Haul Road Stories Annie Olson (bio) 1 The James W. Dalton Highway stretches 414 miles north from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay—that is, 414 miles across the Arctic and beyond the reach of civilization in Alaska. When my boyfriend Mike and I quit our summer jobs on the Kenai Peninsula with a fishing out-fitter, we wanted to be beyond reach. We were tired of earning less than minimum wage and even more tired of the summer tourism season in south central Alaska: thousands of trailers lined bumper to bumper on the Sterling Highway, the passengers snapping pictures from their windows of rivers and mountains. It wasn’t the Alaska I wanted to show Mike while we were still twenty-six and untethered. So we set forth, in June of 2007, to find out if frontiers still existed. We applied to job postings on a bench outside a coffee shop in Homer, connecting and reconnecting to a feeble wireless signal. Out of money, we left for the Arctic before Northern Alaska Tour Company officially hired us. The distance we traveled from the Kenai Peninsula to the Yukon River is equivalent to a road trip from Wisconsin to Oklahoma. [End Page 31] 2 I do not keep travel journals—at least not good ones—but I love to read them. Classics like Darwin or Heyerdahl or the diaries of prospectors from the Alaskan Gold Rush. Before Darwin ever reached the Galápagos Islands, he sailed around Cape Horn several times. Many of his early letters describe the wind: that “grand spectacle” of “all nature thus raging.” He was enthralled by the “savage, solitary character” of southern Argentina, where “no European had ever trod.” But I do not mind if others have gone before me. Even the best expedition journals are brief moments in the story of a place. 3 In the 1970s the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built to funnel oil from the fields in Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks, with the Dalton Highway constructed alongside. The Arctic icecap makes shipping to Prudhoe nearly impossible, so the Dalton or “Haul Road” is the only way to transport supplies: machinery, ATCO trailers, enough food to sustain workers at the oil rigs. Seventy-five percent of the road is unpaved. The truckers who work the Dalton are a tight and insular clan, having run the same route for years. Most live in Fairbanks and make two “turns” per week—trips up to Prudhoe and back. When I worked in the Arctic, the trucking family included about three hundred regular drivers and two hundred part-timers. Small communities of seasonal workers and homesteaders live along the Dalton. Yukon River Camp, at milepost 56, is the first stop going north. There are two restaurants, a dorm for construction crews, and a visitor center. Camp is only open mid-June through early September. The Arctic Circle is next, at milepost 115. It is marked with a single sign. [End Page 32] Coldfoot, at milepost 175, is considered the halfway point for truckers. There is a restaurant, dormitory, airport, and motel. Property management varies—currently Northern Alaska Tour Company operates Coldfoot Camp—but all managers are contractually obligated to keep the restaurant and fuel pumps running twenty-four hours a day, year-round. It’s the only truck stop in 414 miles. The unofficial lowest temperature ever recorded in Coldfoot, which locals consider accurate, is negative eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Most winters see lows in the negative sixties. Truckers stop articulating the minus sign by the end of October, at which point “thirty” translates to “thirty degrees below zero.” There is little difference between the twenties and the thirties, but gasoline freezes and will not pump in the forties. When temperatures fall into the fifties, it is very dangerous to drive. 4 Mike and I were initially hired by Northern Alaska for a two-month contract at Yukon River Camp. Getting there was the first obstacle. Our new employers offered us a ride up in a tour van, but we insisted on bringing our Chevy Blazer. Ostensibly, we understood the risks. Guidebooks warn against driving a personal vehicle on the Dalton. It’s poorly maintained, and mostly dirt...