A realtor and an insurance broker walk into the wild.

If it sounds like the setup for a joke, for Rick Stockel and John Sherman, it was a plan. Two years of preparation and anticipation had brought the two longtime friends and Richmond classmates, both just past their 61st birthdays, to the shoulder of this hard-packed dirt-and-gravel road more than 4,000 miles from home. At their feet, the ground dropped away into scrub. In the distance, the terrain rose again to steep ridges.

“This is where we have to start walking,” Rick says in the video footage he captured in the moment, the camera panning the spare landscape.

It was a Sunday, late August of 2022, and ahead of them lay what they had come here for: five days and nights trekking in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, a raw and challenging subarctic wilderness larger than the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware put together. The gravel road where Rick and John stood, along with two fellow adventurers Rick had picked to join them, is the only one that serves Denali’s more than 6 million acres. Fifteen percent of the park is covered by glaciers. It is braided by multiple rivers and thousands of miles of streams. More than 200 species of animals live in the park, including grizzlies, black bears, wolves, coyote, lynx, caribou, and moose. If you’re not conversant with a compass, a topographical (aka “topo”) map, and some solid backcountry skills, you might quickly find yourself lost and in a load of trouble.

Read the story in the University of Richmond magazine.