To the Arctic Circle!

In my mind, we came to the Fairbanks area primarily for one reason: to drive the Dalton Highway aka "North Slope Haul Road."  This is the road that is seen on History Channel's Ice Road Truckers.
Even before this show came out, I have always wanted to drive this road just to see what was on it.


The Entire Haul Road is 414 miles of broken pavement and gravel to the Arctic Ocean and the North Slope Oil Field. We went about 175 up the road to the "town" of Coldfoot, and then of course 175 miles back. The Dalton actually starts about 70 miles from Fairbanks, so as you can see we had a lot of driving to do this trip round trip in one day.

 Suffice to say this drive was everything that I expected it to be and more. The scenery is amazing and everywhere you look, you can really tell that you are in a place that is way up in latitude and gets to -50 regularly in the winter. When you turn off the motor of your vehicle, all you hear is the sound of silence.

Here are some pictures of the road and scenery. In the first and  last picture, you can see the ever present Alaska Pipeline, which is always paralleling the road on one side or the other.

 On the way to the Arctic Circle, we crossed the Yukon River. If you remember previous blog posts, we have crossed the same river in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and floated across the river on a ferry in Dawson City, YT. The Yukon river bridge here is a wooden deck and has a 6% grade.

 The Dalton highway has some extremely steep hills. I would estimate 15% grades. These grades are rocks/mud in the summer and ice in the winter, so it can be very slippery for a loaded semi truck. To take care of this problem, truckers on the Dalton have a "chase" semi tractor on heavy loads that actually pushes on the trailer of the truck in front of it to get them up these steep hills. Here is one we saw on the road. The chase truck seen here is not pushing on the trailer in front as they are going down a hill.

We finally arrived at the Arctic Circle at mile 115 of the Dalton highway. Here we are picture both below the arctic circle on the left of the sign and above the arctic circle on the right of the sign.

Lastly, we went about 70 more miles up the road from the Arctic Circle to the "town" of Coldfoot, which is featured prominently in the show "Ice Road Truckers." Here is the combination gas station/ post office/ eating establishment. Don't like the food Don't want to pay over $5.00 a gallon for gas? Too bad, you have to stop, next service up the road is another 270 miles of gravel and washboard.

Despite the above picture, Coldfoot is actually in a really beautiful location. Gates of the Arctic National Park is on the West Side of town, and the famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is on the east side of town.