Caribbean Breeze

The road to Prudhoe Bay was half paved, half dirt, and all bumps! The freeze thaw cycle affects most roads in Northern Canada and Alaska and the Dalton Highway was no exception. It was a strange road to be on because there were no towns along this 415 mile road! Gas was rare and expensive. Even Deadhorse, our destination, had no permanent residents, but was just a camp for oil and construction workers. The views from the highway were surreal. The landscape was desolate, but extremely beautiful! Sunday, we started the drive in the afternoon and camped on the boundary of the Arctic Circle. We saw amazing fall colors in the boreal forest. Approximately, the first 200 miles were rolling foothills with many lakes. The valleys and the low hills were forested and the larger hills were crowned with tundra vegetation. There were some interesting rock formations, one aptly named Finger Mountain, and many berries!

The next morning we got our first glimpse of Brooks Mountain Range from a hill known as Goblers Knob. They were distant, jagged, and rather intimidating. After getting gas in Coldfoot, the last gas station, we still had a 230 mile trek to Deadhorse! The hills became low mountains, with some dusted in snow, and gradually the trees disappeared. Once on the other side of the pass the land was as flat as Kansas, but very boggy. The day had been sunny until that point, but as we neared Deadhorse dark clouds appeared and the wind began to pick up. We spent a cold night huddled in the Jeep with the wind and rain rocking us to sleep.

You are not allowed to just drive to the Arctic Ocean, you have to pay for a shuttle to take you in to this restricted zone in Prudhoe Bay. Tuesday we boarded the shuttle and after a very boring tour of Conoco-Phillips and Exxon-Mobile oil fields and Prudhoe's National Forest, we finally made it to the Arctic Ocean! Lauren went in first like the brave soul she is, Chris went second. The air was 37 degrees with a windchill that made it feel like 27 and raining. The water was near freezing, but felt like bath water compared to the air! Taking our turns, we would strip off our clothes (with our swimsuits already on) and bolt out of the bus and sprint into the water. The water was very shallow, only shin deep after running 100 feet, so we just had to lay down in the cold mucky shallow water to pose for a picture. Once out of the water, the wind and rain set to work numbing our bodies and making every step feel like we were running on pins and needles. There was also a Polar Bear on another part of the beach foraging for whale guts, but alas it was too far away for us to get a glimpse of it.

Oooooooh! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

Upon returning to the Jeep, we blasted the heat and blasted out of Deadhorse. It rained almost the whole way to the mountains, so as a result the Jeep became covered in a second skin of mud. The mountains that were lightly dusted were now covered in layers of snow! The drive back was even more beautiful! We camped near Fairbanks, and headed to Denali the next morning.