The Dalton Highway may be more commonly remembered as the “Haul Road”. It follows the Alaskan pipeline all the way up to Prudhoe Bay.
In it’s heyday, 2.1 million barrels of oil a day flowed through the pipeline. Right now it runs about a half a million barrels a day.
The road was built in the 1970s to service the pipeline and it’s crews, and in fact, it didn't open to the public until the 1990s. \
Its 450 miles of dirty, dusty, muddy sometimes gravel, sometimes dirt, and sometimes paved road, traveled very heavily by truckers. In fact, it was made clear to us several times that the truckers have the right of way and we should stay clear of them. These guys fly down the road at the speed of light, so we were happy to pull over and let them do their thing.
There are very narrow areas and very steep areas, and sometimes very narrow steep areas. This one is called the Ice Cut and its one of the more dangerous hills. 
This section is appropriately named the roller coaster. There wasn’t always a spot to pull over and take a picture, and this is one road you don’t want to stop on. As it is, they say to keep checking in your rear-view mirror- one minute there could be no one there, and the next, a huge truck could be breathing down your neck. It happened to us several times. We got passed by a truck we didn’t even know was there.
When it rains, the road turns into a slippery, mushy, muddy mess in some places. There were a few places where I was holding my breath, although Paul never lost control of the truck.
Along the road we saw a bunch of stuff, and learned a bunch of stuff. This bar is called a headache bar. It’s designed to stop any vehicle that is big enough and tall enough to damage the pipe. There are a lot of these along the way.
Part of the pipe is buried under the ground and part of it is above ground. Sometimes it dips under the road itself.
Some sections are raised and some are put underground to allow large animals room to get past the pipeline.
There are several types of large animals that roam this area. Musk Ox are pretty common in the northern sections.
We saw several herds of Musk Oxen and I had never even heard of them until we got to Alaska.
…and he kept stopping to look and see if we were still following him. 
Finally he turned and took off into the tundra. We saw a fair amount of hunters while we were driving down the road. Mostly they were after the caribou so lucky for this guy, his rack isn’t big enough.
In areas where there is permafrost, the pipe has radiators that move the heat generated by the oil from the ground up to the air. Once permafrost starts to melt, the pipeline would sink.
There are just a couple of small towns situated along the pipeline- and by small, I mean populations of 15-25. Other than that, its pretty much the only road for hundreds of miles.
Coldfoot is the only place to get diesel along the 450 mile road, until you reach the end. Its conveniently located at about the halfway point. The story about the name is that the first miners in the area had intended to stay here through the winter, but they got “cold feet” and left, so it was referred to as the “Coldfoot guys’ place”. There is no cell service except at the beginning and end of the road, so we used their phone to make a call. In order to actually get to the Arctic Ocean, you have to call and make a reservation 24 hours in advance and give your driver’s license number, so we needed to get that taken care of.
Coldfoot has a small “hotel”, a restaurant with pretty good food, and a bar. There are no signs. I guess when you are the only bar and restaurant for 240 miles, you don’t need to put a sign out front.
There are plenty of places to pull off and spend the night. This was one of my favorites.
The road starts out in a spruce forest, loosely following a couple of rivers along the way.
The salmon actually travel 1100 miles to spawn in these gorgeous rivers. 
Sometimes the views got monotonous, but before we got a chance to get too bored (I am not sure Paul ever got bored, between watching for trucks, ruts and potholes) the scenery would change.
We got closer and closer to the mountains- the Brooks range.
Before we knew it we were going up and over them through Atigan Pass, one of the more scenic areas along the road and the highest pass in Alaska.
Soon after we came down out of the mountains, the terrain changed again. Gone were the spruce trees- we had already passed the “furthest north spruce tree” a few miles back.
The colors are vibrant- miles and miles of yellows, oranges and reds.The Arctic tundra is what grows when the ground underneath is permanently frozen-permafrost.
This area falls within the Arctic Circle- we passed a signpost for it quite a while back. The Arctic Circle is an imaginary boundary line set at about 66 degrees …..anywhere north of the Arctic Circle the sun does not set on June 21, and it doesn't rise on December 21. When you get as far north as the North Pole, the sun doesn't set for 180 days in a row.
After several days of driving and exploring, we reached the end of the road...
Random Thought: When I commented at the grocery store in Fairbanks that the outside of the bread bags seemed wet, an employee responded that except for a few types of bread from a local bakery, ALL the bread products coming to the interior/Fairbanks, are frozen because of the long trip.
