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It was at a gas station so remote that a litre of fuel and a cup of coffee cost the same -- in the $1.30 range. The taste was similar too.

A dust-covered road warrior on his way to Alaska from down south strapped himself to his bike and prepared to kick-start the machine. He paused and looked over at me. "Which way is north again?" he asked, dead serious.

I pointed him on his way, but as he roared off, I thought twice about my directions. Over the past two months, I've left a responsible job with The Globe and Mail, sold my home and waved goodbye to family and friends for an extended vacation and writing trip. My girlfriend Christina and I have already put a year's worth of kilometres on her 14-year-old car. We don't know exactly when we'll be back, and there are still days where we don't know which way is up.

Of all the ways we could have begun our travels, we chose to get in the car. Nothing screams road trip like Alaska -- the drive north is a pilgrimage for some, a rite of passage for others, a yearly routine for a fortunate few. For us, Alaska represented the end of an especially scenic road, which had a lot of allure for two people beginning a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Our plan, as it took shape, would have us leaving Toronto in early July, driving to Alaska and back down through British Columbia and the U.S. Pacific Northwest before returning to Ontario. We'd be home in time to watch the leaves change, pick up our backpacks and head for sunnier latitudes. But it was never as simple as just picking up and leaving; planning the trip while disassembling our lives would prove to be impossibly complicated.

"It's funny how the closer we are to being on the road, the more stressful things become," I wrote in my diary in June, as I balanced packing, work, goodbye parties, family emergencies and the creation of a website. It was a relief to finally start travelling.

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There are two ways into Alaska by car: by ferry up the coast and by road from the interior. Driving from the east, we chose the latter, which allowed us a side trip to Edmonton and the Northwest Territories.

We linked up with the Alaska Highway in northern B.C., which is where our road trip began to get seriously scenic. Heading northwest from Fort Nelson, the array of mountains and wildlife often make it difficult to keep an eye on the road.

That can be problematic, because although this storied road is now paved from end to end, there are still plenty of perils: hairpin turns, 12-per-cent grades and an endless parade of bulky trucks. On Day 17, near the Yukon border, we watched horrified as a recreational trailer clipped a French cyclist. He was knocked over but unhurt, somehow. The RV continued on, oblivious to the havoc it had caused.

The next unpredictable hazard was the rising gasoline prices, which have thrown a wrench into our budgeting. A litre of gas cost about 90 cents when we left Southern Ontario on Day 1, and generally rose as we drove got farther north: $1.00 … $1.10 … $1.20 … and finally $1.30, which we paid on Aug. 20 near Muncho Lake, B.C. We've also been forced to buy a new set of tires -- we noticed the old ones beginning to bald by the time we reached Whitehorse.

It took 20 days to reach Alaska, yet we didn't feel like we'd really arrived until we pulled into Anchorage on Day 21. After three weeks in the car, it was time to slow down and savour the restaurants, the pubs and the Sunday market.

But although Alaska's largest city is a good spot for stretching legs and unpacking bags, it remains a city surrounded by scenery, so we also used it as a base for hiking and sightseeing.

The byways around Anchorage are as remarkable as the ones you take to get there, and none is more remarkable than the Hatcher Pass Road, which we discovered almost by accident during a visit to the Independence Mine State Historical Park.

The paved Palmer-Fishhook Road follows a northward course from the farming town of Palmer to reach the former gold mine and Hatcher Pass. But the spur that leads west from the mine is pure pothole-and-gravel madness. The wildest stretch is concentrated near the east end, above the excellent Hatcher Pass Lodge: The road rises about 300 metres in three kilometers, an average 10-per-cent grade, to an alpine summit among the clouds. On our sunny afternoon, paragliders were swooping off a ridge, hanging against a backdrop of green valley laced with a shrinking band of silver road. Their flight seemed limitless, as if they might somehow be able to float all the way to Anchorage, an hour's drive to the south.

The Independence Mine is fascinating in its own right -- a reconstructed complex from the early 1900s, complete with workshops, trams, abandoned tunnel entrances and a furnished manager's home.

Hatcher Pass's competition for most scenic road was the Seward Highway, which loops southeast from Anchorage around the waters of Turnagain Arm and the base of the Chugach Mountains. It's designated a U.S. National Scenic Byway, but it's used by outdoor enthusiasts of every bent. We stopped to watch dozens of locals and tourists casting for salmon at 100-metre-wide Bird Creek, where fishermen are asked to cut their lines if grizzly bears approach.

Our destination here was Portage Glacier, reputed to be Alaska's most visited tourist attraction. The glacier was worth the visit; our boat tour took us close enough to clearly see the variation in tones and texture that typify ice fields of this size. It was also obvious how quickly the glacier is receding: 50 metres a year, by some estimates. The boat tour is necessary because it's no longer possible to see the ice from the visitor centre.

But if it was the end of the road that explained our draw to Alaska, we had to go farther -- to Homer, at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, southwest from Anchorage. Some Alaskan towns are farther west, but none of them are accessible by road.

Homer's other geographical quirk is the Homer Spit, a gravel bar that juts seven kilometres across Kachemak Bay, in a spectacular setting beneath more 4,000-foot mountains. It's a haven for vacationers, retirees and charter fishermen -- Cape Cod with glaciers, perhaps.

We stayed in a loft above a gift shop on the spit, took an hour tour in a Cessna and dipped our toes in the cold waters of the Pacific.

It really did feel like we'd reached the end of a journey, even though we still had thousands of kilometres to drive before we started home. Indeed, we still had thousands of kilometres to travel before we even left Homer. The end of the spit is also the terminus for the M/V Tustumena, an ocean-going ferry that was our home for a week on the monthly run out the Aleutian island chain.

We did finally have to leave, however; it was mid-August when our ferry returned to Homer, and summer businesses were already closing up shop for the season. So from the Kenai we drove back past Anchorage toward the Top-of-the-World Highway, which would take us through Dawson City on a short detour before we headed south to Vancouver.

But when we descended into a low area around Tok, near the Yukon border, it got cloudy in a hurry. We were puzzled until we rolled down the windows and inhaled: It wasn't mist, but smoke from a giant fire in the north. It obscured the view all afternoon as we drove the rugged highway, and when we reached the Yukon River crossing, Dawson was barely visible, just a few hundred metres away. It was an anticlimactic exit from Alaska after everything we'd seen heading the other way.