Road Trip to the Arctic

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My brother has been traveling Western Canada and Alaska the past two months so flew up this past Monday to meet him in Fairbanks for a little road trip up the Dalton Highway - a 415 mile largely unpaved "haul road" that runs from outside Fairbanks Alaska up to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean. It follows the Alaska Pipeline over the Brooks Range and vast expanses of tundra and Boreal forest. The only settlements along the route are Coldfoot (pop 9) and Wiseman (pop 13) and no cell service for most of the route.  

Dalton Highway Sign.jpg

Dalton Highway Map.jpg

Dalton Highway.jpg

 

First stop was the crossing of the mighty Yukon River.  Not too far past that was the Arctic Circle (bucket list -check) where we made camp for the night.   It was still surprisingly hot and smoky and with the midnight sun beating down.  Got that song “I wear my sunglasses at night” stuck in my head.

Yukon River.jpg

Arctic Circle.jpg

Next day we made it to Coldfoot and stopped off at the little café/bar, which is the most northern place you can by a beer in the United States.  All of the arctic villages and work camps north of Coldfoot are dry.   Good thing we stocked up on beer in Fairbanks.

Coldfoot Beer.jpg

Coldfoot.jpg

Smoke was still bad as we pushed on through the Boreal forests of the Brooks Range and up and over the “other” continental divide where water flows to the south to the Pacific and to the north to the Arctic Ocean.

Boreal Forest.jpg

Dalton Pass.jpg

Spent the next night tundra camping at the base of the Brooks Range on the North Slope in Alaska. Ground was squishy, mosquitoes were thick, and the smoke from the wildfires obscuring the view of the mountains.

Tundra Camping III.jpg

Tundra Camping.jpg

Tundra Camping II.jpg

Along the way, we saw caribou and musk ox.   We also lost a back window when a trucker came roaring past us honking his horn and showering the Sprinter with rocks.

Caribou.jpg

Musk Ox.jpg

End of the road - Deadhorse, AK on the Arctic Ocean. Couldn’t drive any further. Deadhorse has only a handful of full time residents and is instead a working oil field featuring a sprawling and chaotic collection of oil rigs, pump houses, trailers, equipment yards, and pre-fab dormitory buildings ("camps") on stilts above the permafrost which house thousands of traveling workers (95% male and numbers varying with the price of oil).   We camped on the outskirts of town and did some fishing for Arctic Grayling.   Felt bad because there were workers who just got off shift fishing too and we were the only ones drinking beer.  If those dudes get caught with alcohol, it’s a one-way ticket back home with no chance of working the North Slope again.

End of the Road.jpg

End of the Road II.jpg

End of the Road III.jpg

Cool

 

thanks for that

Woah

extreme road-tripping

thx for the cool travelogue + pics!

Very cool pics, thanks Ken  (a buddy to go to Antarctica earlier this year, had a cool project he was working on)     

Very cool, Ken! I really admire how much you and your brother travel and make it a point to see and get to know so many cool places. Nice work!

Priceless!!

Thanks for the road trip show and tell, Ken.  I'm guessing you're not expecting a tourist resort when you go to a place called Deadhorse.

Way cool!  Thanks for sharing & safe home...

looks like a tough trip

Wowza, Ken!!!

 

Kai was just talking about taking a road trip up to Alaska and I told him that I didn't think the Prius could survive that one.


Now I know for sure....

 

Thanks for sharing!

Very fine Zoning, many thanks.

Very cool photos & tale of your trip!

Thinking about the north pole / arctic always causes me to beg the question: which way is "up"?

 

Great trip, great job Ken.  Too bad the about the smoke though.

Does the bay come down to Deadhorse?  Is that beach the bay? The map looks like it is short of the bay and the sign said no go to the bay.

 

>>>>Does the bay come down to Deadhorse?

You can't drive to the Arctic Ocean.  The road stops in Deadhorse, which is a couple miles inland.   To see the Arctic Ocean, you have to book a tour of the off limits portion of the oil field.   The tour wasn't cheap ($65 per person) but because we drove that far, we went ahead and did it.  Interesting insights on life in the oil field and they let us out at the Arctic Ocean for about a half hour.  My brother went out for a short chilly swim, but I stayed onshore. 

The place where we camped in Deadhorse was down by the Sagavanirktok River, which flows from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean.