Alaska Finances

As a public service, here is a list of things that aren't cheap, in order of not cheapness:

1. Being in Alaska.
2. Traveling to Alaska.
3. Driving to Alaska.
4. Driving an RV to Alaska.

We knew going into this stretch of the trip that it would be expensive. We also knew that it would almost certainly be a once in a lifetime experience, so we resolved to spend the money necessary to do what we wanted to do. That said, we weren't going to waste money either. We'd spend what we needed to spend and no more.

Before I get into the details of the financial breakdown of our Alaska swing, a disclaimer: I realize that talking about finances is taboo to a lot of people. In creating this post, my goal is twofold.

First, as with all blog posts, I'm trying to create an accurate record of our trip that we can revisit in the future. As I said when I started this blog, I'm mainly creating this content for the future me, but I have no problem if others want to eavesdrop.

Second, I'm optimistic this may be useful to anyone else who stumbles across it through the magic of the internet and is considering a trip like this. I found other blogs extremely useful as I was planning this portion, and many of those included financial numbers, which gave me an idea of what to expect.

What I'm not trying to do is brag in any way. The point of this post isn't to say "look at how much money we were able to spend!" We are blessed to be in a situation where we could afford to do a trip like this. I realize that not everyone has that luxury. We've always been very conservative with our finances, and we were able to reap the benefits of years of saving.

At this point, I should remind you that there are eight national parks in Alaska. Of those eight, three are accessible by car. Since the overarching goal of our RV trip is to visit national parks, there was no way we were going to be able to do this on the cheap.

So what did it cost us to travel to Alaska (including the Canadian parts) for 6 weeks? Around $28,000. Let me break that number down, because it won't be the same for everybody.

Here are how the major categories worked out, with numbers rounded to the nearest dollar:

Expense	Amount	Notes
Fuel	$4,057	Most of the cash was also spent on fuel; we paid anywhere from $4.50 to $6.00 per gallon
Lodging	$1,839
Activities	$1,528
Transportation	$14,579	Flights and ferries to get to national parks
Food	$2,614	Both groceries and eating out
RV Repairs	$732	The roads are rough on RVs
Cash	$1,500	Mainly Canadian currency, and mostly spent on fuel
Souvenirs	$281
Insurance	$433	Roadside assistance and travel health
Other	$282

Obviously, someone who wasn't trying to visit all of the national parks could get out much cheaper than we did. More than half of our expenses were simply trying to get to these very difficult to reach parks. But going to the parks was our goal, so these flights and ferries were the cost of doing business expenses, so to speak. And it could have been worse; Julie saved us some money by not coming along on the flights!

For those interested in visiting the parks, this is how the cost broke down:

• $6,400: 8 hour Flightseeing trip over Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arctic for me and the kids
• $2,040: Round-trip to Port Alsworth (Lake Clark) for me and the kids
• $4,600: Round-trip to Katmai for me and the kids
• $1,539: Ferries to and from Glacier Bay for the entire family

As I've pointed out in other posts, Alaska is very big. It's also very far away. That meant we had no choice but to spend a ton of money on fuel. I was filling the RV almost every day though Canada, and at about $300 a pop, that adds up fast. But again, cost of doing business.

It doesn't look like it, but we did pretty well on lodging. Ignoring California, which is a major outlier, we spend anywhere between $1,500 and $2,500 on a typical month in the lower 48. We intentionally kept our schedule flexible (read: we didn't book ahead) so that we could take advantage of cheap or free places to park. It paid off. We had a number of free nights (shout out to Cabela's), and we had a number of very cheap nights (mainly city parks).

Just under $1,000 of the $1,800 spent on lodging represented three nights in Juneau, two at an Airbnb and one at a hotel. We had a stopover in Juneau, which is not accessible by car, on the way to and from Glacier Bay National Park. In found the most affordable lodging I could for those three nights, and I still spent almost $1,000. There's Alaska in a nutshell for you.

We obviously would have spent money on food even had we not been in Alaska, but it would have been less. Groceries in Alaska are not cheap, though the markups vary wildly based on the product. As best I could tell, things that incorporate a lot of air have huge mark-ups. A bag of chips can run $8 or more. I'm guessing it's because it's not efficient to ship air to Alaska. The reason I'm guessing that is because things that are more dense (chocolate bars, for example) tend to have much smaller markups.

We didn't eat out a lot, but when we did it was probably 25% more expensive than it would have been otherwise. Granted, eating out anywhere has gotten very expensive since the pandemic hit, so it's tough to tell.

There you have it. If you are considering traveling to Alaska in an RV, this hopefully gives you some idea of what it will cost. You can obviously do a trip to Alaska much cheaper than this if your goal isn't to drive or to visit the hard to reach parks. Alaska has multiple very accessible airports, and costs around the big (with "big" being a relative term) cities is comparable to costs in California.