Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has brought Alaska to the headlines – suddenly everyone is talking about ice fishing and helicopter hunting. But what is the 49th state really like?
Travel writer Roger Norum, a native New Yorker based in Oxford, England, has written a four-part account of his road trip along Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his dad, especially for Roaming Tales.
“Skeeters!” The ex-marine next to me is flailing about, arms in the air, his choky, smoker’s cry resonating across the campground. “Goddamn skeeters!” His cinnamon neck flushed to a deep scarlet, he is swatting away at a lone, thirsty mosquito – Alaska’s state bird – that has fixed upon him for a noontime snack. Eventually, the man gives up, abandons his food outside on the picnic table, cowers into his motorhome and fastens the door shut.
It’s summer, but the ground outside is a desolate, unforgiving permafrost frozen several feet thick. Just ahead of us, outside the campground, the wily antlers of a caribou steer slowly towards a herd of mangy, stubby musk ox. In the distance, a silver mass of steel tubing snakes its way in and out of the ground, shooting off over the frozen land towards the horizon. This morning I woke up in a town called Deadhorse; tonight I will sleep in one called Coldfoot. It all feels very much like the end of the world. And, geo-politically speaking at least, it is.
I’ve come to Alaska to drive the Dalton Highway, the most isolated road in North America. In a car-smitten continent of service-stop strip malls and turnpike Wal-Marts, the Dalton, or Haul Road, is a curiosity: the quintessential barren-wilderness thoroughfare. From Deadhorse to Fairbanks, the asphalt, gravel and dirt road hurtles, plunges and tears through Arctic mountain ranges, empty tundra and stretches of boreal forest charred to a crisp from fire. Extreme weather conditions and the perennial freezing and thawing of the land cause the road to billow and swell in many places, creating chuckholes, ripples and washboard humps that make for roller-coaster driving. Rental cars are contractually barred from a long list of Alaskan roads, the Dalton being first on the list. But our trusty Ford E350 XLT Super Duty van – powered by a menacing 5.4-liter Triton V-8 – is tackling the rutted mountain roads with a vengeance.
Norm, our jovial guide, speaks with the deadpan tenor of a character out of Northern Exposure. A 55-year-old transplant from Minneapolis, Norm blew into to Alaska 33 years ago to work on planning the highway and now, retired and filled with an infective energy, he leads tours along it. Norm seems like an everyday, run-of-the-mill, middle-class guy – except for quirks such as owning two airplanes (a seaplane and a skiplane) and a massive power boat and regularly coming out with ludicrous lines such as, “…and this one is the only bear I ever shot with a gun other than my handgun” [emphasis mine], when, for example, flipping through photos of a recent to the Alaskan bush.
But then Alaska is just the kind of place where the average Joe is more likely to own an airplane than a car or a bicycle. “You just can’t get to most places,” [emphasis his], Norm explains when wonder aloud why you’d own three vehicles, none of which will ever work on blacktop.
For many, Alaska is an ideal. With its Scandinavian climate, Himalayan landscape and small-town disposition, it is all that’s left of America’s Wild Wild North. Though voted in by Congress as the 49th state of the union 50 years ago, parts of it are so different from the rest of the United States that at times the territory almost exists as a separate nation. When Alaskans travel to other states, they either head “Outside”, to “the lower 48″ or, occasionally, to “America”. When parking in the winter, they plug their cars into power outlets to protect the engines from hypothermia. The day we arrive, the front page of the Anchorage Daily News declares “Dog Wins in Tussle with Bear.” Highway culture is different here, too: truckers are polite and drivers slow down to let others pass but road signs are punched through with bullet holes – souvenirs of wild, shotgun-giddy nights.
Stay tuned tomorrow and all this week for the next installment in Roger’s Alaskan journey.
[...] part 1 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment [...]