A Viking’s Walkabout – Day 15 – Viking Navigation LLC

Fairbanks to Coldfoot, Alaska

Distance: 253 miles / 408 km across a muddy, moonscape, potholed hell of a road… so much fun!

Time: ~8 hours (don’t believe Waze or Google for a second on this one, unless you brought a spare axle)

Okay! So this is why we came here. Fifteen days of driving to get to the starting line. After crushing the drive from Whitehorse to Fairbanks in one day, I’m ahead of where I thought I would be. But, of course, it’s now cold up there, and it has been raining, sleeting, and sometimes snowing for days between Fairbanks and the last hurdle: The Brooks Range.

Starting north from Fairbanks I immediately encounter traffic. The trucks headed south are plastered in this fine, wet, silty mud. Keep an eye on the Alaska DOT truck headed north over the next few photos. It’s white here.

Still on pavement. The pipeline burrows into a hill as we go around and over it. The DOT truck is now off-white.

This road is constantly under construction. This is where the CB radio starts to prove its value. The pilot cars that lead you through construction give helpful advice over Channel 19. The truckers and DOT all talk to each other. I’m starting to get a feel for the lingo. This is the most CB chatter I have heard the whole trip. The DOT truck is now brown. The big rig tow truck driver (I’ll hear him multiple more times over the next few days) is hysterical and jaded, but in a good natured way.

Wait! We’re just now getting on the Dalton Highway!?!?! Check out the potholes. This is what it starts to look like for much of the next few hundred miles.

War Bus! War Bus! War Bus! Stopping to get gas at Yukon River Camp. I didn’t need it. The only gas was 87 octane and I’d been able to get at least 90 the whole way… but they told me to fill up here. It was scaremongering. Fill up in Fairbanks and push on to Coldfoot. If I did this again I would more intentionally balance the 91 in the jerrycans when I had to fill with 87 the couple times I had to do that. I think I managed to keep an average of 89 the whole way, but it requires you to keep track of when and where you fill up in more remote areas. In the future I would be more likely to tap into the higher octane reserve fuel. Getting a steady diet of 92 in a week or so in the PNW was nice.

$7.50 a gallon? Sure!

Road conditions continue to worsen.

Big grades of 10-12% are common on this road. They have catchy names like “Roller Coaster” and “Beaver Slide” and “The Shelf.” Going into these hazards, the highway signs instruct you to announce yourself on Channel 19. It goes something like this, “Northbound, Milepost [whatever], Roller Coaster, starting the descent.” A southbound trucker will hear this and hold at the top of the hill on the other side. This is really just a glorified one and a half lane road that is a muddy, slippery mess. It’s worth holding and waiting for the huge fuel truck to clear the slip-n-slide of a highway before you try. The radio and people’s willingness to talk to each other helps make this a safer-ish road. I found truckers to be open to talking and giving tips. After a while I came to trust them when they told me it was safe to pass going into a blind pass in the pouring rain.

Arctic Circle! Top that!

Potholes start to become more common… Here’s a couple tire killers. But that’s nothing…

Holy S&%#! There’s a pump station on the pipeline in the distance, but the real news is the potholes. I’m glad it was raining. It helped. If it had standing water in it, you didn’t want a tire in it. The number of times I slammed the breaks from 35 to 15 mph and still hit something and put on that stupid clench jawed frustrated face… After about an hour of this s&%# I felt I had a very precise read on the width of War Bus’s wheel base. I got good at threading a moonscape and gradually my speed crept up in these areas. The gravel and mud I liked. The “paved” parts just sucked.

Grayling Lake. Inhabited by humans for thousands of years. Just south of here was my closest approach to the Russian Federation at about 510 miles away.

The pipeline at the foot of the mountains.

Gravel roads, pipelines, haul trucks, and rain.

Half-funny, half-serious. The Arctic Interagency Visitors Center in Coldfoot is really cool. The staff is very engaging and informed. They give live presentations and start late in the evening expecting drivers to arrive in Coldfoot for the night. It was one of the better federal parks/agency centers I have ever visited.

Coldfoot Post Office. In the political spoils system as it once was, would Postmaster of Coldfoot be a sought after position?

This sign is deadly serious and not a joke.

Coldfoot Camp. I loved this place. It’s a dorm. Each room has its own bathroom. It’s simple and modular, but comfortable and clean. The Camp is on one side of the truck parking and fueling area, and the post office, restaurant, check in, and the northernmost saloon in the Western Hemisphere are on the other side. North of here everything would be dry.

My room at Coldfoot Camp. That small duffel was my only luggage for clothes for a month. I loved traveling light.

After 5pm guests are free to use the laundry. I did. I had been re-wearing socks for a couple days. I started tomorrow with a completely clean wardrobe.

I liked the instructions. “Empty the damn lint trap you barbarian!”

The parking lot/fueling plaza between the camp and the saloon. It starts to take on a Maximum Overdrive vibe as the evening wears on. That truck closest to me has a huge boat on it headed north… Okay…