Kinda Alaska road trip

[Budman]

Welcome back. Coincidentally, we just returned to Plymouth MN from our Nova Scotia epic adventure. 5350 miles for us. We should swap stories.

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[schwartz83]

Absolutely! Welcome back to you as well,!

 

[Redline]

Trip Summary

5,539 miles, 2,968 kWh and 24 or so charging sessions later our trip is complete. we also covered about 1,822 miles while on the ferry.

if i caught all the charges, we spent $1,022.63 charging using mostly Tesla superchargers, some RAN chargepoint, Recharge Alaska and Flo (free, but not super fast)chargers. We also charged at a couple of different campgrounds. We had absolutely no luck finding hotels with available charging. Napkin math has us spending $830.30 if we drove a gas vehicle. So we spent about 19% more driving an EV. We did have the Tesla membership.

Highlights were the scenery of course and visiting with old friends. Halibut fishing - that's been on my bucket list for 30 years..and the ferry. I love taking it and find it incredibly relaxing.

Things I'd do differently:

- in the photos you probably noticed the rooftop box...I was originally planning on mounting it over the bed, but it was too long. I should have switched to our hitch mounted rack. I have to imagine we took a bit of a range hit with the roof top box.

- give ourselves more time for a days travel. Too often we got to our planned destination much later than expected - between road construction or just plain bad roads. This meant we'd book a hotel room rather than camp or sleep in the truck ( more comfortable than expected). Not the end of the world, but not how we envisioned the trip. Of course, as my wife pointed out, if we'd given ourselves more time, we would have just packed more into the day. She's probably right!

- reassess what we pack. Originally this was to be a 5 or 6 week trip and I packed for that. Due to some late breaking commitments, we had to compress it to just over 3 weeks. I packed way too much for that length of a trip.

- truck issues - none really. We had a slow leak in the drivers side rear tire, but the compressor and fix a flat took care of it. We also needed to do a hard reboot a couple of times to clear some error messages. They went away after the reboot.

Vampire drain was much less than I feared....maybe 5 or 6 % - less I think - over the 3 days in the ferry. I often left tho outlets on to run our cooler. We turned off proximity lock/unlock. We were required to leave the truck unlocked

Would we take the trip again?Sure! I still haven't caught a salmon, so I need to fix that. I'm thinking about an east coast road trip and a southwest national parks trip that we'll want to knock out first, but Alaska is always on my list. My wife and I met there in the late '80s and it has a special place in our hearts.

If anyone has any questions, let me know. I'm happy to help EV roadtrippers!

I'm sure I'm forgetting something and will edit this post if I remember it.

We’re about to do a Minneapolis to Grand Teton-Yellowstone trip next month…I’m assuming that portion of your trip to about Bozeman was pretty easy?

 

[Budman]

We’re about to do a Minneapolis to Grand Teton-Yellowstone trip next month…I’m assuming that portion of your trip to about Bozeman was pretty easy?

I’ve done that trip. Easy if going through North Dakota. Plenty of Tesla and electrify America chargers. I had good experiences with EA, faster than superchargers. We camped overnight at a state park in Glendive MT that had cool scenery and electric hookups.

Not sure about off the freeway after Bozeman….

 

[Redline]

I’ve done that trip. Easy if going through North Dakota. Plenty of Tesla and electrify America chargers. I had good experiences with EA, faster than superchargers. We camped overnight at a state park in Glendive MT that had cool scenery and electric hookups.

Not sure about off the freeway after Bozeman….

We are going through ND. I have two Airbnb’s with lvl 2 charging near the parks.

 

[schwartz83]

We’re about to do a Minneapolis to Grand Teton-Yellowstone trip next month…I’m assuming that portion of your trip to about Bozeman was pretty easy?

Yeah - straight forward. Plenty of charging options. Sounds like a fun trip! If you are in the mood for a great steak stop at Pompey's Grill in Three Forks just west of Bozeman. Not cheap, but probably the best steak I've ever had. It's in the Sacajawea Hotel - which is a nice place to stay too.

 

[Phatman113]

There's an Alaska EV group who did a run up there a little while back, listed those as charging stops.

Yep, I've seen those block heaters on a lot of buildings so it makes sense you could slowly trickle up. There's a lot of random welding shops in various remote areas with 240 readily available, so while not DCFC, it'll still get you full overnight!

Ok,

Update on those charger locations... The pump station was fenced/gated off. You could drive up the road a little, but it had a closed gate. (family didn't want to go poking around a closed gate, so we just looked and kept going)
The Airport didn't have anything obvious. I couldn't find any charger pedestals or obvious locations that said "EV Charging" for anything. It's possible they found someone who could show them a 220v outlet, but nothing listed in any official capacity. Tons of block heaters as mentioned, but we didn't have an EV to test with, so those may or may not be anything worthwhile for charging.

Sorry I couldn't help more. We saw a couple L3 chargers that weren't on plugshare, but they were in areas we didn't have service and couldn't update. They were also way down by Anchorage, so not helpful for northern trips...

Seems like, at the moment, Tuktoyaktuk may still be the best location to shoot for with an EV

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