Roaming Tales

This is the third part of guest blogger Roger Norum’s four-part series on driving Alaska’s Dalton Highway, or Haul Road, with his father.

The Dalton is the gateway to the most remote regions of the interior and northern parts of Alaska and offers a rare glimpse of America’s Arctic – an opportunity to imagine what gold prospectors first saw when they flooded into the Klondike and Brooks Range over a century ago in search of golden riches.

Invariably, a disproportionate amount of the state’s population has arrived from somewhere else. The average Alaskan tends to be very, very outdoorsy. Jillian Simpson, for example, is a tall, striking ex-Bostonian who arrived in Alaska 11 years ago for a vacation and never left. The day I meet Jillian, who is now head of overseas marketing for the Alaska State Tourist Board, she is happening on her way out of the office for a weekend hike with friends to camp on the banks of the Arctic Ocean.

But it’s not that the average Alaskan happens to be interested in the outdoors; it’s that you have to be outdoorsy to get around.

Even for outdoorsy types, though, walking around on Alaskan tundra for any period of time can be extremely exhausting. The land in much of Northern Alaska is riddled with tussocks, fibrous stems and leaves of cotton grass and sedges that wobble and crack as you step on them, making twisted ankles and wet socks commonplace.

Not that driving here is any cakewalk. Vehicles kick up thick clouds of dust and mud, rocks occasionally flash into windshields and potholes that could easily take out an axle mandate a lot of deft manoeuvring at the wheel. Visibility is rarely more than a pipe dream. Many of the more rugged parts of The Dalton are groomed on a daily basis by maintenance crews, who wet the road down into a slurry, mow and shave it with Caterpillars and then add calcium chloride to enable the road to retain moisture and keep it from disintegrating into dust.

Nor is life made any more sustainable by the masses of bugs that can descend on northern Alaska at any time of the day, commando-strength no-see-ums that despite their magnitude deterred few of the thousands of soldiers and common folk who came here to build the state’s major roads in the last century. Before these civilians signed on, their employment contracts required the admonition, “Mosquitoes, flies and gnats will not only be annoying but will cause bodily harm.”

Still, bodily harm notwithstanding, there can be no better time to explore Alaska than summer. Come mid-August, the brown, greys and rich greens of willows, birch and bearberries turn a brilliant crimson and goldenrod, as the coats of ptarmigan and snowshoe hare morph from brown to white; only the evergreen spruce maintains its colour.

In the forested reaches, grizzlies and black bears putter about the rivers and lakes, while on the plains caribou find shade under the pipeline when they’re not fraternising with shag-carpeted musk oxen. An ugly, hefty beast with the face of a cow, the form of a bison and the furry coat of a English sheep dog, the musk ox is taxonomically a goat. It looks horrifically prehistoric – an animatronic fossil of a mammal that should have died out millennia ago along with the woolly mammoth. Though staunchly herbivorous, they can easily take out their predators – grizzlies and wolves – by trampling them to death.

As we trundle along the southern reaches of the highway, Norm calls out through the Ford’s makeshift loudspeaker system, “Does anybody remember what a tree looks like?” He’s right. We are in Alaska, the most forested state in the nation, but I haven’t seen a single conifer since we’ve arrived. South of Coldfoot, if the side of the highway isn’t completely barren, it’s lined with miles of burned stubby, half-naked black spruce trees that look ripe for another lightning fire. One fire four years back decimated 500,000 acres in this area; plains of naked, ashen-coloured stalks of dead spruce that stretch towards the heavens. “Mother Nature puts them out when Mother Nature is ready,” Norm advises. It’s all part of the ecological cycle: fires remove dying spruce, readying the soil for fireweed, then spawn willow, aspen and birch, followed by an undercover of moss and lastly the growth of new, healthy spruce. This whole process, which takes several years, is a natural renewal that is one of nature’s most productive cycle of habitat regeneration and maintenance.

Read part 1 and part 2 of Roger’s journey here, and stay tuned for the next installment tomorrow.