Over the last three days or so, I have done the run up to the North coast of Alaska and back.
These are my experiences and thoughts...
Lots of bush fires going on here in Alaska, just like home in BC. So much burning that as far as I can tell, the whole state is covered in a thick pall of smoke.
For myself, I quite like the smell of it since it reminds me of my childhood in Australia (not sure that thats actually a good way to be reminded though!). The down side is that any view I have seen for the last few days has been extremely hazy...Oh well, what can you do?
Another thing to note up here is that there sure is a lot of daylight!
I have been moving North rather rapidly and since its summer, the days have rapidly been getting longer and longer. The last couple of days I have been well above the Arctic Circle (up to 70 deg Lat) and the sun has not bothered to set... Mind you, it did disappear into a very dense layer of smoke haze while it was still quite high in the sky!
One consequence of these long days is that I can ride as far as I want and not worry when I start or stop for the day.
Another rather unexpected consequence of this is that when you find your self in a bar after dinner and you are having a chat and a beer or two with some blokes you just met, There is no que as to when its time to call it a night... Its forever just evening...And they buy you another round and then you buy them one and then someone else turns up and more rounds are bought, and pretty soon everything is a bit "woozy" and everyone is talking randomly about stuff and your pretty sure you should have called it a night, well, a day or two ago :)))
But a good time is generally had by all, and you get to learn lots about the local culture and what matters to the locals.
The North Slope Country is beautiful :)
As you go North, the trees get smaller and smaller and sparser and sparser. Then, You head up over a low mountain pass (The Brooks Range) and climb above tree line, and as you come down the other side, the trees dont manage to show up again. You are now on "the North Slope" where all streams drain northward to the Arctic Ocean, and all you get to see now is Tundra.
Personally I find this country incredibly attractive. It starts out in a low mountain range, but the hills get lower and more rounded, and after about 100Km or so, its all massively open country covered in grass and heather in various shades of green.
The ground is VERY boggy and in most places if you walk off the road, you are standing in swamp with water up to your ankles. There are an infinite supply of little lakes and ponds and tarns and its all really beautiful (to my eye anyway).
The road is much better than I was expecting!
Its true that there are very few stops along the way. The last run from "Coldfoot Camp" up to "Dead Horse Camp" is just over 400Km without any kind of services.
But its no real problem since the road is very wide and in very good condition. Quite a lot of it is paved and for the sections that are not, they are made of a combination of finely crushed gravel and lots of clay. This combination makes for lots of mess when the road is wet, but it also means the road is easily maintained by graders and it survives the harsh climate very well.
And, Why is the road so good to "the end of the world"?... Its not for the tourism, I can tell you.
What the road was built for in the early seventies is (I wasnt really expecting it ... though I should have been), way up at Prudhoe Bay, (which happens to be "slightly off shore"... the shore is very swampy and difficult to actually define) Its a quite massive oil field. Apparently it has 20% of the US oil reserves!
And, ALL of the supplies and equipment to service and install about 40 drill rigs in this field comes up this road. When I got to Dead Horse, I was a bit taken aback to see the scale of the development... Its like a massive drill camp (for anyone who has ever seen one). Its full of massive amounts of huge machinery. There are "camps" for all the big names in US oil exploration and Im sure there are many BILLIONS of dollars tied up here!
The whole place is also built for arctic conditions and reminds me a lot of the buildings and style of the research stations that I used to work on in the Antarctic (I used to weigh penguins for a living dont you know :) )...
Mostly though, everything is built out of "containerized" modules...It looks like a big kids toy block city. The only way you know that one group of containers is actually a hotel and not a private work camp is from a sign standing out the front.
And the equipment is amazing too. I saw more large US made pickup trucks than I could count. And massive very specialized "transporters" for going over snow and ice and tundra. These things are custom built for this place...And they dont just have one or two of them either, there are rows and rows of these machines all waiting for the corporate head quarters to send them off to work on this rig or that, or maybe a new one...
Its all very "corporate industrial" and you know there are REALLY big bucks at stake...
But to me its just an access road to the far North and though there are plenty of bugs to go with the views, The trip has definitely been well worthwhile :)))
