"Sure it gets a little rough at sixty below. Your brakes freeze to the drums, or you can pop a drive shaft like a piece of candy cane if you're not kind of tender with the gears. Make a wrong move on a hill, and suddenly you're driving an eighteen-wheel toboggan. That's how come some guys call this road the Kamikaze Trail. But it's the best trucking in the world if you know what you're doing."June 22 in the Fairbanks area was a catch-up day around the rig finalizing some plans for the Anchorage stay, getting mail downtown, etc. (The USPO in Fairbanks said it could take 2 weeks for a Priority Mail package to get here from Sioux Falls, SD—it took 9 days!) We enjoyed a noontime concert by the 9th U.S. Army’s jazz band in the downtown park and continued the sport of “people watching” in the far north. Both the band and the people were very entertaining. We looked around downtown and went into the Ice Museum which turned out to be an $11 rip-off. Roberta and I both definitely agreed it wasn’t worth the price of admission! We finished the day by going to the Alaska Salmon Bake at Pioneer Park. Now, that was a good choice! Kind of pricey, but worth every dime.
We were up very early (3:45 a.m.) on June 23rd to get to the airport where we boarded a bus at 0500 for a trip up the Dalton Highway, aka “The Haul Road”. We initially traveled several miles on other highways before getting on the Dalton Highway north of town. The Haul Road was built to service Prudhoe Bay and the Alaska Oil Pipeline which, by the way, is 30 years old this year. It is a slow road—gravel with some short stretches of pavement where it has been re-routed. The drive was very interesting with vast expanses of uninhabited land. We saw miles and miles of areas where forest fires had burned in past years similar to those we had seen in other far north areas.
The U.S. DOT requires that re-routed stretches of the highway be paved which is pretty ridiculous up here. The locals would rather keep it gravel because the permafrost doesn’t cause frost heaves and subsequent breakup on a gravel road like it does on a paved road, therefore giving a smoother ride overall. What heaves there are on a gravel road can be graded and that is the end of the maintenance. Paved roads are much more complicated and expensive to maintain in the far north.
On the drive north we paralleled the pipeline most of the way and saw a lot of black spruce, hillsides covered with pink fireweed, tundra, bedrock that had been “floated” to the surface by the freezing and thawing of permafrost, and many small lakes in the boggy tundra. At one point we stopped to walk on the tundra—it was very “squishy” and much like walking on a sponge. Our guide dug down about 10” into the tundra to the permafrost. She wrung a surprising amount of water out of the soil that she dug up. We were able to reach down and touch the permafrost which felt like touching a block of ice.
Our guide had chocolate cake along to celebrate crossing the Arctic Circle on a balmy day where the obligatory photos were taken. We then continued north into the Brooks Range foothills and along the southeastern boundary of the Gates of the Arctic National Park to the destination at Coldfoot. Roberta and I had signed up to fly from Coldfoot to a native village at Anaktuvuk Pass deep in the Brooks Range; however, poor weather prevented us from making that portion of the trip. What a disappointment! (We had also tried to book a trip to Barrow and Prudhoe Bay, but these were sold out weeks before. I will definitely return for this trip in the future!!!) Since we couldn’t fly further north, we flew with other bus passengers back to Fairbanks in a Piper Chieftain.
Although the Dalton Highway is 400+ miles long, there are only two small parcels of privately-owned land along it. In fact, only ½ of 1% of land in Alaska is privately owned. The guide also told us that only 2% of tourists go anywhere north of Fairbanks, including the small communities just outside the city, and 80% of them never leave the “cruise ship corridor” which has Anchorage as its northern terminus. Our trip north of the Arctic Circle put us in the small minority of Alaskan visitors indeed. It was a long, but very interesting day and I look forward to seeing that part of the North Country again.June 24-27 we worked around the rigs, saw local sights and I worked on uploading my blog which was getting to be very time-consuming because the posts would not upload. One evening we went to the Malamute Saloon in Ester, a restored gold mining town just west of Fairbanks. They had an entertaining musical show telling the gold rush story in song and verse. We also took in the Tanana Valley Farmers Market where we found the vegetables and fruit to be quite expensive and much of it was imported. Crafts at the market were quite pricey, also.
June 28th we moved to Pioneer Park in Fairbanks where we boondocked for several days. The city won’t let RVs park at WalMart in town, but the borough (i.e. county) will take your $12/night to boondock in the parking lot at Pioneer Park which is located in the city. The park features restored buildings that have been moved from other parts of the city and small businesses operate from them now. Had dinner at the Pump House where I ordered steamed clams for the first time on the trip. Uuum! Good!
The next day we went to the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Museum of the North. It is a very well done museum covering all areas of the state. The building housing the museum was completed in 2005 and is an outstanding contribution to Fairbanks’ north side skyline. The downside of the museum is that instead of using appropriate temperature controls inside display cases to preserve exhibits, they keep the whole building at a very chilly 69 degrees or below. I was really cold dressed in shorts and a t-shirt--and I wasn’t the only one. Even men were walking around with arms folded, huddled up against the chilly conditions! All in all, though, the museum is a wonderful stop in the city.
June 30th we bought groceries, got haircuts, etc. in the a.m. before going to the University’s Large Animal Research Farm in the afternoon. They study musk ox and reindeer at the farm. Incidentally, reindeer are a genetic subspecies of caribou and are basically domesticated caribou. The musk ox were particularly interesting to me with their shaggy hair. There are an estimated 3,000 musk ox north of the Brooks Range in AK and an estimated 160,000 worldwide in the circum-polar regions. I don’t remember the estimated number of caribou in AK; however, one herd is estimated at 500,000 and the worldwide population is estimated to be 6-7 million. All in all, this was a very interesting stop and I would recommend it highly to anyone visiting Fairbanks.
We ended up staying in the Fairbanks area several days longer than I thought we would. It is very interesting and I left things to do on a future visit. Who knows, I may even consider a trip back in their “forty-below time” of year to see the northern lights! A Japanese airline runs daily flights there in the winter bringing folks to see the aurora borealis.
