Road Train to Texas

Keith the Ham
Photo by Tony A.

Riding out toward Chugiak today, I noticed a guy taking a break beside the bike path. It’s hard to miss a guy pulling two BOB trailers at once. A few minutes later, he caught up to our group after we took a snack stop.

His rig was a spectacle: A Rivendell Atlantis towing two trailers, one of which had a somewhat large, flexible solar panel draped over its load. This was a long-haul set-up. A very heavy long-haul set-up, from what I could tell. I pedaled beside him for a minute to ask where he was headed with this huge load. The answer? Fairbanks ... then Texas, where he said he hopes to arrive about five months from now.

I needed to start catching up to Carl and Oscar, and the road traffic was too loud for more questions, so I didn’t ask about the solar panel. Probably for a cell phone, I figured.

Yeah, not so much.

Turns out, my friend Tony had run into this guy, Keith, as he was passing through Anchorage earlier in the day, so Tony got more information. The dude’s traveling with a ham radio, for crap’s sake. And there might be a laptop in there, for all I know. So, what the hell, if you’re driving up the Alaska Highway this summer, you can try to give him a call on the radio. (Or you can stop and hand him a cold beer if you see him laboring up a big-ass climb with his road train.)

You can follow Keith’s progress via his blog, and check out his radio set up by going here, and searching for "KE1THR."

Keith, may the road be kind, and the hills gentle. I hope to read five months from now that you’ve put down the kickstands on those trailers in Brownsville. And if I do, I'll know it's you because, before today, I've never seen anyone who used so many trailers he actually needed kickstands on them.