2005/07 Alaska Trip - North to Alaska - Alaska pipeline |
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Thursday July 21st
There is a road called the Dalton Highway and it was built to service the Alaska Pipeline. It goes from just north of Fairbanks all the way up to Deadhorse and the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean. It’s a 900 mile round trip on gravel, and not really a good place to pull a big trailer, so we were going to leave the trailer in Fairbanks and just do a day trip to the Arctic Circle.
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Dalton Highway (Yukon River Crossing, Arctic Circle) |
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For a change we had glorious weather as we headed north through the mountains along the Steese highway and then the Elliot. These roads are paved, but have some very bad ripples which caused the truck to bounce and would have been too exciting with the trailer on.
We turned off onto the Dalton and headed north along reasonable gravel. Most of the vehicles on this road are trucks carrying gear to and from Prudhoe Bay, and a few tourists like us who want to see some of northern Alaska. The trucks roar through with a blast of dust. There are only a couple of roadhouses in hundreds of miles so this isn’t a good place to break down.
We were running parallel with the Alaska Pipeline, which is high enough in most places to drive
a truck under it. It’s high to keep the warm oil away from the ground to avoid melting the permafrost. There are also radiator fins on the top to take the heat away. In places it goes underground to avoid avalanche zones and then it has to be embedded in insulation for the same reason. In other places, it zigzags, apparently so that the tubes can expand and contract. Back at Delta Junction there had been a “mole” on display. The moles are like large bullets that travel through the pipeline cleaning crud off the inside.
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