Less than 1/10th of 1% of people who travel to Alaska go above the arctic circle. There are a lot of good reasons for this. First its very hard to get above the arctic circle. There is a road that will take you there but is a dangerous gravel packed road meant for trucks. Car rental companies will not let you drive their cars on this road so you have to rent special SUVs at high prices. The other option is flying but that is expensive too. There are also not many services like food and hotels above the arctic circle so getting basic food and shelter is a major hassle. Lastly there are no real tourist attractions to visit or things to do so there is no real reason to go north of the 66.33 latitude that marks the arctic circle. However if you are not deterred by the hassle and rustic conditions and have an adventurous spirit traveling above the arctic circle can be a transformational experience.
As part of exploring Alaska we wanted to go to the northern most point because we had met people who had done it and that couldn't stop talking about how cool it was. This is not something that is easy to arrange on your own so we found a tour from the Northern Alaska Tour company that would take us on a 3 day tour above the arctic circle. The first day we would fly from Fairbanks to Barrow Alaska, the northern most town in the US. We would then fly to Prudhoe Bay for an overnight stay in an oil workers camp. Days 2 and 3 would be spent driving down the 520 mile Dalton Highway back to Fairbanks with a lot of interesting stops along the way.
Weather was warm and sunny which was good since bad weather may have cancel the trip. It also gave us some great views of the mountains and terrain as we headed north.It was an early 7am start as we took a small 9 passenger Piper Navajo up to Barrow. Because of the distance, the plane had to make a pit stop in Coldfoot to refuel and to let us off for a bathroom break. Coldfoot is in a valley in the Brooks range of mountains and is very scenic.
It clouded up as we got near Barrow so the pilot had to make and instrument approach to the runway. It had been about 60 degrees as we left Coldfoot but was 35 when we landed in Barrow so I put on the extra sweatshirt and a jacket as we waited for a van to arrive to take us on a tour of Barrow.
Barrow was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. I thought it would be a small native fishing village but it is a town of over 4000 people with a hotel, supermarket, 2 year college, and museum. Its still a desolate place as all the roads are dirt and gravel because you can't build on the permafrost since it is constantly heaving and shifting.
New structures are built on pilings that are sunk deep into the permafrost but the older homes lie on blocks or skids on the ground and occasionally need to be re-leveled. The people of Barrow don't care about how the outside of there house looks and are proud of that fact so things are strewn around the yards. Its not a very pretty place at all. Even the beach is more gravel than sand.
If you come to Barrow one of the things people must do is to stick there hand or foot in the Arctic Ocean. Some people go so far as to strip to a bathing suite and jump in. At 33 degrees I was content just to stick my hand in.
Because there are no roads leading to Barrow every thing that comes here has to come by air or by barge in the summer. So everything is 2 to 3 times more expensive hear. Some prices are even worst than that. For example a half of water melon was 42 dollars.
Most of the people of Barrow still lead a subsistence life style. They still hunt whales here and the town has a quota that is used by the people to feed themselves. That is one of the reasons that the beaches contain some of whale bones.
After a 3 hour tour of Barrow we left by our little plane again for an hour flight to Prudhoe Bay and the town of Deadhorse.
Prudhoe Bay is the where the northern Alaska oil fields are and one of the chief sources of income for the state. The place is an apocalyptic industrial hellscape of warehouses, gravel roads, oil rigs, and thousand upon thousands pieces of heavy equipment surrounded by pristine arctic tundra.
There is no way to image what this place is like unless you have been here. The actual town is called Deadhorse and there are various stories about how it got its name. We did take a brief tour of the oil facilities and stopped at the general store which has everything from a Deadhorse coffee mugs to a hydraulic pump for a 100 ton crane used to move the oil derricks around.
We stayed for the night in a large double wide trailer that is used to house the oil workers. Each room has two twin beds with communal bathroom down the hall.
It felt like a juvenile detention facility. But the buffet dinner and breakfast in the trailer next store was surprisingly good.
The next morning the nine of us that booked this tour got in a van and headed down the Dalton highway for our 2 day 520 mile ride back to Fairbanks. The highway is more of a wide gravel road and less of a real highway. The road is built on permafrost which is frozen wet dirt that is somewhere between 400 and 1500 feet deep so there is no way to get down to a solid surface to build a road. They actually put down 6 inch foam board then pile gravel on top of that to keep the heat of the road from melting the permafrost. Of course this doesn't work 100% so the road sinks into the permafrost and then just add more foam and gravel. The line of heavy trucks rolling over it doesn't help either. Then there is the fact that snow during the winter piles up against the road only to melt and wash out parts of it every spring.
It was a bumpy ride in the van but we had some Aussies with us that made the ride fun. I have yet to meet people from Australia who weren't friendly and knew how to have a good time no matter where they were.
It was a little cloudy and misting at the start of the ride and got a little foggy as we left the tundra and drove up into the Brooks mountain range.
One we got over the Atigun pass however things started to clear up and the views really improved.
After 10 or so hours we arrived at the only truck stop on the entire highway. We arrived back in Coldfoot for our second nights stay. Coldfoot is no more than a gas station, a couple of buildings a gravel airstrip and a couple double wide trails that they call a hotel. Our rooms were similar to the ones in Prudhoe bay except for the fact that we had a 3/4 bathroom in our room.
Dinner was again a buffet and very good. It was warm enough to eat on the porch and we were treated with a view of a full rainbow that was actual a double rainbow for a few minutes.
Despite the rustic conditions Coldfoot was one of the most scenic places I have ever been. It was just so quiet and peaceful that I could sit there for hours and stare at the mountains.
The next day we made a stop in the town of Wiseman which is just north of Coldfoot. Wiseman is an old gold mining camp that consist of a few dozen log cabins spread out across about 10 acres by a river. There is no more gold to be mined so the people that live here because they want living off the grid in a subsistence life style. There are a lot of those type of people in Alaska. The main person we talked to was Jack Reakoff who was born in Wiseman and chose to stay here. He is not your typical recluse who just wants to get away from society but a person who wants to live close to the land. You can tell he has a real respect for the animals he hunts and the forest he lives in. He is on the advisory board for Denali national park and helps them monitor the local wildlife and come up with ways to preserve it. He was really sharp and smarter than most professors that I have met. He even taught me a few things about the aurora and I'm and astronomy geek.
It must be an interesting life living in Wiseman but I can't image the winters here where temps get to 30 or 40 below and the sun doesn't shine for a couple of months. There is so much vacuum pressure from the heat rising in his cabin on a 40 degree below day that it sucks cold air though the walls even though the are sealed. To solve this Jack said that he piles snow up the sides of his log to insulate it.
Wiseman is not totally off the grid they actually have a microwave tower that provides a hard line phone and a slow internet connection. They use solar panels to generate electricity for lights during the summer and generators during the winter when there is no sun. Electricity is used mostly for LED lighting and to charge their computers and cameras. The internet connection also allows then an easy way for people to contact them about tours and aurora viewing. There is no indoor plumbing though so some things about life here are stuck in the last century.
Besides living off the land Wiseman is famous for two things. First, part of the show Life Below Zero is shot here although it shows a very distorted view the actual lifestyle. On the show it implies that the person is hundreds of miles from civilization where as he is really only a half mile from the Dalton highway and 15 miles from Coldfoot. The second thing Wiseman is famous for is view the aurora. There is actual a hotel(i.e a nicer log cabin) where people stay during fall and spring to view the aurora. A few people like Jack act as there guides and earn a little extra money to help them buy the things they can't make.
After our tour of Wiseman is was back in the van for another 270 miles. The road was a little better and was actually paved in a few places which made the drive faster. At lunch time we stopped at an overlooked that actually marked the edge of the arctic circle as we crossed it going south. Besides having lunch we also all got our pictures taken in front of the sign.
Even though it was late August it was really fall up here so the leaves and tundra were changing colors and made the scenery more interesting. The last main stop was at the Yukon river. Here I got a few close up pictures of the Trans Alaska Pipeline. This is the pipeline that carries oil from Prudhoe bay all that way to Valdez. This was the main reason the Dalton highway was built so it would be easier to get people and equipment to build the pipeline.
The pipeline is an eyesore on an otherwise pristine wilderness. The engineer in me marvels at the technical challenges that were required to build this pipeline and all the safety features they have built in. However the environmentalist in me hopes that the predictions that this pipeline will no longer be needed in 15 years comes true. You can read more details on the pipeline here
By the time we got back to Fairbanks we were really beat as we had been on the road for 12 hours. Our tour guide in the van and the people we were traveling with made the trip enjoyable. My wife really bonded with the Australian couple and their 30 year old daughter who were on a 9 week vacation. For some reason they had a constant stream of cross the road jokes going
Why did the caribou cross the road.....
because he was afraid to go under the pipeline.
This joke is neither funny or good unless you were there but little things like this and the many interesting things we learned and saw made this grueling trip one of the coolest things I have ever done.
And it didn't really end there. All we wanted to do when we got back to the hotel was eat and go to bed but it turned out that the aurora was going to be strong tonight which is unusual this early in the year. So I got up a 1:30 am after a few hours of sleep and saw this.
It was just another amazing day in Alaska.
No comments:
Post a Comment