Dalton Highway and the Brooks Range

Cruising the pipeline

Still known locally as the Haul Road, the Dalton was built along with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s. Just over 400 miles of mostly gravel runs from north of Fairbanks up to Deadhorse and the oilfields of the North Slope, crossing the Yukon River, Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range along the way. Like the Dempster Highway in the Yukon Territory, this road wasn't built for a Sunday drive. An hour can pass without seeing another vehicle. Two headlights and a dust cloud on the horizon become a mud-crusted big rig pulling two trailers, hurling gravel, hauling ass across the tundra. Most of the other pickups on the road belong to oilfield workers or to Alyeska, the company that owns and operates the pipeline. After crossing the Yukon, the Dalton snakes through bogs, bridges several rivers, passes a few million stunted black spruce and crosses the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north. Not long afterward the jagged, austere Brooks Range rises on the horizon. The most northerly mountains on the continent, these ancient peaks rise like islands above the tundra. The silence is sobering. Dall sheep stand sentinel high on the rocky slopes.

River valleys full of wolf and grizzly tracks rise through willow-choked banks to low hills covered with blueberry and low-bush cranberry.The tundra here is staggering in its variety, with one square foot containing stiff, mint-green lichen, mosses of deep green, crimson and pale yellow and four or five different mushrooms moistened by recent rains. Above the tree line, the mountains are breaking apart, streaming scree slopes into the valleys below. It's a special and stilling place.

My group camped at Marion Creek for two nights, one of the Bureau of Land Management campgrounds along the highway and just north of Coldfoot. On the second day we drove up to Atigun Pass (at 4,800 feet the highest road pass in Alaska.) Then we hiked east along Nutirwik Creek, a braided river wandering in channels across the gravelly valley floor, past animal tracks and up into the hills for views and blueberries. Then an arctic bath as I stripped down and splashed off in Marion Creek.

Road, river and pipeline in the Brooks Range

My office at Marion Creek

Ursus arctos was here

The mosquito killer

Hitching into the Brooks

Atigun Pass in the Brooks Range