In 225 miles of travel, there were 135 miles of beach riding, 65 miles of paddling, and just seven miles of actual trails. Photo by Mike Curiak
Bike. Pack. Raft.
On the Lost Coast of Alaska, a crew of five tests the missing link to a new kind of adventure
A few years ago, in what has to be one of the biggest buzzkill endings to any wilderness trip ever, I was taking a deeply satisfying, long-overdue piss alongside four friends off the side of a stark gray boat launch in Alaska’s Glacier Bay—all of us having just paddled for eight straight hours in tiny, overladen pack rafts on the final leg of a 200-mile bike-and-paddle down-coast journey—when a national park ranger rolled up and started writing us tickets for public urination.
This had not been on our list of potential hazards when we’d set out. We’d anticipated several grueling and treacherous encounters along the way—including with calving glaciers, powerful currents, and aggressive bears—but this one hurt the most. It meant for sure that the trip was over and we were back in the land of the Man.
Ten days earlier, our motley crew had set off from the fishing village of Yakutat with bare-bones fat bikes, packrafts,
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