The Haul Road to the Arctic Ocean

At Livengood the pavement ends. For a few miles the blacktop holds, patched and heaved, and then the surface changes to loose gray gravel, and the Dalton Highway begins. Mile 0 is a pullout where the road turns off the Elliott Highway and puts its shoulder to the work of going north. A green sign at the junction gives the distance to Deadhorse, a number large enough to recalibrate the sense of scale.

The road was built for oil. That is the first thing to understand about it.

Before the Trans-Alaska Pipeline carried its first barrel of crude south, someone had to move the pipe itself, the modules, the fuel, the drill rigs, and the machinery from the Yukon River to the Arctic coast. In a few frantic seasons in the mid-1970s the road was cut through the interior. It has been a working road longer than it has been anything else. The names change on the tank trailers, but the work is the same: freight north, fuel north, and the long empty running back.

The highway carries the name of James Dalton, an engineer who spent years on the edges of the Arctic working out how heavy equipment could move over country that would not support a wheel. The road took his name later. The drivers still call it the haul road.

It is not a fast road. The gravel washboards until the teeth rattle in summer, and in winter the frost leaves the surface as a series of shelves. A loaded rig owns the center of the road; a lighter vehicle follows behind and eats its dust. The road has no center line for most of its length. It has mileposts instead, counting north from zero, worn by studded tires.

All the way, the pipeline keeps company with the highway. In places it runs buried; in more places it runs raised on steel legs, doubling back on itself in slow deliberate zigzags, the angles it needs to breathe against the cold. It crosses the road the way a branch crosses a path. Both are going to the same place.

In summer the ditch lines run fireweed, magenta along the gravel, and the dust hangs in the long light. In winter the crushed rock freezes to a surface harder than pavement, and the trucks run on studs, and there is no hour that is not dark.

The River in the Way

Fifty-odd miles in, the road comes out of the spruce to the Yukon River. The E.L. Patton Bridge takes the highway across, the only place in Alaska where a road crosses that river. The bridge is a plain work of steel, and the river is bigger than the bridge pretends to be: in summer a moving weight of silt, in winter a white plain marked by snowmachine tracks. In spring the river breaks up with a sound like distant artillery, piling ice on the banks, and the bridge waits it out.

The road climbs past Finger Mountain, a bare fin of rock rising out of the black spruce, with a boardwalk where a traveler stands and lets the wind arrive unbroken from the north. At Gobblers Knob the stairs of a fire lookout climb above the treeline, and from the top the whole country lies down: the low forest running to the horizon, the Brooks Range standing ahead in a blue wall.

Near the hundred-and-fifteenth mile the road crosses the Arctic Circle. There is a pullout and a sign, and the trees are shorter here, bowed by the same wind. The road rolls on across the low divide, out of the Yukon drainage into the country that drains north.

Coldfoot comes at about the hundred-and-seventy-fifth mile. It is not much: a truck stop, a few buildings, a landing strip at the edge of the trees. It is the last fuel for 240 miles, and the whole feeling of the road gathers there, in the diesel smell and the hard closing of a heavy door.

The name is older than the highway. Gold seekers bound for Wiseman in the early 1900s reached these flats, weighed what the country still asked of them, and turned back. Cold feet. The place kept the word.

A narrower road turns off here and winds over toward Wiseman, an old mining settlement that refuses to be a ghost town. The Dalton goes on, north, into the mountains.

Atigun Pass

The Brooks Range is the top of the country. The highway crosses it at Atigun Pass, the highest point on the road. The climb runs up the Dietrich Valley beside a braided river, past the last dwarf birch and willow, until the slopes are only rock and the work of wind. In the pass the wind is constant. It drives snow across the road in winter and whips at the edges of the grade in every other season. The faces above the road are scarred with chutes where the spring snow releases.

The road has no guardrails. The shoulder drops away into tundra or talus. In winter the pass is a discipline: keep the speed down, stay in the ruts, do not stop on the grade. The drivers talk on the radio about the pass as a living thing — a word for whether it is open, a word for whether it is ugly.

At the top of the pass is a divide. South of it, water runs eventually to the Bering Sea. North of it, water runs to the Arctic Ocean. It is a bare place for such an important boundary, marked only by the road and the wind arriving from a long way off.

North of the pass the country opens out. The trees are gone entirely. Tundra lies in vast patterned polygons — raised ridges of earth enclosing shallow ponds, the signature of permafrost — and the sky is so large that the road seems to have shrunk. In summer the ground is a wet green quilt. In fall it turns gold and red. In winter it is only white and shade.

Caribou use this country. The Central Arctic herd crosses the highway at this latitude by the thousands on its way to the coast, and in some weeks of the year the road belongs to the animals. A cow and a calf can take an hour to decide to cross. The drivers idle and wait. Nobody honks at the arctic.

Deadhorse, at the Top

The road runs its last miles beside the braided channels of the Sagavanirktok River. The architecture of the oilfield appears slowly: rows of light, gravel pads, tanks, more pipelines, a fence line. At mile 414 the road ends.

Deadhorse is not a town so much as an arrangement of parts. Everything in it arrived by truck or plane, and everything stands on a pad of gravel laid thick to keep the permafrost cold underneath. The road ends in a scatter of turnaround gravel and the long low buildings of the work camps.

The Beaufort Sea is close, somewhere beyond the last buildings and the flat miles of tundra. The road does not go to it. The ground between Deadhorse and the ocean is oilfield land, closed, and so the traveler meets the Arctic Ocean only as a horizon: reached up to, and no further.

The Dalton is the only public road in the country that gets that far. It is the condition of the road that it stops before the water. The traveler who came from Livengood steps out into the wind, feels the absence of trees, the light coming low over the tundra, the scale of what has been crossed — and then turns around, because the only way out is the way in. The 414 miles run back under the tires, south, the country once again in the right order.

The truckers make the run in all seasons, twice through every day, carrying the goods the top of the continent needs. On a clear day at Atigun their road shows ahead and behind, a pale line drawn the length of the world.

Photos: matt verso, James St. John, Alaska DOT&PF (CC BY 2.0)