Alaska Range Traverse, Richardson Highway to Parks Highway
After a long time Wilderness Classic organizer told Charlie Procknow that the Alaska Range Traverse (aka Black Rapids to McKinley Village) was his favorite route, Charlie prioritized it for a summer trip and I was lucky to have time to go in the summer of 2023. This is a spectacular route, and it's logical to visit for a week-long trip since so little can be reasonably visited with trips of shorter duration. To research the trip, we referred to helpful blog posts by Kellie Okonek and Andrew Skurka . To see a synthesis of their routes in map form, visit this Caltopo link . As far as we could tell, most of Skurka's narrative remains accurate, with the exception that retreat of the Hayes Glacier makes a glacial crossing of Hayes Creek highly inconvenient; instead, plan on either ferrying or fording the creek shortly downstream of its new terminus, where a short stretch of flat(ish) water makes crossing possible. We hiked and paddled the route in early August following what see