6633 North: The Haul Road Introduction

Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Haul Road Introduction

The Dalton Highway , originally known as the North Slope Haul Road, is 415 miles long. Round trip from Fairbanks is 1,000 miles. According to The Milepost, it is one of Alaska's most remote and challenging roads. Services are few and far between, with food and gas only available at the Yukon Crossing, Coldfoot, and Deadhorse, aka Prudhoe Bay. Road conditions vary constantly. There is pavement or chip-sealed road, some gravel sections, with washboard that makes your teeth rattle. There is graded dirt, just plain dirt, mud and muck. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour for the entire length of the highway, but only trucks make that speed, and they are throwing rocks and mud into the windshields of oncoming traffic.

Some of the road is built up to 15 feet above the tundra with little or no shoulder. There are grades with 12-15% climbs. Ruts abound, and flat tires are common.The road is 28 feet wide, which is barely enough for two vehicles to pass one another.

The truckers own the road, which was only built to provide for the building on the pipeline. They even have a truckers association postcard they give to bicyclists, saying, politely that there could be injury or death because the truckers can't see bicyclists! In other words, stay the ---- off the road!

Actually, the ones we passed were polite and slowed down but we were in our camper, and John was not on a bike.

The road and the pipeline actually goes to Valdez (As in Exxon Valdez) which is 800 miles. It was built between 1974 and 1977 and cost $8 billion. The BLM manages 2.1 million acres along the road, which was named for James William Dalton, an arctic engineer involved in early oil exploration on the North Slope.