Tuesday June 26 Dalton Highway to the Arctic Circle

From our campground in Fairbanks, we went for a drive in the jeep on the Dalton Highway, all the way to the Arctic Circle. The Dalton HW starts just north of Fairbanks and continues 450 miles to the Arctic Ocean. We only drove just short of 1/2 yesterday(200 miles), to get to the Arctic Circle mile on the highway. So that was a lot of miles on really bad roads. Nice scenery on the whole drive, as the landscape changed from lots of trees around Fairbanks to the Tundra near the Arctic Circle. Roads are really tough up here because they are built on top of permafrost (the ground below the surface is permanently frozen just below the surface). If the permafrost melts at all then the road falls apart.

The reason that the Dalton Highway is there is because of the Alaskan Pipeline, which was built in the 1970's. It runs from the Arctic Ocean to Valdez in Alaska. As we were driving the Dalton Highway, we could see the pipeline on one side of the road or the other. The road is used a lot by trucks with supplies and workers for the pipeline. When we were driving, we really had to watch out for these trucks as they throw stones and rocks as they go by. We never had any problems, but busted windshields on cars driving this road is not uncommon. There were also lots of bikes and motorcycles making this trip. Gas was very infrequent, so we got gas whenever we seen it.

Temperatures were in the 60's and varied up and down as we drove along. It also rained off and on, which turned the dusty road into a muddy road. The poor jeep was completely covered when we were done.