Driving The “Haul Road” (Officially the Dalton Hwy)
(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.
