Up the Haul Road

Up the Haul Road, a set on Flickr.

Since Dave did the drive up the haul road (Dalton Highway) and back I told him I would write the blog post for the trip. To say we had a long 3 days is putting it mildly
Our friend, Joe, arrived from STL on Tuesday evening about 2130. We went to the campground and after a little chatter, we headed to bed. We needed to get a fairly early start on Wednesday.
Our plan was to go to Coldfoot, about 260 miles, and spend the night at the Coldfoot Truck Camp deluxe accommodations, and on Thursday drive to Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse, a distance of 240 miles one way, take the oilfield tour and then drive the 240 miles back to Coldfoot. Which we accomplished.
This does not sound like a long drive but the speed limit was only 50 and there were times you could maybe make 50 and times you could maybe make 5. There was packed gravel, really the best to drive on, humped up permafrost blacktop, gravel and then some tar and chip and some actual good road also.
Since the winters are hard here and this is the road used by the Ice Road Truckers, from Coldfoot up to Deadhorse, it gets much wear. They take advantage of the 24 hours of daylight and do repairs round the clock from June - Sept.
The scenery was indescribable. The pictures I have posted DO NOT show the splendor we viewed. I have some short videos of the trip also and will get some of them posted soon. There were mountains, streams, valleys, meadows, animals, small shacks, one huge mountain pass, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atigun_Pass), the pipeline and mosquitos. We went from Boreal forests to above the tree line and back down to the Tundra to the Arctic Ocean and then returned.
There are no words to describe God’s beauty we viewed on this trip.
Rest areas are few and far between and the one time we got out to search for a bush we were all eaten alive by female mosquitos, the bitters. Therefore, we did not do that again.
The oilfield tour was different than the 3 of us expected but we did learn some stuff.
A great time was had by all of us and we had a lot of laughs and ooohs and aaahhs.