Canada: Wilderness and Wildlife of the Yukon, BC and Canadian Rockies (Northbound)

Twenty nights from Anchorage into the Yukon, British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies, ridden northbound. Bikes are rented, or riders can bring their own.

The Glenn Highway opens it, running east out of Anchorage past Wrangell-St Elias, which is the largest national park in the United States and bigger than Switzerland, with nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the country inside it. Tok takes the first night.

The Yukon follows for several days, through parks, glacier-fed lakes, famous rivers and conifer wilderness, which is as empty as anywhere on the continent: the territory is the size of Spain and holds fewer people than a small English town. Whitehorse comes next, with its downtown district and the SS Klondike, a sternwheeler that worked the Yukon River until the 1950s and now sits in dry dock.

The Alcan Highway carries the route on, built in eight months during the Second World War to link the contiguous United States to Alaska through Canada, to Watson Lake and its Signpost Forest, where a homesick soldier put up a sign in 1942 and visitors have been adding to it ever since, to the tune of tens of thousands. British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies close the route, which is where the scenery turns from boreal wilderness to the glaciated peaks most people picture when they think of Canada. The price is quoted per rider, and no wildlife sighting can be promised, though on this route bears are more a question of when than whether. Twenty nights is what the distances demand: fuel stops can be two hundred miles apart and the riding season is short.