Haines in 15 days, returning to town on June 11.
They faced a flooded highway and were forced to fly a leg of the route but still managed to ride 70 to 100 miles a day. Before the trip, none of the boys had biked more than 60 miles at a time.
Wald said the trip came about spontaneously. “One day I was hanging out at home,” he said. “Arik (Miller) came over and he had this idea to bike from one coast to the other, from Tuktoyaktuk to Haines, and for some reason I thought it was a good idea.”
The three began training two weeks ahead of the trip but preparations didn’t go as planned. “We decided we hated (training), so we stopped,” Wald said. “We flew up there in not very good biking shape.” Wald said that they paid the price for not training – soreness for the entire trip.
With nothing but camping gear and three bikes, the boys on May 27 caught a flight to Tuktoyaktuk, an Arctic coastal village in the Northwest Territories, on the Beaufort Sea.
The first section of their journey was down the Dempster Highway. After biking 150 miles, the group found the highway closed due to flooding. A few people advised them to head back to Tuktoyaktuk and take a different route to Haines.
They decided to fly from Tuktoyaktuk to Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory, where they would continue their journey, but their flights kept getting canceled due to weather. Camped out by the airport, the boys were stranded in Tuktoyaktuk for three days awaiting a flight out.
Wald described their campsite as a swamp. “I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a swamp,” said Wald. “It was very wet, soggy ground.”
On June 4, the boys caught a flight to Dawson City and continued their ride to Haines. After 410 miles, they made it to Haines Junction. They rested there for three days before completing the final 150-mile stretch. The boys arrived in Haines on June 11, around 3 a.m.
In the end, the bike ride was 400 miles shorter than they initially planned due to the unexpected flooding on the Dempster Highway. The trip took 15 days, with eight devoted strictly to biking. The boys camped next to the road throughout the trip.
They said they plan to conquer another long bike ride someday, but for now they just want to rest.