Living in Alaska - Life in the Last Frontier

We are fully recovered from last weekend’s trip up the Dalton. Steve has gone back to work and the truck has been washed both inside and out. We’re still reveling in the memories of that fabulous drive and look forward to doing it again sometime. I’d like to drive at least a portion of the road in the fall.  I can only imagine the vibrance of autumn colors across such a vast and beautiful landscape.

My last blog entry has drawn quite a bit of attention, and I want to thank all of you for taking the time to leave comments. It is always wonderful to see comments from my regular readers, and I’d like to extend a warm welcome to my new readers as well. I hope you’ll continue to visit.

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We have had so much rain lately! While it is much needed for our wildflowers, and most importantly to keep the risk of wildfires down, it’s not making too many of us very happy. With summer being so brief, I’d much prefer to have sunshine everyday. However, if it’s a choice between rain and smokey air - I’ll take the rain. I don’t melt.

The rain has caused our lawn to positively EXPLODE with growth. We are thrilled about this, but it is in need a mowing - badly! - and we can’t do it while everything’s wet. The fescue and other grasses in the seed mixture have come to life and the lawn is starting to look like a pasture.

My wildflower garden in the rear of the yard is also doing well, but I have no blooms yet. I wonder now if the seed was sown too thickly. I hope not. I would like to see color back there before autumn comes.

Steve’s zucchini and tomato plants are producing now. We have three zucchinis so far. His tomato plants have four tomatoes. I do hope there will be more. I’ve enjoyed watching the growth process, which seems to move in fast forward with the long daylight hours.

I took Sedona with me on errands Friday and, as always, we made a stop at Creamers Field for a walk.  The front field was aglow with yellow flowers and there were about a dozen sandhill cranes visiting. The cranes stop at Creamers in great numbers in both the spring and the fall. I was pleasantly surprised to see them on Friday.

I called Creamers Field Visitor Center to inquire about those gorgeous yellow flowers, and was told that the plants were safflower. Amazingly, the crop was planted many years ago and continues to come back every year (when not mowed down or plowed under). The contrast between the yellow flowers, the green grasses and trees, and the blue skies was stunning.  Add in the rusty brown color of the cranes - with their bright red crowns - and I couldn’t resist the photo op.

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(Warning: This is a very, very, very, long entry!)

Steve and I left Friday morning on an adventure that would begin about 90 miles from our house - at the start of the Dalton Hwy. The James W. Dalton Hwy (known informally as The Haul Road) is a 414-mile road that begins at the Elliott Highway, north of Fairbanks, and ends at Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. It was built as a supply road to support the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1974.

Taken from the BLM website:

The Dalton Highway stretches 414 miles across northern Alaska from Livengood (84 miles north of Fairbanks) to Deadhorse and the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay. Built during construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the 1970s, this mostly gravel highway travels through rolling, forested hills, across the Yukon River and Arctic Circle, through the rugged Brooks Range, and over the North Slope to the Arctic Ocean. Along most of its length, you’ll see no restaurants, no gift shops, no service stations—just forest, tundra, and mountains, crossed by a double ribbon of road and pipe.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages a swath of public lands along the highway from the Yukon River to the north side of the Brooks Range. Within the Dalton Corridor, the BLM maintains campgrounds, rest areas, interpretive panels and a visitor center.

I borrowed this map of the Dalton Highway from the BLM website, so you can see the route we drove, and the various places we explored:

Quite a bit of preparation went into this trip. The highway, which directly parallels the pipeline, is one of the most isolated roads in the United States. There are only three towns along the route: Coldfoot (mile 175), Wiseman (mile 188), and Deadhorse (mile 414).  Gas is available in only two locations along the way: the Yukon River bridge and Coldfoot. It is also available at the end of the line. Unless you want to pay extremely high fuel prices, it’s always a good idea to carry extra gas with you. We carried an extra 25 gallons of fuel for the truck (which only gets about 13mpg). We topped off our tank in Coldfoot, both coming and going, and paid $3.57/gallon.

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The cottonwood trees are shedding. Actually, the trees are Balsam Poplar and not cottonwood, although we refer to them as such because of the fluff that falls every summer.  This cottony fluff is annoying for most, and causes allergy problems for many.  When I take Sedona out for her walk, I try to avoid breathing in the fluff, but I’ve been waking up with a stuffy head most mornings so I don’t think I’ve been very successful.

I took these photos yesterday, so you can see our ’snow’ in June:

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