Wednesday, July 7th, Atigun Pass, Dalton Highway, AK

240 Miles

Today, we made it…..after a 60 mile drive from our campsite we finally got to Deadhorse, Prudhoe Bay. It was a wet drive in, and quite a bit of roadworks just kept piling more dirt onto Ruakiwi.
The place was far bigger than we expected, like a town except all the buildings are transportable offices and accommodation blocks, with huge workshops surrounding a rather grotty looking lake. There is machinery and trucks everywhere, and all the different companies that are working in the area seem to have their own compounds. There are 3 “hotels”, once again made up of portable buildings. We called into fuel up at the most northern garage in the continent….we had to go inside a building to swipe our card….the machines have to be kept warm! We got talking to some of the guys who work for the fuel company, they work for 3 weeks, 7 days a week for 12 hours a day, then the company fly them home to Anchorage where most of them seem to come from. These guys had been working on the field for more than 10 years. The money is great, evidently young guys can come up and earn $100,000 in their first year. During the busy season, there can be 3,500 to 5,000 people based here.

Winter is the busiest time of the year, they have to wait for the ice roads to be formed so that they can get out across the wet areas to the new mining fields. We passed big yards with rows of heavy ice going machinery, sitting idle over the summer….although today certainly didn’t feel very summery…it was 5 degrees Celsius and the wind chill would have dropped that quite a bit. A really fascinating place.

After a good look around we set off for the 500 mile trip back to Fairbanks. The weather hasn’t been the best, the drizzly rain has closed in quite a bit.
We were cruising along really well when the tyre monitor went off….we had a flat on one of the inside back duals…..buggar! There was no where to pull over, but there was good visibility both ways. The road was muddy, there were mosquitoes hanging around but there was nothing else Ian could do but get into old clothes and get in amongst the mud and deal with it. This time everything went according to plan, the new spare wheel fitted, and within an hour Ian had us back on the road again….but feeling a bit nervous as we have 120 miles to drive to Coldfoot where they repair punctures. We have stopped at a Wayside pullover at the base of the pass over the Brooks Range and have the company of two semis.