INSIDE ALASKAN, AND OUT ON THE ROAD
 
by Jim Elder
jimelder@wyoming.com
Many of the camper feature ideas I had considered in 30-some years of RV travel had already been incorporated into the current Alaskan models. Don Wheat showed interest in some of my other suggestions, and we decided to combine my travel plans with our mutual interest in product development.

It takes time to build a new Alaskan Camper, especially when incorporating new features and technology. But we were committed to assignments in Newfoundland and Labrador, with a special project in Newfoundland that could not be delayed. Don suggested we begin with a trade-in 1991 model he had available, to get a better understanding of where Alaskan had been and an appreciation of where it is going. That would give us both perspective and reference as the new research model took shape.
The '91 was installed on a 1997 Ford F350 Turbodiesel dualie. That's perhaps overkill—a heavy-duty 3/4 ton would carry the 10-foot front dinette Alaskan with a normal load of personal gear. Dual rear wheels are not really needed with the telescoping camper's low center of gravity and low crosswind profile. But we wanted extra load capacity to carry the tools.
Tools to build houses. Habitat for Humanity International homes, on a 5-day 7-home "Blitz Build" in St. John's, Newfoundland. The "Habitat Gypsies" were joining several hundred other volunteers, from all over Canada, the US, and several foreign countries. We belong to the Gypsy group, 500 RV-based HFHI volunteers. Gypsies are mostly

 retired, or have seasonal jobs, who travel once or twice or several times each year to Habitat work sites. We bring our own tools, pay our own way, work for a week or two, and ride off into the sunset having got much more than we gave. More on the Gypsies in a later report. St. John's, Newfoundland is 4,367 miles from Chehalis, Washington, not including a 14-hour ferry trip from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Argentia, Newfoundland. Best we get rolling. As of this posting, Al is leaving the Pacific Coast, embarking on a multi-year adventure, hoping to find and share with you our experiences— people, places, technical tips, and test results. We’ll include our mistakes and misfortunes, along with the discoveries. The theme song could be the old children’s ditty, “The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see.”

We invite you to ride along to Newfoundland and points beyond. To encourage you to bookmark this web page and join our travels, we reaffirm this promise: Some travel writers tend to be elitist. They tell about places and people only accessible to the privileged. Anywhere Al will go, you can go. If Alcan, Yukan.
We left you last time with the subject of quality. In the years preceding Wheat's purchase of Alaskan Campers, the operation had been "franchised" to several locations in North America. Construction practices were not always consistent. The campers were always good, but some were "gooder." Don Wheat moved all production to Chehalis in 1990 and made quality the first priority.
Each camper has about 450 man-hours in it, roughly three times the industry average. This is a result of careful craftsmanship, and the fact that each camper is built to customer order, according to the layout and option preferences. That's a chicken/egg thing, because the labor intensive operation allows that custom service. Models and options are described on the Alaskan Camper home page (www.alaskancamper.com).
I went to the plant in Chehalis as a vehicle journalist, on the chance there might be a good story for one of the magazines I work for. After seeing what the Alaskan Campers had become, a long-planned project got up and running. We had dreamed of one day embarking on a series of travels taking up where Kuralt and Steinbeck left off, using a go-anywhere RV as our "Rocinante."