Tropics to Tundra

The passing of time is surreal. Sometimes it just stands still and sometimes it speeds by. We’ve made a conscious decision to chase it while we can. So before we embarked our absurd idea to dip our toes in the Arctic Ocean this summer, we sought inspiration from the master of bizarre. Thirteen years ago…

Our F-250 land yacht is readied for a diagonal North American crossing.  Tropics to tundra we’re leaving heat, humidity, comfort and convenience in our wake.  At around 300 miles a clip, we’re moving slow enough to experience festivities around America 250 yet fast enough to escape the hustle and swelter of a USA summer.   The…

When you look down at the ground of the campsite and it is literally a moving carpet of small ants, you know you are in southern Georgia. The gnats invade your ear canal. Fly into your eyes and up your nose. Swarm your head like Pigpen in Peanuts. They don’t bite, but they sure do…

While the Devil was down in Reed Bingham using gnats and ants to steal souls, an Angel was flying high over Cloudland Canyon State Park in the northern Georgia mountains dropping midnight rain to symbolically cleanse our spirits for our new year ahead.  It was the Fall of 2023 when we last visited this touchstone…

Is 59 years of age too late to be an aspiring musician? How about 64? In Nashville you are never too old to turn that catchy tune and moving lyrics running around in your head into a hit song. Nashville is billed as the ultimate star-making factory. Can’t play an instrument or carry a tune?…

Crime is low in campgrounds, but it unfortunately does happen. Early clues were a Chevy dually who would slow down and give a confused stare every time they drove by our minimalistic teardrop setup, or when a suspicious couple entered our site to comment that we must really like each other to live in something…

Life is a leap of faith. In downtown Sioux Falls, SD, there is an Arc, 285 feet long, hovering 70 feet above the Big Sioux River. On the Arc is an 18 foot gap at the apex, representing the leap of faith dreamers must take in pursuing their ambitions. This Arc is the anchor of…

Calling an audible is typically a hero or zero play. You’re ready to run your best offense but something on the other side spooks you. When your spidey senses are high and that pivot works in your favor you’re dictating game flow. But when uncertainty checks your confidence sometimes a pivot turns into a wasted…

Being the escape artists that we are, we left Teddy Roosevelt National Park before Reveille. If there’s one thing that sends us over the edge, it’s a big rig neighbor flying a KC Chiefs flag, running their generator while they sit outside shouting over the engine noise on FaceTime about feeding the “do not feed…

There’s been a lot of rain and wind across Montana this week, especially in East Glacier National Park. But as Dolly Parton says, if you want the rainbow you have to put up with the rain. Now that we are big time songwriters from Nashville, we quote our good friend Dolly a lot. On the…

There is an International Peace Park that spans the borders of Canada and the US designated by a poster in each Visitor Center at Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. There are no magnets, t-shirts, commemorative coins or posters of the purported UNESCO World Heritage site. You can take a boat cruise that crosses into…

The Rocky Mountains stretch from Colorado all the way northwest to Alaska. Some areas, like Aspen and Banff, are meccas for their names, but are essentially part of one contiguous range. Alberta locals know this and have claimed the span north of Glacier and south of Banff. They named the region after their high school…

Banff. When you say the name the angels sing. It’s the national treasure of Canada. With 5.2 million tagged posts, it is the most instagrammed, most visited, most symbolic badge of accessible geologic beauty in the country. It has a reputation for being overcrowded, over commercialized and overpriced, but it is nevertheless, a beacon for…

After a half hour in the Banff Visitor Center talking to volunteers about how to get to the most coveted selfie destination in the park, we made the choice to boycott Moraine Lake. We’re no strangers to boycotts. If the destination is hyped and the barrier to entry is high, we’re searching for the alternative;…

The Icefields Parkway connects Banff in the south to Jasper in the north. With a name like ‘Icefields,’ we knew the views would be spectacular. Also, the 144 mile passage continually makes the list of 10 most scenic drives in the world. Yes, the world. Of course, Siesta Key in our Florida backyard continually makes…

We got legs and we know how to use em. Admittedly they might be getting a bit tired, but we’ve got remedies … compression socks, rest stops, stretch-it strap, happy hour, Motrin. Heading west out of Jasper on highway 16, we overnighted in Beaumont Provincial Park. When we need to put down some miles, a…

The mosquitoes told us to pack it up at Boya Lake. The rumbling thunder chimed in with agreement. Haines Junction was nearly 450 miles away. When T@G requested we take a shower sooner rather than later, we packed Boss, put T@G on the hitch, and prepped for an EARLY departure the next morning. There comes…

There are parks like Banff and Zion then there are parks like Great Basin and Kluane (clue-AH-née). Those that are not so difficult to get to and have a high aesthetic/adventure ratio for a range of abilities are those that have been mapped and monopolized by magazines, influencers, tourists and tour companies. Those that are…

Sometimes you wake up with a dead battery. In our case this is not a metaphor. Whoever said the best laid plans often go awry has obviously been to the Yukon. We packed the night before for an early departure. Up the Al-can, into Alaska, through Tok and Chicken, with a ferry crossing back into…

If there is one timeless characteristic of human psychology it has to be the fear of missing out. Today it has its own acronym, FOMO. When Skookum Jim found marble sized nuggets of gold in Bonanza Creek, ten miles outside of Dawson City in the Yukon Territory in 1896, the rest of the world caught…

The locals tell us, it’s The North – get used to it. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. We‘re dubbing that, Yukonic! Things happen up here. Things you cannot control. Some days are more beautiful than anything you can imagine. Other days are so difficult that you dream of an…

Clausewitz coined the term “the fog of war” to describe how hard it is for military commanders to make good decisions when they have imperfect and incomplete information. We are trying to navigate the fog of ferry crossings like a great General, but can relate to their predicament. No one knows anything. Everyone is an…

Lyle poked his head in the CLAM just as potato curry was coming off the stove. “Time to go,” our Eagle Plains parking lot partner and retired Dempster road engineer, urged. We woofed down half of the Indian spiced blend, packaged the rest and decamped in record time. The Eagle Plains lot had filled as…

If we had to pick a theme for our Tropics to Tundra 2026 adventure, it might coincide with the Great Northern Arts Festival theme of “Gathering.” For their 37th annual summer event, they wanted to celebrate people communing around art, music, words and food. For our break the loop summer event, it’s gathering our patience…

There are places that represent. The Arctic Ocean is one of them. As the northernmost ocean on the planet, its ice acts like a mirror reflecting sunlight back into space, keeping the planet cool. It continuously releases cold water into the deeper ocean driving global circulation of currents that regulate weather and temperatures worldwide. As…

We have to keep reminding ourselves … it’s about the journey, not the destination. When we reached the Arctic there was a moment of jubilation followed by the slap in the face reality that we now had to work it, flip it and reverse it. To beat a dead horse, the Dempster is 550 miles…

The wrongs of north of north were piling up. Broken rigs, broken teeth, broken shins (another story!), and broken patience were stealing our mojo. It felt time to get right with the world again. When you are north of north, that means dropping hundreds of miles south to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, where…

Once we got our proverbial “stuff” together in Whitehorse, we were ready to find high-speed blacktop to make tracks south. It had been awhile since we had seen the speedometer hit 60 mph, and the Al-Can Highway was built exactly for that. Originally constructed during WWII to run supplies to Alaska and Russia, it quickly…

The uncertainty induced by unknowns stirs up strong emotions, especially when you’re tired. Temps are smoldering across North America. Wildfires are burning. Air quality deteriorating. We looked at a trans-Canada crossing, but towns quickly became names on a map without activities or current events written down in our notebook of possibilities. We thought about revisiting…

Why and if are bedfellows of can and can’t, will and won’t. There’s always a challenge. Something to face. Something to prove. We can’t always identify the whys or ifs, but it’s the can you or can’t you, will you or won’t you that becomes your odyssey. There is a Journeys page on shericadventures.com. It…

When heavy rain thwarted our pitchfork skewered steak, we got a burger at Boot’s. When lighting and thunder canceled our America 250 musical revue date night, we watched a movie on our laptop inside T@G. When we were early for the opening of President Teddy’s library by a month, we drove the scenic loop of…

In 1991, Lenny Kravitz sang “It ain’t over til its over” to try to keep his life with his wife and daughter from ending. During the Oscars, when the orchestra strikes up a song, the awardee gets that not so subtle hint to wrap it up and leave the stage. At your favorite concert, the…