Holy Crap !

I had a few hours of down time tonight so I did some exploring on
Google Maps in Alaska.
I followed route 11 north of Fairbanks all the way to the oil field entrance.
Using street view there are some spectacular views of a lot of land.
The pipeline parallels and crosses the road in spots.
I have no idea how you would travel this road. There are NO gas stations.
There is NO food. There is great scenery.

I spent a day doing that in Australia after watching these guy's Youtube vids on a cross country trek on XR650's. Amazing technology there .... but if you look locally it borders on invasion of privacy ...

Anyway, I was up there in '87. Not quite that far north - Fairbanks was as far as I went - but amazing scenery nonetheless. If it weren't for the winters I'd consider moving there in a heartbeat.

If your going to move to Alaska, you might as well leave your
balls in MA. They'll freeze off the first day.

I hear that. Been watchin that series on Discovery .. or History channel ... one of those. Lots of work to survive those winters.

I bitch and moan about 5 months of *censored* weather ...

State sends me up there once a year, made first trip in 2WD pickup, no real problems.
About 500 miles form Farbanks to Deadhorse, fuel at each end, and at Coldfoot camp in the middle.
http://wikitravel.org/en/Deadhorse
http://coldfootcamp.com/
In the fall the road is lousy with hunters, bow hunting only near the pipline.
Ice Road Truckers is filmed on this road,
officialy called the Dalton Higway, aka, the Haul road, I call it Drama Drive.
Some of the pictrures I posted in the Alaska section are from there.

I thought that all sounded familiar. Watched Ice Road Truckers the first 2 seasons faithfully, then lost interest. Talk about drama .... They seemed to blow alot of incidents way out of proportion. For ratings I guess.

We went up that route to get to my brother inlaw's gold claim...it's wilderness out there. I would love to live there and the winters wouldn't be too bad if you lived in a place that didn't get those bad temperature inversions like Fairbanks does. Outside the inversion areas, the temperature can be 20+ degrees warmer.
Summers can be really "buggy" though...the noseeums (sp?) can be bad at times.

Yeah we got hit by them up there in July. Forget exactly where we were .... somewhere in between Fairbanks and Ketchikan, but the weather and bugs reminded me of home, 100%. Was exactly the same.

I think most those "reality" shows, are in it for the drama, but who wants to watch a truck drive 1000 mile round trips, endlessly, year round.
TSB, grab your camper or trailer, buy some fuel, make a trip of it, to enjoy this you need to like driving and should have six weeks or so once you get to Canada, I would plan eight weeks if retired.
You can put your wheels on the boat in Anchorage Alaska to Tacoma Washington but then you need to fly that streach. http://www.totemocean.com/vehicles
Or you could take the Alsak state Ferry up the coast from Washington and then drive around Alaska and then down though Canada, tell your wife you are going on a Cruse.

I was on a cruise ship on the way back to the 49. The first 2 floors of the ship were LOADED with class A motorhomes & tag-along campers. Couldn't believe how big this ship was. We left Ketchikan, went thru some inlet passage where they kicked the side thrusters on to try and get the glacial ice to drop into the water for the guests (highly doubt that's allowed these days ...), and ended up in Seattle.

I can't imagine what those guys paid to hitch a ride on that thing .... But if you can avoid getting a passport, that would be the way I'd go.