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.

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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.

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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.

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Train company First Great Western has abolished shared sleeper compartments on trains and will force single travellers to pay a supplement. The company has cited privacy concerns as its motivation.

“It is considered more appropriate in the modern age to allow people their privacy. You wouldn’t expect to share a hotel room with a stranger and nor should you expect to share a sleeper carriage with someone you don’t know.”

On the midnight London-Cornwall run, couples will continue to pay £30 each for a sleeper but a solo passenger will now pay £40. Instead of accommodating up to 24 people in its sleeper carriages, there is now space for only 12 if everyone travelled alone.

I think this is a step in the wrong direction. With the planet in the state it is in, we need to be doing everything we can to make it easier and more economical to travel by train - or at least not by air. This will reduce availability for everyone and make it more expensive for singles. I might not expect to share a hotel room with a stranger but I would expect to share a hostel dormitory or an aeroplane cabin with a stranger and the same goes for a sleeper carriage. It’s usual to segregate strangers by gender (while friends can opt to share mixed cabins) and I think that’s appropriate.

When I went to the Arctic in 2006 to see polar bears I found it a painful irony that I had very few alternatives to flying in getting there. I tried to organise train and ferry transport to get from London to the departure point in Oslo. But the ferry crossing from Newcastle to Stavanger or Bergen in Norway would have cost me £500 without a car because the company’s policy was to make me book an entire cabin at double the cost. That was one way and does not include the cost of travelling from London to Newcastle or the Norwegian coast to Oslo. The journey would have taken over a day but that was not the deal breaker for me - I simply couldn’t afford to pay over a grand when I was already paying thousands for the trip and the cost of a flight was £100 return.

Apparently other UK train companies are considering following suit. Fortunately, First Great Western is not asking people to pay double but it sets a worrying principle. I imagine that there are a lot of single travellers on trains, and the London-Cornwall and London-Scotland legs are particularly popular with business travellers. If revenues dip from having more berths booked out by one person paying £40 rather than two people paying £60, they might rethink their policy. Then again, they might just raise the single supplement to compensate for the shortfall.

Surely this should be optional? If someone is very concerned about privacy, there is nothing to stop them booking the second bed in the compartment. But for most people, surely gender segregation is enough?

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London is a fabulous place for a holiday - it’s a world capital brimming with everything from the world’s best museum to some of the most exciting rock venues. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Visiting the British capital is guaranteed to take a chunk of change out of any travel budget. With the Euro at a record high, it’s never been better value for Europeans and Australians too are enjoying historically favourable exchange rates. But it’s still expensive.

Since the US dollar is currently worth about half the value of the pound, a trip to London must be particularly painful for Americans right now. There’s a reason why so many Brits headed to New York armed with a spare suitcase for some half-price Christmas shopping last year.

Don’t let that put you off. Whether you’re in to fashion or food, London is a seriously exciting place right now and there’s never been a better time to visit. Instead, take some tips from a local on how to make your dough stretch further.

In part one of a five-part series, I look at how to save money on transport costs.

1. Get Connected
If, like most visitors, you are flying into Heathrow, don’t blow 15 quid on the Heathrow Express to Paddington. Instead get the Heathrow Connect - it takes half an hour rather than 15 minutes but it costs a third of the price. If you really need to get there quickly, then go with the Heathrow Express but book online. It’s still more expensive than the Connect but you’ll save £1 off the cash price.

If you are getting off a long flight, don’t be tempted to get a taxi all the way from Heathrow. It’s hideously expensive but it’s also very easy and very fast to get the Connect or Express trains. If you need to, you can fall into a cab once you get to Paddington. Of course, the frugal option is to use public transport and from Paddington you can get the Underground (London’s subway system, usually known as the Tube) almost anywhere and it’s also a hub for trains out of London.

There is a Tube service from Heathrow Airport but don’t bother if you are going to central London - it costs the same as the Connect service but it’s much slower and it can often be very crowded. It’s only worth using the Tube if you are headed somewhere in west London on the Piccadilly Line.

2. Get an Oyster
Okay, so the Thames isn’t known for its shellfish, but an Oyster is also the name for the pre-paid card you can use across the London transport network, including the Tube, overground trains and buses. The cheapest cash ticket for a single Tube journey costs an eye-watering £4 but with an Oyster the equivalent trip is just £1.50. If you are there for more than a couple of days and plan to use the public transport network extensively then it’s worth buying a three-day or weekly ticket.

You don’t need a car in central London and if you insist on having one, it’s going to set you back £8 a day on top of car hire and fuel. This is because the central part of London is subject to the Congestion Charge. Parking is also limited and parking inspectors are very diligent in fining and even clamping wrongly parked cars. You have been warned!

3. Travelling on from London
If you are planning to travel elsewhere in the UK or Europe by train, then book ahead for the cheapest fares. You can check train timetables and fares for Britain on the National Rail website and book directly with the train company or with ticketing sites such as Trainline. The best prices are when you book at least two weeks in advance and avoid travelling on a Friday. The trains are not as good as on the Continent (they are more crowded, less technologically advanced and the tracks are not so well maintained) but they are still usually faster than driving.

Trains to France or Belgium are definitely faster and more comfortable than flying. It’s just two hours by train from the centre of London to the centre of Paris or Brussels with Eurostar. Again, it’s cheaper if you book ahead and the booking window is 120 days.

For more information on train travel in Europe (and around the world), check out The Man in Seat 61.

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Please come back tomorrow for the second part in the series, looking at what’s free to see and do in London. Or subscribe via RSS so you don’t miss a thing!

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Until recently, the only people arguing against expansion of Heathrow Airport were protest groups campaigning against climate change or the increased flight noise west of London. Following the debacle that was the opening of Terminal 5, the tide now seems to be shifting.

Bob Ayling, the chief executive of British Airways from 1996 to 2000, came out against expansion of Heathrow in today’s Sunday Times.

The UK government has long argued that the expansion of Heathrow is necessary for the future competitiveness of the UK economy. But recent reports indicate the BAA and the government bent the facts to make the case.

Ayling argues that building a third runway would be a “costly mistake” and that BAA is pursuing a flawed business model by chasing transfer traffic, since most transfer passengers buy little more than a cup of tea and therefore cost the airport more than they bring in revenue.

Meanwhile, the new London mayor Boris Johnson is apparently in favour of building a new airport in the Thames estuary, a plan that has been on the cards for decades but never come to fruition. That wouldn’t do anything to deal with the underlying questions on aviation policy in an era of climate change, but it would potentially ease congestion and it would give long-suffering residents of west London and villages and countryside around Heathrow a break from the incessant noise and pollution. (Most of the flights would take off and land over the sea).

Of course, London already has four other airports - Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City - and yet Heathrow remains inexplicably popular for both airlines and passengers.

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