 |
| The Loop, Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier National Park, Montana |
In July 2018 we drove from our driveway in Germantown, Maryland to the Canadian Rockies and back, which took sixteen days and about 6,280 miles. The truck was Storm Trooper, our 2012 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor. First generation, desert-racing-inspired, 411 horsepower from a 6.2-litre V8, and an aftermarket mid-perch front suspension that gave it a stance out of all proportion to anything we actually asked of it.
We wrote the trip up in three parts, and this page is the index to all three. It also carries the things that only make sense at whole-route scale: total distances, the border crossings, where the fuel gaps are and how the sixteen days actually divided up. If you are working out whether this drive is feasible for you, start here and then follow the parts in order.
USA–Canada Overland 2018 — Series Summary
Sixteen days, roughly 6,280 miles, fourteen US states and three Canadian provinces, driven as one loop from Germantown, Maryland to Jasper, Alberta and back. This page gathers all three parts of the series in order, adds the whole-route context that no single part covers, and sets out what the drive actually asks of you: border logistics, fuel gaps, mountain-pass timing and how long each stage really takes.
| What's Covered | |
| ▸ | Part 1: Germantown to Wall, South Dakota — two long days, nine states, the Appalachians to the edge of the West |
| ▸ | Part 2: Badlands, Yellowstone and Glacier — six days through the Black Hills, Devils Tower, Wyoming and Montana |
| ▸ | Part 3: Chief Mountain to Jasper and the Long Way Home — the Canadian Rockies and the eastbound prairie run |
| ▸ | Route, Terrain and Context by Leg — highways, geology and elevation for all nine stages |
| ▸ | Planning This Drive Yourself — timing, border crossings, fuel gaps and what we would change |
| ▸ | What This Loop Set Up — how a 2018 Raptor trip became the template for a 27-country, four-continent expedition |
