The Dalton Highway: Yukon
The previous entry is the Dalton Highway and Coldfoot.
June 8
We were still above the Arctic Circle, so it was bright daylight when we left Coldfoot to travel the remainder of the Dalton Highway to Fairbanks early in the morning. This leg of the journey would be less interesting than the one on the North Slope, if only because I found the tundra landscape to be so otherworldly, and the terrain we would now travel through would be hilly taiga forest, crossed by rivers. Pretty landscape, though not alien, and we saw no wildlife. But there would be geographic landmarks to pass through, as well as a close look at the the pipeline.
The first of these landmarks is the Arctic Circle itself, not too far south of Coldfoot. This is the southermost latitude at which the sun will not set during summer, though, of course, the post-sunset dusk will still keep the sky light for points much further south of the Circle, and tall mountains and high clouds will still catch rays of light from below the horizon. There’s a highway rest stop at the Circle, and a sign explaining its significance. There was a line of people getting photographed at this sign — everyone on the bus with a camera handed it over to one of the bus drivers to act as cameraman while they posed — and Alaskan mosquitoes swarmed us as we waited.
Our next morning stop was a burned out plain dominated by a height called Finger Hill (or maybe Finger Rock: there were rocks that vaguely looked like fingers there). The bus driver explained the ecology of the region: forest fires would sweep this part of Alaska every few years. This was part of the life cycle of some of the plants, as the fires would kill off the competing undergrowth, and their seed pods had evolved so that they actually required hot fire to open and reproduce. Fires had swept the plain we were driving through now, as far as the eye could see. The government doesn’t fight these natural fires unless the pipeline was threatened, or significant property was at stake. For example, the ATCO units that formed our hotel at Coldfoot would be left to burn; rebuilding would probably be cheaper than trying to save it. We stopped for our obligatory group photo at the Finger Hill rest stop, and then the more adventurous ones climbed up the hill to take in the views. Grass was already starting to reappear among the ashes, but there were no trees in the burned regions. There were heat damaged bushes around the hill, but it doesn’t appear that the hill was badly touched.
While on the hill, a helicopter operated by the pipeline company flew past us, heading north. Earlier, our guides had said that the whole pipeline is inspected from the air or the ground frequently and regularly, and that a complete inspection can be done in a hurry over a few hours.
The night before in Coldfoot, we filled out a checklist form for lunch the next day. We were eating at a restaurant just before the Yukon River Bridge. The most reasonable choices were burgers, though they had much more expensive dishes, such as steak and halibut. Vegi-burgers seemed like a good idea after all the eating we did on the ship and all the sitting we were doing on the bus. We were told that the restaurant had to be completely renovated at the start of this season, because a grizzly bear had broken in through one of the windows during the winter and had taken up residence, wrecking the place. We found out from one of the waiters at the restaurant (there was actually wait service here; I guess we’re closer to bigger towns) that there were actually two sets of bears, as far as they could tell. The first set was a grizzly sow and her cub, who had made a lair in the gift shop. Later in the winter, they were chased away by an old mail grizzly, who was awake during the winter because he was too old to effectively hunt during the summer: his fat reserves were too low for the deep winter sleep. This bear had to be killed, shot in the corridor just past the restrooms, because he couldn’t be driven out.
After lunch, we took a short drive across the highway to take pictures of the Yukon Bridge from a place on the northern embankment. There were interesting wildflowers blooming in this rest area, just in from the river bank. The pipeline runs right past this point, near enough to touch if only we were much taller: the bus drove underneath the pipeline to reach the parking area. The usual highway outhouses were also here, but no one used them: the restaurant, built out of ATCO components, had flush toilets, as well as showers for passing truck drivers.
There were a couple more rest stops before getting near Fairbanks. One was at Joy, Alaska, a small town that seemed to consist of a gift shop and nothing else. The bus drivers had said that the mosquitoes here were the worst on the route, but there were no swarms when we were there.
The last stop before Fairbanks was actually a small area to look at the pipeline more closely, to touch it and the trestles. There was, in fact, a Pipeline gift shop, selling souvenier pieces of the pipeline as well as the displays describing the construction. Off to the side, they had older versions of the robot “pigs” that are sent down the pipeline to clean it and monitor it.
When we pulled into Fairbanks, we could say that we’ve seen the length of the Dalton Highway. We had seen it from a bus, not the more adventureous motorcycle or bicycle, but we had seen it. One of our guidebooks notes that rental car companies in Alaska typically prohibit you from taking their vehicles up the Dalton Highway, as the unpaved gravel will cause more damage to the car than it’s worth. The guide also mentioned that the Highway past, say, Coldfoot, isn’t recommended for travelling on your own: it’s a hard road. So I guess it was best that we left it to the professionals to drive us on it.
At Fairbanks, we checked into the Westmark Hotel, which is apparently owned by Holland America. The hotel lobby had the same hand sanitizer dispensers that we saw all over the ship, presumably to cut down the incidents of infectious disease that could spread like wildfire among the crowded vessels. The company has apparently mandated that the sanitizers be placed on all their properties. They have a proximity sensor to dispense a little bit of the gellified alcohol, like the ones you find in airport restrooms, but these sensors worked poorly. The hotel also had unlimted Internet access for about $10 a day, working until checkout time. I did the evil thing, and used the opportunity to upload a backup copy of all the pictures on the laptop overnight — there was only one copy of all our pictoral efforts in Alaska on a old laptop’s hard drive and I didn’t want to lose them for stupid reasons. Ten dollars was cheap insurance. I got half the pictures uploaded before the power saving mode on the laptop switched on when we were sleeping, interrupting the process. I probably gobbled up most of the hotels upstream bandwidth when everything was running, though.
Downtown Fairbanks is a couple of blocks wide and a few blocks long. We were too far from the university area to get to without taxi, and didn’t bother. From the Lonely Planet guide, we learned that Fairbanks is relatively untouched by tourism, though it’s used as a launching off point for tours to the Yukon and to Denali. (Other tours from our ship were also going to Denali National Park at the same time we were, but were staying in Fairbanks for a couple of days before setting out. I assume they just went on local tours, whereas we did the Arctic Ocean route.) We walked around before finding a place to eat, and saw an Army Reserve band playing on a plaza next to the river, with free ice cream being given away by one of the local charities. We ate a few blocks away from downtown, which seemed to be mostly closed for the evening, at a tapas place called Cafe Alex. The food was good, but fancier than anything we’d had since leaving Anchorage: Asian and tropical accents that seemed out of place after the caribou stew of Dead Horse or the large buffet spread at Coldfoot.
The next entry is the first Denali posting.