Fond of road trips? Millions of people plan their summers around road trips to see natural wonders, visit family or just to explore. Of course summer is the prime time for such a trip, especially in Alaska.
When planning a road trip, the informed traveler will check the National Weather Service for the most up-to-date forecasts along the route.
But what if the situation were reversed? What if a route was designed with no specific destination but aiming to follow the weather? This is essentially what storm chasers do in Tornado Alley. For the rest of us who wish to avoid tornadoes, why not follow a path of pleasant weather?
But what constitutes pleasant weather exactly? This is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the years and, unfortunately, there is no satisfactory answer. One person's pleasant day brings complaints from someone else. We hear on television newscasts that the weather will be pleasant, or nice, or unsettled, or some other descriptive term that conforms to the audience's expectations.
Without conducting a survey, I am left to arbitrarily decide what constitutes a pleasant day. Based on nothing other than my own subjective judgment, I chose 70 degrees Fahrenheit as an ideal temperature. I know, I know, there will be complaints about this.
Road trip
But imagine that you really like days where the high temperature is 70 and you wanted to plan a road trip where the temperature always hovers around that mark.
Well, wait no more. I have done the planning for you. Since you cannot know what the temperature will be more than a week in advance, the current limit of detailed forecasts, you have to go with Plan B. That means looking through a climate almanac. The go-to almanac for United States data is published by the National Center for Environmental Information, which computes the daily normal high temperature for more than 7,000 stations all across the United States. In addition, Environment Canada publishes monthly normals for stations across the north country. "Normal" is a technical term that refers to a smoothed average for a 30-year period. It is close to an arithmetic average but not exactly the same.
North America
A yearlong route following a normal high temperature of 70 is shown on the accompanying map as a red line. The progress required at the start of each month is shown with a yellow dot. The route always follows a major highway and was selected to maximize the number of states visited. Out of convenience, the route begins and ends at an international border (Texas to California). Other routes exist that begin in Florida and encounter more of the Northeast, but I digress.
So start up your cars, RVs, motorcycles or bicycles, and let's go. Here is your 13,235-mile route where the normal high temperature is always within 1 degree of 70.
• On Jan. 1, the normal high temperature in deep south Texas is 70. This is a good place to start.
• By Feb. 1, the trip has only progressed as far as Laredo, Texas. The next two months will be spent on Interstate 35. (180 miles in January)
• On March 1, the slow trek is only pulling up to the south part of San Antonio, Texas. (110 miles in February)
• Throughout March, the higher sun angle warms things up and the trip moves to the Texas/Oklahoma border by April 1. (342 miles in March)
• Now that April is upon us, we start heading east and northeast until we near the Capitol by the end of the month. (1,204 miles in April)
• During May, we go through Pittsburgh and Chicago and end the month in extreme northern Wisconsin on June 1. (946 miles in May)
• A tour of northern states and Canada is in order during June. In fact, we go more miles in June than any other month. Starting around the second week, our route makes a right turn on to the Alcan Highway. We travel through Calgary and go past Whitehorse on our way to and through Fairbanks via the Richardson Highway. It then drops down the Parks Highway and picks up the Glenn Highway in Palmer. The month ends near Whitehorse (again) heading southeast. If traveling on bicycle, June is quite a workout. (3,873 miles in June)
• In July, we turn on Canada Highway 37 and head south toward Bellingham, Washington, and finish the month in Portland, Oregon. (1,584 miles in July)
• The August portion of the trip is a scenic section along Highway 101 through Oregon. (361 miles in August)
• In September, we loop back onto Interstate 5 before turning due east in Eugene, Oregon. The route continues through to the Snake River Plain in Idaho before turning south through South Dakota and into Nebraska. (1,767 miles in September)
• In October, the trip makes its way to near Kansas City, Kansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and ends at the Texas-New Mexico state line. (1,268 miles in October)
• The November portion of the trip follows Interstate 10 from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Arizona, where it heads north along Interstate 40, before departing for Las Vegas, Nevada, and ending near Los Angeles, California. (1,358 miles in November)
• December is another leisurely month that only takes us from Los Angeles down to San Diego, California. (242 miles)
The route goes through parts of 27 states and three Canadian provinces. Since I first posted the map on my Facebook page, many people have expressed interest in following the route for part of the year. The map has appeared on websites for RV, motorcycle and bicycle enthusiasts. It has also appeared on the websites for BuzzFeed and The Atlantic.
Here in Alaska, we have as many road miles as the state of Vermont, which is about 70 times smaller. And Alaskans know that many of the best places to see are off the road network. An Alaska-themed map might depict a snowmachine route that travels between Interior national parks and refuges. For sizeable chunks of the year, a traveler could find areas where the normal low temperature is below 0, rivers are the highways, and daylight lasts less than five hours.
Brian Brettschneider is an Anchorage-based environmental planner and climatologist who writes an Alaska weather blog.