The Dalton Highway, AKA Haul Road

What could be more fun than a thousand mile round trip from Fairbanks, across the Arctic Circle, over the Brooks mountain range, through 200 miles of North Slope tundra, and up into the industrial town of Deadhorse, gateway to the Prudhoe Bay oilfields. Again, not something that interested Andrea, but with relentless persuasion I knew it could happen! With a new set of tires on the Pathfinder, recently named Going Broke, two spare wheels, and an additional five gallon gas canister we were set.

At 11.20am on Friday morning we departed Fairbanks, not sure we would be able to make the entire journey, but we were determined to drive the 200 miles to the Arctic Circle. The weather was crappy with rain showers, although the weekend looked fairly nice on the upper sections of the Haul Road, named after the truck loads of equipment and supplies were hauled up to the Arctic Ocean/ Beaufort Sea to support man’s quest for black gold. Other than the scenic byway road, where only 20% is paved, the only thing that we planned on trying to do was the Arctic ocean tour – this was a little excessive at $59 per person just to get to the water, but everything is expensive when you go above 66 degrees latitude!

The first eighty miles is known as the Elliott Highway, until Livengood where it bears onto the Dalton Highway. North from here there are a few places to get overpriced gas, very limited tire services, and at a couple of the road camps they provide food and lodging. A basic shoebox size room in a very rustic looking building would have set us back $199, with trucker food on top. We had enough food with us for the two nights but had no idea where we would be camping when we set off.

Rule number one on the haul road was that truckers have the right of way so we made sure that we pulled over whenever one approached, which was quite often. Other than that we just hoped that we didn’t have more than two punctures, didn’t run out of gas, and managed to stay on the road. After passing the Yukon River camp, which housed a small but useful tourist information hut, we arrived at a turnoff for the Arctic Circle – we were now 115 miles along the Dalton Highway and 200 miles from Fairbanks. This made for a cool photo opportunity as we had arrived at 66° 33’, a place where in summer the sun doesn’t set for around 80 days, and struggles to rise for 64 days, making for a hell of a long winter.

One of the big highlights of the weekend was coming across a little Japanese guy and his trailer. He was stopped at the side of the road at one of the many muddy sections, where we assumed his bike had a mechanical, that is until we looked and there was no bike. This guy had walked, pulling a trailer, from Dawson Creek at the start of the Alaska Highway, arrived in Fairbanks some 1600 miles later, then decided that he hadn’t yet had enough so was now walking up to Deadhorse. Now this road is really remote, bleak, and busy with fully loaded rigs that blow by at amazing speeds scattering anything in their path with stones and dirt. We stopped to chat with him, apparently something every one has been doing – we found out later that he was also the talk of the highway as truckers joked about the crazy nut over CB radio.

After driving for 260 miles we arrived at Coldfoot, a small outpost with slightly more civilization, including fuel, tire services, food and limited lodging. Again, hugely overpriced as we found out when we filled up with gas – a mere $5.50 a gallon but with no other option we gladly paid. Across the highway is a fancy combined tourist information center manned by National Park staff, BLM, and Alaska Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. We would never have expected this facility in such a remote setting.

All we had to do now was to make our was through the mountains, cross a couple hundred miles of tundra and we were there – what could be easier? Driving through the amazing Brooks mountains was easy, albeit very cloudy on the way up, what wasn’t easy was trying to fathom how forty years ago workers had managed to put in 800 miles of pipeline, some over and some under the ground. With permafrost, unstable ground, and the potential for avalanches and earthquakes this is an amazing feat of engineering.

What happened next was part lucky and part unlucky – the low tire pressure light had come on many miles prior but after checking the tires once I chose to ignore it, thinking it was due to the rough road and all the potholes we had bounced through. We decided to pull into a side trail and stop for a snack a hundred miles or so from Deadhorse, upon which we noticed a very flat rear tire – ooops how the hell didn’t we notice that! I hoped the tire wasn’t ruined, but this wasn’t the time to be concerned with that as I now had to splash around in the mud and swap it out for one of the spares. By now both the inside and outside of the Pathfinder were filthy, with the outside also covered in corrosive calcium chloride which is put down on the road surface to stop excessive dust. What a fun job cleaning up this mess I have when we get back to Fairbanks!

With no more problems we arrived in Deadhorse, not a usual inhabited town, but dirty, cold, and desolate, built only for contractors supporting the extraction of oil. With a permanent population of zero the town houses only businesses and prefabricated housing for their shiftwork employees. We were still a few miles from the Arctic Ocean, but getting there required security clearance, available only to Deadhorse Camp Arctic tours – we had decided to register for the tour on the deadline, 24 hours prior. We joined a group of likeminded travelers, all with one thing in mind, to conquer the Dalton Highway, and possibly to leap into the frigid northern waters.

The tour consisted of a twenty mile drive through the various oilfields, ending just short of BP’s Liberty and Endicott drilling rigs, set on manmade gravel pads right on the shoreline. Everything about the place is mind-blowing on a grand scale, and compares to seeing the massive Grasberg gold and copper mine in Indonesian Papua. Our arrival at a dirty looking Arctic meant I now had to strip down and go for it – three of us are now members of the Polar Bear club!

This long weekend was a fantastic experience, although next time it would be nice to have more time and see the Gates to the Arctic National Park and take a flight to Barrow, the US’s most northerly town, to visit the local Iñupiat Eskimos and polar bear viewing. Fat-biking the length of the highway is now on my bucket list too – maybe a winter ride would be fun where the temperature can drop to 80 below!

July 25th – July 27th 2014