Alaska Roadtrip by David Rose

Today we’re featuring a stunning travel series by film photographer David Rose. David traveled from Los Angeles to Alaska and capturing each bit of the incredible landscape and wildlife on film. Here are a few words from David about the experience…

So many words, so little time. It’s not every day you find out a friend is about to move to Alaska and needs to somehow get their car up there… Cue a 12 day roadtrip that spanned a total of 3,600 miles from Los Angeles, CA to Anchorage, AK – much of which was spent on the road driving from sunup to sundown day after day.

The start of our journey took us North through San Francisco, and then further on up the coast through Oregon and then Washington until we reached the Canadian Border. Although this sounds far, it actually ended up being the shortest leg of the trip.

It’s hard to imagine how huge the north country is until you’ve spent days driving through it and barely denting the overall distance… We drove from the bottom to the top of British Columbia, spending one of the nights on the Liard River – a natural hot spring in the Canadian wilderness. We could see the northern lights dance in faint pulses above us while relaxing in the heated river on that frigid Fall night. From here, we traversed through Whitehorse in the Yukon and made our way across the seldom transited Alaskan-Canadian border near Tok, AK.

Once we finally reached Alaska it felt like everything had suddenly increased 10x in size. The vastness of the landscapes was immediately staggering, and within the first few hours we had already seen all manner of wildlife, including moose, bald eagles, and a close encounter with a female grizzly bear and her cubs. It took just one more day’s drive to get to our final destination of Anchorage.

I tend to be a conservative shooter, but on this trip I shot over 30 rolls of film (a personal record at the time). This included some rolls of double exposures I had taken with this cute girl I recently met who would later go on to become my wife (plot twist!), and even a completely unplanned triple exposure that mysteriously tied 3 distinct locations together – an apartment in Paris, a sunset in Southern California, and the Space Needle in Seattle, WA.

Analog cameras and films used: Pentax K1000 (Find at KEH Camera or eBay), Pentax ME Super (Find at KEH Camera or eBay) | Kodak Portra 160, 400, and 800 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Ektar 100 (Find on Amazon), Kodak Gold 200 (Find on Amazon), Fuji 400h (Find on Amazon), Fuji Velvia 100 (Find on Amazon), Fuji Provia 100 (Find on Amazon)

Connect with David: Website | Instagram

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