Season 1 Episode 2 of the DPV Podcast we recount our trip to Alaska in the 84 Bronco built on Off the Ranch!
Josh: Welcome to the DPV podcast.
Alex: Episode 2!
Josh: We’ve got an exciting episode for you today. Going to talk about one of the most epic adventures we’ve ever been on
Alex: Probably, it’s right up there. It’s one or two. It’s our Alaska trip. We’re going to be talking about a little bit about how that came to be and how we just kind of lucked into this whole trip. But it was a four-day blitz of driving and flying home. Yeah, it was a lot, but we got some great stories about that.
Josh: So, I already know the answer to this, but…
What did you get done in the last month, big guy?
Alex: Not much. Work sucked. I worked 20 straight days, 20 straight 12s at least and did not get much done in the last three weeks. But I did get some parts ordered, so coming up we’re going to have a video about…
I have some air cleaner interference with my distributor, the HEI I put on that 360.
And I bought a gauge set so I can kind of watch the life of the engine and I’m not just running on dummy gauges.
Josh: Sweet
Alex: Yeah, so hopefully we’ll get those installed here in the next week or so.
Josh: I had a great month.
Alex: Yeah, you did have a great month.
Josh: We had a wheeling party, and that’s just been like one of my childhood dreams to have my own off-road playground on my property. And it has finally happened! We built some obstacles, had some friends over, had a couple Jeep TJs. And the Chief did awesome.
Josh: I did break some stuff. And so my shop time this month was getting this thing put back together. Got some Barnes4WD leaf spring brackets and boomerang shackles. Got the front suspension all dialed. Still want to get the rear suspension kind of dialed. I do have a bent rear leaf spring, so in the next month going to be working on that.
Josh: But my next month is pretty busy. I got two big family vacations, and I picked up a dang remodel! I don’t know why I did that, but whatever. It happens. Sometimes you say yes to work.
Alex: All right, so you want to do your fantasy bill of the week?
Josh: Yeah, what do you got for me?
Alex: Well, I originally had this pretty sweet, what was it, a 50, what did I say it was?
Josh: You said it was a 57 Chevy pickup.
Alex: It was a 57 Chevy 3100 pickup that was 100 different colors, but it was complete and solid. But then that listing expired, so I can’t show you the pictures and everything about it.
Alex: So my three-minute find for you, we had a budget of $1,500 with another $1,500 to throw in parts and stuff. Josh is going to get a lot more to work with because in a blitz I found this car for $400. So you’re going to have a lot of money to work with.
Alex: You don’t have an engine and transmission, so you got to come up with one of those. But for $400, you are going to get a 1967 Ford Thunderbird, two-door. It is all one color, decent paint, and I can’t see rust on it. If I did not work this week, I would definitely be making a trip to Everett because it’s got a clean title too!
Josh: Oh my gosh, yeah. These pictures, it looks super straight.
Alex: Dude.
Josh: It’s like a dark forest green. Wow, look at that tail light!
Alex: Dude, I believe on the 67, I think that whole ring lights up with the brake lights coming on.
Josh: Wow, that is cool! So I need engine and transmission. Well, got to stick with the reliability here and put a small block Chevy in it. I mean, I would say LS, but I’ve looked into LS swaps. They’re not as cheap.
Alex: No, I know you can get a junkyard LS for $400 and then you need $1,200 worth of stuff to go onto it.
Josh: Where I could get a 350, 350 for pretty cheap.
Alex: Yeah, and three wires. That’s good to go.
Josh: And then slam it! Definitely slam it. I don’t care if it’s cutting the coils.
Alex: Yeah, I think this thing would look cool just dragging around.
Josh: Yeah, that would be sweet. And then, man,
Alex: It is really clean! It’s got the vinyl top, but the vinyl top is probably soft.
Josh: Probably. Wow, the interior even!
Alex: And it is a bucket seat console car!
Josh: Oh my gosh…
Alex: I know! It’s awesome.
Josh: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe I could put a little more money in the engine and actually keep it a Ford. I mean, it’d be cool to put a 460 in it and you can pick those up for not too much money.
Alex: No, or I mean, I got a 302 laying on the shop floor at home.
Josh: Yeah, I could steal from you.
Alex: With a C4 behind it that would probably look really good in that car.
Josh: And I’d probably do the two inch dual exhaust if I was doing a small block. That nice crackly sound. Yeah, sweet. Good find.
Alex: They are out there. Yes, you got to hunt a little bit longer, but I mean, I did find this in four minutes. It helps to find a project car if you’re not super narrowed down to like, I want to build a hot rod or I want to build a muscle car. It seems easier than I want to build a 57 Chevy.
Josh: Right. Yeah.
Alex: If you keep your options open and don’t and you don’t see a lot of 67 Thunderbirds. I don’t see these a whole lot. I see the earlier ones like the 50s, the real roundy.
Josh: I like that body style.
Alex: I like this body style. Bucket seat console car.
Josh: Yeah.
Alex: Dude, I set you up!
Josh: I can’t believe how clean that interior look. Yeah, that’s crazy.
Alex: It looks good!
Josh: Hammer it down with some armor all.
Alex: Yeah. I bet some I bet some patina wash on this.
Josh: Yeah, put some shine juice on it.
Alex: shine juice on this thing, I bet it comes right back to life. What do I got What am I working with? Is it? I don’t feel like it’s nearly, why are you hiding it from me?
Josh: Because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
Alex: Oh no.
Josh: Okay. So you got a little less money for parts, but I think you can still do something with it.
Alex: Oh, I’m building a mail jeep. Is this right hand drive?
Josh: It is.
Alex: Oh, this is awesome.
Josh: It says it needs a motor, but it has a motor. It just says that..
Alex: Oh, get it running.
Josh: It’s junk.
Alex: Oh, what motors did these have? I know nothing about.
Josh: It’s got some sort of four cylinder that the owner says is a garbage motor.
Alex: Okay. DJ 5G mail jeep. Are these four wheel drive?
Josh: They are not.
ALex: Okay, good. Ooh. So a guy says a 4.3 will fit in between the frame rails because that’s what he was going to put in there. I think that’s not a horrible idea.
Josh: No
Alex: And I think this thing would actually look really cool slammed to the ground.
Josh: I think so too.
Alex: So one of my like dream cars that I will never be able to afford is a Volkswagen Fridolin, which was a Swiss and French mail vehicle that had real close to the same. I mean, it had a sliding door like the Fridolin does, and the overall shape is the same. I think when someone builds a mail vehicle, they just give a crayon to a third grader and say, draw a car.
Alex: And that’s basically what they make when they make a mail vehicle, including the current one of those, the GMVs or whatever the current mail vehicles are. Yeah, dude, I think this thing would look good on its lowered.
Josh: Yeah, I would do like kidney bean mags.
Alex: Ooh, yeah!
Josh: Like deep dish
Alex: Yeah, deep mags, like a nine inch in the rear. I think you make this a little quick.
Josh: Oh yeah
Alex: Make it smoke the tires, Yeah, this is not bad. This is 1300 bucks. I don’t get, she’s not going to be pretty then when I’m done with it because you left me no money for the pretty department. But dude, right hand drive, tire screecher, two wheel drive Jeep. I’m down. Yeah, this is sweet. This is actually a good one. We’ll have some pictures up, you’ll be able to see them too.
Josh: All right! Let’s get to the good stuff!
Alex: Let’s get to the good stuff! So how this how this Alaska trip come to be?
Josh: All right.
Alex: So how did we how did the vehicle come to be here at the shop?
Josh: So I don’t know if you ever saw this gun channel. It’s not that big.
Alex: It’s like Demolition Ranch. There’s this dude named Matt, he runs it. He’s got like three or four followers, you might be one of them
Josh: three or four, maybe 11 million. I don’t know. But on his other channel, Off the Ranch, which is also not that big, it’s only like four million. He built this Ford Bronco.
Alex: 89?
Josh: 84, on that channel, and it’s pretty dang sweet. It’s got a crazy backstory. It was a good friend of his in high school, and that friend ended up passing away overseas in a military operation. And his friend’s family contacted him and said, “Hey, Matt, do you want this Bronco? It’s just going to rot in our field.” And he’s like, “yeah, I’ll take it.” And he built it on his channel over a few years.
Alex: And it’s a pretty sweet Bronco.
Josh: One tons. It’s got a… what was it? Four…
Alex: I think its got a stroker 427.
Josh: Yeah, stroker 427 about 500 horsepower,
Alex: monster transmission,
Josh: Atlas T-case.
Alex: It’s built
Josh: on 37s. And then the body’s all patina.
Alex: Yeah, it’s sweet what you can build when you got money.
Josh: Yeah, It was a rad, rad rig.
Alex: It was, it was sweet. It handled very well.
Josh: And so then he decided when he’s all done with this thing to give it back to his friend’s brother, his friend’s younger brother, who lives in Alaska.
Alex: So what Forrest was going to do with the vehicle, that’s the Broncos owner, he was going to drive it from Texas to Alaska. And part of the way back, he ran into some transmission issues, overheated the transmission due to some cooling issues or something, and he was looking for a place to work on it, and Josh reached out to him.
Alex: It was just kind of crazy on Instagram, like, hey, I got a shop space and we can help you turn wrenches. And he took us up on the offer. And so he dropped the Jeep or dropped the Bronco off and got a transmission coming, Monster warranteed their transmission. We helped him throw it in.
Alex: But by the time we got everything done and we redid some cooler lines, we did we fixed a couple of little things that while I was here, just because, you know, a shakedown of a couple of thousand miles and he was out of time.
Alex: And he was like, do you think we could just leave the Bronco there for a while until I can get back to it? And with Josh and I’s work schedules, they kind of lined up and I was like, what if we just drop the Bronco off for you, if you would take care of gas? He’s like, yeah, I’ll pay for your gas and airfare if you drive the Bronco up here for me. So that kind of started the ball in motion and our trip to Alaska.
Josh: Yeah. And so I did some research on this Alaska trip. Like, you know, I really wanted to drive the Alcan and like what we should look out for, what we should plan for. And most the articles I read said you need like, I don’t know, seven days.
Alex: Yeah. And that’s to, you know, take in the scenery and and see all that you can.
Josh: Yeah. Well, we had three days.
Alex: Yeah. Well, three days plus flying back on the flight back on the fourth day. Think about this Alaska trip like growing up, like for vacations, we always did road trips, whether it be like through Yellowstone or through the Redwoods. We always did these big road trips growing up. Dad was a truck driver before, and so he never shied away from a 30 hour drive and he would just get in and we would just go.
Alex: And that drive to Alaska has always been like on my bucket list of like, I think this would be a sweet family vacation. So much so that after doing this one, I am we’re doing another one this summer driving to Alaska with the family. We’re going to take it a little slower this time. But yeah, with three days to do the trip, it was the mileage was…
Josh: It was twenty five hundred and forty nine miles, I believe, in sixty two hours.
Alex: Yeah, that is, and that is total hours, not driving hours. That includes all of our stops, breakdowns, run ins with the law, different, different things that took up our time.
Josh: Yeah. So Alex met me after coming off a night shift.
Alex: Yeah, I worked a 12 hour night shift at the mill and then I live two hours south of here so my my trip was actually like 20, I had an extra hundred miles on mine on both ends. So I got off work at four in the morning, drove up here, met Josh.
Josh: So Alex slept like to Sandpoint, which is a couple of hours away and that was kind of our last chance to get some cheap gas before we crossed the border.
And I was trying to save some food money on the trip, so I made like five or six breakfast burritos and wrapped them in tinfoil. Well, I was trying to do the whole manifold burrito thing
Alex: That didn’t work out at all.
Josh: It didn’t work out at all. I had after two hours of driving
Alex: they were still stone cold.
Josh: It was still cold. But you know, it is what it is.
Alex: Good thing that most of those places have microwaves, most of those gas stations.
Josh: Yeah.
Alex: But once we got up to the border, we kind of ran into our first not issue, but just like there was a couple of things going against us. One, the vehicle was not in either one of our names to it was licensed in Texas. And it just it it’s kind of an unbelievable story. Like the fact that we’re just like helping about like, oh, yeah, this guy we just met is letting us drive his Bronco all the way to Alaska for him, and it has Texas plates. But in Alaska, it was
Josh: Well, and it wasn’t registered to Forrest yet. Like Forrest had not done the paperwork. So it’s still registered to Matt Carriker.
Alex: Yeah.
Josh: Who’s not us and not Forrest. And we’re taking this Bronco across international lines.
Alex: Yeah. And the other thing that was we had to really think about was they could let us into Canada, but we could get all the way to the other side and be like, no, you can’t get back into America. And so we didn’t really think about that part until we got like all the way there and we’re like, oh, yeah.
Alex: So that guy gave us I mean, it was pretty
Josh: it was pretty smooth,
Alex: pretty smooth to get across. But he kind of thought that what we were doing is was pretty cool. And we kind of leaned into the them being members of the armed forces and we’re helping out a buddy who was in the service.
Josh: Yeah, I’m not going to lie, I was kind of hoping that I was going to be able to call Matt because I am a big fan of the channel. And yeah, I was like back home even when this whole thing was kind of coming into fruition, I would like tell my wife like, “Hey, babe, guess what I’m doing? Texting Matt Carriker.”
Alex: Fanboy
Josh: fanboy for sure. But it’s all good. We really appreciate all the work that Matt did to help us get all the paperwork we needed and whatnot so it went super smooth. But shortly after the border, the steering column decided to come unattached from the dash.
Alex: Yeah, they kind of turned into like airplane controls with no like tilt. Yeah, tilt and trim.
Josh: But we found all of the nuts on the floorboard.
Alex: So we got her back together.
Josh: There were quite a few bolts that were loose on this Bronco.
Alex: We did find a lot of stuff when we were working on putting on the transmission cooler and put stuff back together. It seemed like when you build a rig, you know, you put together, take it apart, put together, you know, a couple of times. And sometimes on that last put together, you don’t get everything all the way tight because you’re like, oh, I’m gonna take this apart again. And then you don’t. It happens to all of us.
Josh: Before we left, I was trying to diagnose this clicking noise. We thought the transfer case was going out. It turns out that there was only one bolt still holding the engine in. All the other motor mount bolts had fallen out.
Alex: Oh, yeah!
Josh: And the driveline was hitting the frame or something.
Alex: Would flex and yeah, it would pop the driveline up against the crossmember.
Josh: Yeah, and so that was a clicking noise. Got that taken care of. After fixing the steering column, we made our way through Radium Hot Springs, which is a really cool canyon that just like very steep rock cliffs and it’s kind of a windy road. And then after that was Lake Louise.
Alex: And this is some like most beautiful country in the in North America, I think that you can drive through. It’s just a lot of untouched earth. And it’s just it is so beautiful to be out there when it’s there’s just a little bit of snow coverage down. And it was at this point, it was everything was everything was beautiful.
Josh: Yeah. Lake Louise, If you’re ever in that area, you got to stop that water is just like the coolest greenish blue.
Alex: There are so many National Geographic pictures of Lake of this lake because of that. Like it is it’s beautiful.
Josh: Yeah. And at this point in the trip, snow started coming down.
Alex: Yeah, it was. Yeah, we were starting to use that four wheel drive a little bit.
Josh: Yeah. And it was smooth sailing at that point in the trip, like really no issues. We did have to grab some gas at this tiny little gas station at the glacier fields, ice fields. And while we’re there…
Alex: we ran into another dude that was like, hey, is that Matt’s Bronco? And we’re like, one, we are three, you’re 3000 miles away from Texas. Like it wasn’t like some dude that knew that, but he had followed Matt’s build and it like, that was just kind of, that was like kind of a surreal moment for me. Like that’s awesome that people knew this rig.
Josh: Yeah, it was really cool. We gave him some stickers and chat with him for a little bit, bought some like $8 gas.
Alex: And I believe we also had to add at that point, then we also had to put some octane booster into. It was $8 gas and octane booster because that motor wanted to ping if you didn’t have enough octane in her.
Josh: From there, we wound way up in the mountains into Jasper and had some delicious burgers, still smooth sailing. And that’s where we saw our first wildlife. There was an entire herd of elk right in the middle of the town.
Alex: It was awesome
Josh: I think at this point, you got behind the wheel, maybe.
Alex: I think I did a little driving.
Josh: And it was getting dark and we hit this windy narrow road that had the fastest speed limit
Alex: of any road. And it was probably the worst road that we were on. And Josh in the passenger seat was a little scared girl about driving too fast. But that Bronco handled it perfectly. I never once felt like we were out of control in that rig.
Josh: Yeah.
Alex: But yeah, we made pretty good time until nightfall.
Josh: During this whole time, we pretty much didn’t have snow on the road. It was snowing in Lake Louise, but not really sticking. Then we got to Dawson Creek, which is the start of the Alcan, and the snow started coming down
Alex: HARD!
Josh: And at this point, I was trying to go take a nap because I’d been driving most of the trip at this point, except for that little windy road section. And I had a very hard time going to sleep.
Alex: Yeah, it was a little slippery.
Josh: So this guy, every time I’d wake up, from the passenger seat, it feels like that Bronco just wants to go in the ditch or in oncoming traffic.
Alex: it wandered a lot.
Josh: It wandered so much!
Alex: Foreshadowing!
Josh: And there’s snow all over the road. We’re getting blasted by…
Alex: Oncoming truckers. The truckers don’t care. They must be set to like 70 or something because they were flying.
Josh: Yeah, we’re driving like 65, and these trucks-
Alex: In a modified off-road vehicle. And here are these truckers with…Yeah, just flying by.
Josh: And so I’m just freaking out. I’m like every 15 minutes just like, oh my God, dude, you’re going to kill us.
Alex: It was fine. Yeah, it was great.
Josh: But we had probably what, an hour stop, somebody had wrecked.
Alex: Yeah, we kind of got a little bit of a rest. It was kind of weird because we came up over this hill and there was just a long line of trucks. So we just kind of got in line and we waited like half hour and we went up, talked to the next truck driver and see what was going on. Because we think we were the only personal rig in the whole lineup. I think everybody else was a trucker, so they all had CBs.
They all knew what was going on. So we caught up to them and we talked to them and he’s like, oh yeah, big wreck.
No timeline.
No, you just wait.
All right.
So we just waited. And eventually everybody started going. We took off!
Josh: I think one of the things we realized on this trip because of the timing, this was what? Late October?
Alex: Late October.
Josh: This is not tourist season.
Alex: Tourist season ends like first weekend in October, like last weekend in September is really when the, I mean, we didn’t miss it by much, but there were, there were whole towns that we came up to, It was the craziest thing. We came up to this town, you know, you come up to the town and it has like the population, all that stuff. And it was one of these small towns and over the sign, it just said closed. Like there was a town that was closed. I don’t know how you close a whole town, but like, and when we drove by, it was, I mean, it was a small 20, 30 house community spot, but all of the houses, the doors were boarded up like, no, they just leave in the winter and leave their house. And then they come back and they opened the town up in the spring.
Josh: Yeah. So the only cars I think that we really saw were probably locals or trucks.
Alex: Yeah. I think we saw one other dude like kind of adventuring out like in a, I saw, didn’t we see another? I’m pretty sure we did.
Josh: After Dawson Creek, it was snowpack and ice on the roads. Snow coming down, made our way into Fort Nelson, which we thought we were going to do a little sightseeing there. Like Alex said, everything was closed. I warmed up one of my burritos in the microwave at the gas station. We fueled up and I think I got behind the wheel again headed North. And that’s where I realized that this guy can drive. It’s all right.
Josh: The Bronco was so good in the snow. Like I could not believe the traction. It’s got, it had 37 inch BFG all terrains and those things just grip.
Alex: Yeah.
Josh: And I apologized, I was like, all right, dude, I guess you weren’t trying to kill us. This thing actually does grip good.
Alex: Oh, it was, it handled awesome.
Josh: But it’s still kind of, kind of wandered.
Alex: It gripped awesome, but it wandered everywhere.
Josh: And after Fort Nelson, we’re, the road almost kind of follows this ridge and the views were just like stunning.
Alex: We pulled over a couple of times just to like, I think the first time we pulled over like, Oh my gosh, this is a great view! And then we got back in the rig and we drove like a little bit farther and like, Oh no, that view was crap, look at this view! And like, it was just so beautiful. Like that countryside up there is just so cool.
Josh: Yeah. And that’s where the wildlife really started coming out. We saw more caribou than I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean, it makes sense because since there’s no caribou in Washington.
Alex: So I’ve seen a few at the zoo and yeah.
Josh: But it was so cool to see the caribou. So one of the things I was really, really looking forward to on this trip-
Alex: -were these cinnamon rolls.
Josh: Yeah.
Alex: So I had like found, and I think he’d even like adjusted like our nap, our sleep time so that we would be in this town when like when they’re open for breakfast. And I think we missed the window by like 15 minutes.
Josh: No, this, this town was one of the towns is just close.
Alex: Oh. Yeah. We went to, we adjusted our start time so that we could be in this town for breakfast. Yeah. This place had like their reviews for cinnamon rolls were off the charts. Everyone like every review of this place was like, you have to have a cinnamon roll, You have to have a cinnamon roll, Our mouths were watering for cinnamon rolls.
Josh: Yeah. And we get there and it’s one of those towns that’s just closed.
Alex: Yeah. Like it had closed two weeks ago.
Josh: Yeah. Tetsa River Lodge is what it was.
Alex: The good part about this is I will be able to let you know how good they are later this year when I’m there. Is that going to help you at all?
Josh: It’ll make me want to go.
Alex: Yeah.
Josh: After Tetsa River Lodge, we made it to Toad River, which is just another little town, little gas station. We got some fuel that Bronco is completely iced up. We were having a hard time staying warm, and so we got some cardboard out of the gas station and blocked the radiator. And that actually really helped. I think it brought up the 20 degrees or something.
Alex: It really helped our engine temps. It helped up everything.
Josh: Yeah. This section kind of follows the river and there’s a number of lakes along the way that were just awesome. That greenish blue water on all the lakes because they’re all kind of fed by glaciers. Pretty rad.
Alex: A lot of these roads follow the like natural, you know, geographical lines against ridges and rivers and it’s just beautiful.
Josh: So then we stopped at Muncho Lake, which that lake was gigantic.
Alex: Not Monch- not Macho?
Josh: I think it’s Muncho.
Alex It’s Macho. Like, Macho, Macho man. It’s a big lake.
Josh: Muncho, Macho.
Alex: It was a big lake. Like we drove along this lake for a while. It would make sense that it was Macho.
Josh: Yeah. And again, the view is just stunning. And as we were trying to get to our next stop that at this point we’re like, it’s probably closed. Liard Hot Springs, but it was open.
Alex: It was open! It was open in the sense that there’s a year round caretaker and he was cool with us. I mean, it didn’t really feel like it was open open, you know what I mean? Like we were the only ones there.
Alex: And one of the things that we did, we were there, there’s bathrooms at the top and we’re like, oh, this must be where you get your swimsuit on. No, and then you have to walk. I mean, an insanely far away until you get to the Hot Springs in our flip flops and swimsuits. No, there are changing rooms down at the bottom. Yeah, that would have been much better.
Josh: Yeah, it was really cool though. It’s like mostly natural landscape as far as the Hot Spring. There’s a little bit of development there and it ranges everywhere from like, I don’t know, 90 degrees up to 127 degrees, which was really cool.
Alex: And part of that, we did a little walking up. There was some spots you could like walk and see where the Hot Springs come out of the mountain at. And there was some really cool like plant life up there that only happens there because of the way that the Hot Springs are situated. Like there are like, there’s some like tropical or like exotic flowers that bloom there because of like migratory birds that only bloom there because of the Hot Springs. So that’s kind of cool that you have these like exotic or like wild plants that are only growing there.
Josh: Yeah, it was really cool. And there were bear fences everywhere, but-
Alex: High voltage bear fences. So we were a little eerie and the dude was like, oh no, they’re all hibernating. So we were scared for no reason on that.
Josh: I know we should have put it together.
Alex: But- You walk through it the first time, like there’s this electric fence and there’s a lot of signage that’s like, only put your hand through here. And I was a little nerve wracking.
Josh: And in that area, the Liard area, that’s where we saw our first buffalo.
Alex: Was that where the first bison were?
Josh: Yeah, one of these big old guys just wandered into the road at like a snail’s pace.
Alex: And then waited.
Josh: And just, yeah, he’s like, you guys, you’re going to have to wait for me.
Alex: Yeah, I’m in charge here. They are huge. Like, we got, while staying in the vehicle at a safe-ish distance, we got close to them and they are a lot bigger than what-
Josh: The pictures show.
Alex: Yeah, I don’t know. It just seems like the closer you get to them, the bigger they are. Does that make sense?
Josh: Yeah. Then the closer you get to them, the smaller you feel.
Alex: Oh yeah. And they wandered at such a snail’s pace, like when they were just moseying. But we came across one that was like, when they were running, they can get up to speed quick! They gallop!
Josh: And when you look into their eyes, it’s creepy.
Alex: They don’t care. They’ll run through you.
Josh: Yeah. So then we finally made our way to the Yukon border and we put our little stamp.
Alex: Stamp, yeah, our little DPV stamp on that sign. It’s pretty cool.
Josh: We checked out the Bronco, make sure it’s all good.
Alex: Still really iced over. It was cool. It was actually really cool what it looked like.
Josh: Yeah. The hubs had icicles coming off of them, like little spikes.
Alex: Yeah, it was sweet.
Josh: And I think our passenger rear view mirror was locked in a position where you couldn’t see anything.
Alex: Yeah. It was originally when everything was thought out, it wasn’t quite tight enough and it would just bounce so you couldn’t see anything. And then it got locked in a position that was no good. So it was useless the whole time.
Alex: Then we hit up the signpost forest and that place was actually really cool. You look at some pictures and you’re like, oh, this, okay, cool. It’s a whole bunch of road signs in an area. But like walking through there, like all those, like how, to see how far away some of those signs came from. And it was cool. We found some from, there was a couple of little towns like from back home that we found signs for, wasn’t like they’re a…
Josh: Pretty sure there was one from the Anatone.
Alex: Was there an Anatone or like a Cottonwood or…
Josh: Yeah.
Alex: Some of these tiny towns back home that like, oh, this is awesome. These are way up here.
Josh: Yeah. And then there were some signs from like Germany.
Alex: Yeah.
Josh: and you know that like every one of those signs has a story behind it.
Alex: So many stories throughout there. And there’s some cool old equipment through there that you get that has been parked there. It’s kind of like a, there was some old forestry equipment, some old fire equipment.
Josh: Yeah. And just like thousands of signs, I could not believe how many signs were there.
Alex: Yeah. When you look at the picture, like, oh yeah, they took this picture from four different angles. No, that’s four different sections of like, it just so everything was, it’s so…
Josh: I don’t think we saw all.
Alex: No, I know we didn’t. And we were there over an hour.
Josh: Yeah. Alex made a sign, a Days of Pain and Victory sign, and we posted that up there so that was pretty cool.
Alex: Yeah, that was pretty sweet. If you go during the on season, there’s a guy there that you can get nails and a hammer from so you can hang your sign. If you go in the off season, you have to scramble through the Jeep to try to find a quarter 20 bolt that you use as a nail and drive it into the post. But you know, it works.
Josh: Yeah, it works. You got to improvise.
Alex: You got to use what you got.
Josh: So then we were trying to make it to Whitehorse for some dinner, and it was starting to get dark at this time. And while we’re on our way to Whitehorse, the Bronco died.
Alex: Yeah, and it was a little nerve wracking, because we had no problems up to this point with runnability,
Josh: no cell service right there.
Alex: Oh, yeah, nothing.
Josh: I mean, most of the trip there’s no cell service. But it turns out we just ran out of gas. We had we had quite a bit of fuel with us. We had like a 20 gallon extra fuel cell plus like a couple of race cans, and so we were able to top it off. Fuel pump reprimed and made our way down to Whitehorse, but this is where we had some little bit more major issues.
Alex: This whole time with the Bronco, the wandering is not getting better. It’s not it’s not tracking any better.
Josh: It was getting worse.
Alex: It’s getting worse. This wasn’t a oh, we’ll just drive it and make it go away problem, which usually probably doesn’t happen with steering and suspension components. There was one gas station in town which had zero amenities for food.
Josh: All the restaurants were closed.
Alex: Yeah, we pulled in we thought we were getting in there in time, but everywhere the kitchen was closed. Working hours during the offseason get a lot smaller. The one gas station that had lights was situated in I’m pretty sure like a polar vortex wind tunnel the way that it was set up. I don’t know if they had fans blowing the cold air. It was the coldest spot on the entire trip was the gas island at this gas station.
Josh: It was awful.
Alex: It was so I don’t remember what it was with the wind chill, but it was cold. It hurt to breathe.
Josh: My legs were shaking so bad.
Alex: And we had I had on I’m pretty sure I had long johns pants and a pair of coveralls on and I still couldn’t feel my legs and we were laying on we’re sitting on the concrete that has ice on it. I believe we lost some bolts out of our steering box.
Josh: It was no it wasn’t the steering box. It was the track bar mount. So this track bar mount had bolts that go up through the frame and the frame is boxed in that section and the nuts had come off the the top of those bolts inside the frame.
Alex: If you pulled the steering box couldn’t you get to it? if we would have pulled the steering box we could have got to the back of the frame. There was something else in the way
Josh: The crossmember. The engine crossmember was put on after the track bar mount and so the engine crossmember which we were not going to pull no at a gas station at midnight. There’s only like one bolt through the side of the frame that was holding this track bar mount on and-
Alex: I don’t think it was tight.
Josh: No it wasn’t it had loosened up and the two bolts that go up through the bottom of the frame were not there. And so Alex pulls the track bar down so we can get to those bolt holes. I dig in the back of the Bronco for some bolts because not only do we have all of our gear and stuff but Forrest had a bunch of stuff for us to bring up, you know like a windmill for his homestead.
Alex: Space was already at a premium.
Josh: Traveling light. But I found a couple bolts and we were trying to figure out how the heck to get these bolts in there and I had recently done a project where we had these little wire tools that you’d wrap around the bolt threads and it was like light bulb moment. So I found some tie wire wrapped around the threads of these bolts and we ended up making the bolts go down through the frame instead of up through the frame. But it was very tricky and about every five to eight minutes we had to go in that gas station and warm up.
Alex: And we didn’t have like the tactility to do it with gloves on so we’re doing it all without gloves and yeah our fingers were blue by the time it was over. It was only like the second worst time my hands have been that cold…
Alex: So actually got that all tightened up the Bronco drove so much better with a track bar that thing that thing like tracked straight, it was amazing.
Josh: Yeah it’s amazing when you have all your suspension components.
Alex: Oh it was awesome.
Josh: So yeah I think we finished that up around like 1230 in the morning or something or I can’t remember exactly how it worked out but it was late.
Alex: It was late.
Josh: It was cold.
Alex: It was cold. It was single digits without the wind chill.
Josh: We knew with that huge setback in time we had to get some more miles down and so we made our way to Haynes Junction which I wanted to kind of see in the daylight but it just didn’t work out but we made it to Haynes Junction around four in the morning and took about a four hour nap I think.
Alex: Yeah a little bit of a rest there.
Josh: Or it might have been two to six or something something like that it doesn’t matter but we slept for about four hours. It was still dark when we got up and then heading towards the Alaska border.
Alex: So right before we crossed the border we hit this town Beaver Creek and we had seen some signs going into it that there was this guy’s bakery and there was a sign that said cinnamon rolls and Josh after being disappointed from not getting those cinnamon rolls the first time got a little gleam in his eye and he was like oh we’re actually gonna get cinnamon rolls on this trip. They might not be the ones but they’re gonna be good cinnamon rolls. I mean there’s a billboard for them. They have to be good right? And we pull into this town and we get to the guy’s restaurant and he was open in like the off season and he was open so we got excited. We missed it by like 15 minutes. The dude was like closing up and like I watched him from the front window walk out the back door and lock up as he was walking out as he was closing down for breakfast. Took a couple hours off before lunch. So we missed cinnamon rolls two times.
Josh: Yeah closed from 10 to noon, and we roll up at 10 15.
Alex: Shouldn’t have napped as long.
Josh: I know what the heck! So it’s all good but we made it to the Alaska border and there’s something kind of weird about the border in that section. So you cross the border…
Alex: And then it’s you can tell when you cross the border because you can see they have clear cut it all the way forever and you can see the border and you cross the border and then you drive for a ways.
Josh: Yeah it’s like 30 miles before you hit customs!
Alex: Customs and I feel like I don’t know I feel like you could have avoided the customs dude, I don’t know there’s like no fence, anything just go off roading.
Josh: Super weird.
Alex: It was weird but we are this guy gave us a little more, I felt a little more nervous at this border crossing than I did the first one because the guy kept having us like retell, like “all right so say it again who’s this guy?” and then he was like purposely changing it to make sure we would correct him to make it right and he like ask it like four times and we’re like “no man it’s like this” and like he was okay and so I think he was just like trying to like make sure that our story was right that two dudes from Washington were moving a truck from Texas to Alaska for someone. Yeah because on the surface that does sound kind of crazy.
Josh: Yeah so successfully make it to Alaska after a little bit of hassle at the border but not not too bad. Didn’t make us get out of the car or anything.
Alex: No and I hadn’t really looked at the map at this point so, I mean I had looked at the map but I wasn’t really I was not quite aware that once you cross into Alaska it’s not like you cross into Alaska and then there’s Anchorage. There’s a little bit of driving in Alaska before you get to Anchorage.
Josh: Yeah like a lot bit.
Alex: Like a lot of bit.
Josh: We did a little bit of snow wheeling right right after the border. Nothing crazy.
Alex: We weren’t gonna break.
Josh: We saw some two track we took it, it was fun, it was good
Alex: it was good.
Josh: And then we made it to this little town called Tok and we had to get the last bit of fuel from our big 20 gallon jugs and so Alex set up a pretty cool system. We went to an ace hardware there got some tubing.
Alex: Oh yeah we did a little syphon, I think we put the gas tank on the roof and then we just siphoned it down
Josh: and we went and had some burgers
Alex: and we got back it was done fueling.
Josh: Yeah so that worked out pretty good. We still had some daylight we’re trying to see as much as we could see in the daylight as possible and we made it to the Madinus, Matanuska glacier?
Alex: Yeah close enough.
Josh: And it was pretty awesome except for the fact that when I opened the door to get out…
Alex: Oh his entire filing system which at this point was a camera bag just jammed receipts into it just blew everywhere!
Josh: Oh man I had gas receipts flying down the highway. I’m like trying to gather them all up, I got ’em. So after the glacier we’re making our way towards Anchorage still on just gorgeous mountain road kind of a river down on one side cliff on the other and the sunset was just amazing.
Alex: One of the best ones I’ve ever seen.
Josh: Just gigantic mountains with the orange sunset.
So Alex and I have this game that we like to play on road trips and because we had seen so few cars on this entire trip the game wasn’t working out.
Alex: It wasn’t working out and this game is Padiddle, and people have different versions but what happens is you see a car without a headlight you say Padiddle and hit the roof and if you’re the first one hit a roof you reach over and slug your buddy and we have played this game since we were 14. Like we have played this game our entire lives. And our wives aren’t the biggest fan of it but whenever it’s just Josh and I in a rig, and it doesn’t matter if we’re just running the grocery store to grab food it doesn’t matter what we’re doing. Make a parts store run if I see a car without a headlight on or if Josh does we are slapping that roof and it’s not just that we double up our fists, we’re trying to injure the other person and it has led to a lot of great memories. So we are pulling into we’re getting closer and closer to civilization we’re getting closer to Anchorage and we are starting to see a lot of headlights and I don’t know if the national bird of Alaska is the one headlight but we saw a bunch of them in that little section before Anchorage. And I believe this time we were actually playing for who would have to buy dinner.
Josh: Oh yeah!
Alex: Yeah. We had we had extra incentive on it because we thought we’d run into so many cars that our legs would be we’d have dead legs that we would we had a little extra on it and it was pretty intense like it was it was mid 20s to mid 20s like we had seen a lot of padiddles
Josh: yeah in this last like 50 miles
Alex: yeah in this last 50 miles and while I was driving, I was strategically trying to drive where I would be like behind a semi so Josh couldn’t see as far as I could see or I was and I was using all of my lane it’s it’s eight feet wide. I pay taxes on all eight feet I’m going to use all eight feet. I didn’t cross, I wasn’t crossing the line I I was using all of it though and a police officer behind me thought that I was using too much apparently of my lane and he pulls us over and, this is nothing new I’ve been pulled over a few times, so he comes to the window and he is sure that he has us for under the influence because apparently somebody had called according to him somebody had called us in.
Josh: According to him somebody had been following us for some time with their flashers on yeah but we’re looking at the headlights ahead of us not behind us yeah remember our mirrors kind of frozen yeah in a poor position
Alex: yeah so yeah we’re using up all of it and uh actually I don’t I think the track bar is still probably assisting us a little bit because I’m not sure the bolts that we got were the appropriate size so I think there’s a little bit of flex in there or you know a lifted truck there’s a you’re gonna have a little bit of play yeah and when I’m not really focusing on the road ahead of me I’m looking at the oncoming traffic on a divided highway so cop pulls up and I think his first question is just like how much have you had to drink because there was no way that he thought we were sober and he runs me through the full gamut of everything he can ask me at the car. He has me close my eyes count to 30 in my head and let him know and I was within I was within two or three tenths of a second, he was like yeah you were you were really close like you could tell in his face he was like okay this guy might be sober and uh we go through the whole thing we do the alphabet then he’s like let’s do a field sobriety test all right so I get out and he has me do some of the craziest stuff and he’s foot off the ground I’m this like snow on the ground ice on the ground he has me doing all these different things I pass all of them with flying colors he was pretty cool about it though but I think he thought that he had me dead to rights
Josh: yeah Alex always makes me a little nervous when we get pulled over because he says some things that I just wouldn’t
Alex: My train of thought doesn’t have a caboose and I sometimes I don’t really always think the repercussions of what I’m gonna say
Josh: yeah he’s like you don’t have any weapons or anything or he’s like uh I don’t think I have my knife on me I think I changed my pants like why did you even bring it up!
Alex: yeah or no and I think he gets out there no he does he’s like do you have any weapons on you I’m like no and then he gets we get out of the vehicle he pats me down he finds a knife oh and he’s like “what’s this?” I’m like “oh it’s a knife” “thought you said you didn’t have any weapons?” “it’s not a weapon it’s a tool.” Like you don’t think about that when you always carry a pocket knife you don’t always think that like a pocket knife is a weapon
Josh: What what did you tell him when he wanted you to lift your foot off the ground?
Alex: Oh he wanted me to lift his foot six inches off the ground and then he lifts his foot like that far(12 inches) and I’m like if you’re telling your lady that six inches you’re in the wrong business bro like it was he was cool with it though but um yeah I don’t know why they wouldn’t, and I asked like twice just I’ll blow, I I’ll give you a breathalyzer, I don’t care I’m gonna blow zeros. No we gotta do it this way, no we gotta do it this way. But uh he finally let us go and I don’t think he really believed the track bar story at all even though we were like hey I will show you what we did but um after that we uh we motored on got some pizza at this the
Josh: Moose Tooth Pizza
Alex: Moose Tooth Pizza
Josh: Who won padiddle?
Alex: I think you ended up buying pizza
Josh: Yeah that’s typical
Alex: yeah I was I don’t know if I was cheating but I I think me being able to block your vision on some stuff yeah what yeah assisted my win I think we had some uh caribou pizza there was some caribou sausage
Josh: Yeah it was pretty dang good if you ever in Anchorage go to the Moose Tooth it was awesome
Alex: I’m gonna be hitting it up again
Josh: yeah and then uh we stayed at Forrest’s house there in Anchorage and he had a roommate there that was very kind just very nice and um even took us to the airport and everything so that was pretty awesome um but yeah just an epic epic trip
Alex: Yeah it’s uh it’s crazy what uh opportunities present themselves when you’re just more open to like, yeah we can we can drive to Alaska, yeah we can figure this out just go with it, just say yes, uh but yeah it was it was a crazy 63, 64 hours
Josh: Yeah the only thing I’d do differently was I would have taken some time off work, if the same situation happened again I’d take time off work so we could do it in like five days
Alex: I mean when I do it this summer with the family I’m making a little video about that and yeah taking my time a little bit, seeing some more sites, going a couple hikes
Josh: Yeah so that’s our Alaska trip! We’ve got a whole video series on that Bronco and on the Alaska trip itself, be sure to check it out it was it was so awesome! Again big thanks to Forrest for giving us that opportunity
Alex: Yeah without that opportunity I don’t, yeah without him covering the financials I don’t know if we could have done at the time
Josh: It was totally rad
Alex: It was awesome if you like what you see here and like our videos that we put out be sweet if you could uh support us by buying some merch you can get it link below, we’ve got hats stickers sweatshirts it’s uh yeah
Josh: Yeah leave us a review on wherever you listen to your podcast leave a comment if you got any questions about the trip, love to chat about it
Alex: Wheel it, wreck it, wrench it, repeat! Until next time, see ya!
Days of Pain and Victory 
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