This is part 2 of Roger Norum’s four-part guest post on his road trip through Alaska with his father.
Driving in Alaska is an experience amplified by the extended summer hours of near-Arctic daylight, an unsettling phenomenon that deceives the senses: driving without headlamps at 10pm; a glowing red sunset at midnight; waking up to a “dawn” chorus of birdsong at 3am.
Behind us sprawls the Brooks Range, an alpine landscape that would look less out of place on the moon: rifted moguls of deep brown crags, pillowy hunks of ice that cling to and blanket the rock and families of Dall sheep and moose that wander glacial hills and trudge along S-shaped rivers. Everywhere are the taciturn landscapes of northern Finland and western Mongolia. In fact when seismic geologists first arrived here in the 1950s, they surveyed the landscape and saw one thing: Iran. They saw strong similarities in the anticline, the syncline and the way the hills delicately roll. Suspicion led to hunch led to a short drilling exploration in 1967 that led to the discovery of bazillions of barrels of petroleum buried beneath the sea: the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay.
The Dalton, you see, was not built for you and me. It was slapped down by private oil companies over five months in 1974 to enable transport vehicles hauling supplies and machinery for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, the US oil industry’s petroleum aqueduct. Costing some $8 billion to build, the pipeline is still the only way to get crude oil from the ocean to the transport tankers waiting in Valdez. Still, Prudhoe Bay oil is very, very crude – saturated with sulphurs – so raw, in fact, that many refineries dread having to process shipments of Alaskan oil, and many won’t even accept it. Yet the oil produced here accounts for a whopping 20% of US oil production.
Aside from the odd caribou, who feed on the lichen that grows here, visitors driving the Dalton are accompanied by a single, lone travelling companion: the pipeline. A massive steel tube that groans its way south along the tundra for over 800 miles and crosses more than as many rivers and streams. About 50 miles south of Deadhorse, the pipeline re-emerges from the permafrost, where it remains mostly above ground for 420 miles until it reaches southern Alaska. The frigid temperatures outside (–90°F [-67°C] in the winter) and scalding temperature of the oil inside (140°F [60°C]) mean that the 48-inch diameter pipe had to be constructed to be able to expand and contract accordion-like without breaking.
There are no towns or villages along the 414-mile stretch of The Dalton and, by God, there’s nothing that ever comes close to a city. The half dozen settlements up here have been established to accommodate the traffic of lorries transporting heavy industrial objects north and a few bewildered tourists – European and American middle-aged couples who want to keep on trucking after driving the much-mythologised Alcan Highway through British Columbia and the Yukon. Service stops up here are little more than oversized gift shops offering excessively large selections of moose-related trinkets, corny bumper stickers and wicked expensive liquor. Along the route, we pass a handful of what I came to call “inconvenience stores” for their criminal prices (A transport koan rhetorically asks: If you, the proprietor of a roadside shop, charge me $23.60 for a six-pack of beer at a roadside shop, and I beat the crap out of you for attempted highway robbery, will anyone hear your pain?).
Read part 1 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.
[...] completes the end of Roger Norum’s guest series on Alaska. Read part 1 , part 2 or part 3 of Roger’s journey [...]