TWO mates have completed the ride of their lives, literally travelling to the end of the Earth.


Sebastiaan de With, 26, and Stuart Philkill, 30, spent 10 weeks and 17,700 kilometres following the road from San Francisco to Anchorage, Alaska, until it ran out.
Along the way they had a white-knuckled ride on one of America’s most dangerous highways, strewn with the wreckage of vehicles and memorials to lives lost. But they also discovered a beauty they could never had imagined along some roads less travelled.
Sebastiaan talked to news.com.au about the life-changing journey.

What did your trip involve?
When we set off on our trip from San Francisco, we had a loose plan; our destination would be Alaska. We thought we’d try and make it to Anchorage, maybe Denali National Park. As we went on our trip and looked at maps as we got closer to our destination, a different, more challenging route presented itself and we chose to take it.

We literally rode our motorcycles north until the road ended, over one of the most dangerous roads in the United States: the Dalton Highway. Made famous due to it being featured in Ice Road Truckers, it runs from Fairbanks, Alaska all the way to the Arctic Ocean. It’s as close to the North Pole you can get by any road in the US, and the end of the road system up north, period.

What was your inspiration?
We were inspired mainly by the setbacks in our lives: from both of us losing our jobs to generally believing we might find good perspective on our lives on such an extreme journey.
Over 10 weeks, we rode up and down on our motorcycles. We had to ride back separately, but did the majority of our journey together. I arrived back in San Francisco on September 1st (having departed June 20th), with about 11,000 miles (17 702 kilometres) on my trip odometer.

What were the highlights?
There were so many it’s hard to count. We seemed to have amazing luck on the trip, from good weather to ridiculously lucky situations.

I remember the day we were on the way from Chicken, Alaska, a minute town with barely any population whatsoever to Tok, over the half-paved highway. We were happy to finally reach Tok and its nice pavement and grabbed a meal at the local hotspot, Fast Eddy’s. Being only recently out of Yukon, Canada, and now freshly in territory with a mobile phone signal, I checked my emails. One of them was from a girl named Natalie; she’d sent me a Facebook message to tell me they’d found my wallet in Chicken (Alaska)!
I rode the 160 miles (257km) back and picked up the wallet — extremely grateful, of course. A motorcycle rider had brought it in, she said. My wallet is dark brown and had been found on a dark brown dirt road in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Impressive.

I rode back to Tok again, and the next day we proceeded to Fairbanks (Alaska) in the rain. Here riders often stay in the local university dorms, which are cheap. We saw a few bikes out front, and I excitedly walked towards a group standing nearby when one of them shouted out: “Hey! I’m the guy that found your wallet!”. Small world! I still can’t believe my luck.

Thanks to our spontaneous travel schedule and loose plan, we found places we normally wouldn’t have visited. For instance, when we reached Whitehorse, the largest city in the desolate Yukon, we decided to ride South to Skagway. I had confused Skagway with another town in Alaska called Kennicott, which is an abandoned mining town. Believing we’d find an abandoned town, we rode into what is actually a historic port for the Gold Rush where many cruise ships arrive daily full of tourists!

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