Arctic Circle

The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line of latitude at approximately 66°33′ north of the equator, marking the southern limit of the Arctic region. It’s significant because it delineates the area where, for at least one day a year, the sun does not set (summer solstice) and where the sun does not rise (winter solstice). The Arctic Circle marks the boundary of the Arctic region, which includes the Arctic Ocean and landmasses like parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Denmark (Greenland), and Iceland. The exact position of the Arctic Circle is not fixed due to the Earth’s axial tilt, which fluctuates slightly over time. It moves northward at a rate of about 45 feet per year. The Arctic Circle is a region of scientific research, indigenous cultures, energy production, and tourism.

Most of the soil in the Arctic Circle is permafrost, soil frozen year-round just below the surface. Short trees are able to grow where the permafrost is deeper, but vast areas of the Arctic Circle are treeless plains, called tundra, characterized by plant life made up mostly of mosses, lichens, grasses, and very small shrubs. The Arctic Circle of Alaska is sparsely populated with Utqiagvik, formally known as Barrow, being the largest community with a population of roughly 5,000 people. Deadhorse is a large work camp of about 4,000 non-permanent workers that are employed at the oilfields on Alaska’s North Slope.

Dalton Highway

The Dalton Highway, also known as the Haul Road, is a 414-mile road stretching from Livengood (north of Fairbanks) to Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean. The highway is named after James William Dalton, a North Slope engineer who was involved in early oil exploration in Alaska. It is the only road in the United States that crosses the Arctic Circle. The Dalton Highway is known for its rugged conditions including hundreds of miles of dirt and gravel surfaces cratered with potholes. It is also very isolated with virtually no cellphone coverage, few services, and not many people.

The Dalton Highway was initially built in the 1970s to support the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Today, the highway remains dominated by semi-truck traffic transporting supplies up to the North Slope oilfields. The conditions on the Dalton Highway are actually better during the winter months when the ice and snow smooths out the road surface. The popular Discovery Channel program called “Iceroad Truckers” actually takes place on the Dalton Highway.

My Trip to the Arctic Circle

When I was planning my Alaskan adventure, I knew that the Arctic Circle was high on the list of things that I wanted to experience. Due to its remote location, less than 1% of visitors to Alaska ever visit the Arctic Circle in the northernmost part of the state. There are only two ways to reach the Arctic Circle: by plane or on the rugged Dalton Highway. Now there was no way I was driving my RV on the Dalton Highway, but I still wanted to get the full experience which you just can’t get on a plane. So, I booked a ground tour with a company out of Fairbanks that offer a single-day Midnight Sun tour up the Dalton Highway to the Arctic Circle.

My tour departed from the tour company’s offices near the Fairbanks airport at 9:15am in the morning. There were three of us heading up in a van with our guide and we would be joined by four others who would meet us at the Arctic Circle for the return trip. We headed north out of Fairbanks on the Elliott Highway until we reached Livengood where the Dalton Highway officially begins about 75 miles north of downtown Fairbanks. This first stretch of the journey on the Elliott Highway was on a well-maintained, paved road surface.

After a quick stop for water at one of the Alaska community water sources (many homes in Alaska don’t have water service due to the freeze hazard), we headed up the Dalton Highway. The road immediately becomes a mixture of dirt and gravel with the landscape being mountainous with boreal forests. There had been some rain in the morning so some areas of the highway were very muddy and travel was slowed. The once white van was covered in mud once we reached our lunch stop around 1:30pm at the mighty Yukon River which was about 130 miles into the trip. The Dalton Highway crosses the Yukon River over a bridge which spans the canyon the river has carved. The river is still used to ship heavy equipment and supplies aboard barges. The bridge itself can be quite hazardous in the winter when ice forms because it is sloped at a 15° angle making it necessary for trucks to use chains in the winter to grip the bridge’s wood decking.

We stopped for lunch at the Yukon River Camp which is one of the few places that has food, fuel, and lodging along the Dalton Highway until you reach the oilfields. It is a no thrills establishment frequented by truckers and tourists, but the food was surprisingly good and inexpensive. The highway north of the Yukon River is fairly straight with patches that are washboard rough. The landscape is more barren with few trees as you start to get into the tundra dominated by the low-lying shrubs, lichens, and grasses. Our tour stopped at one point for the guide to dig down into the tundra to reveal the permanent ice about 18 inches below the surface.

About 175 miles up we stopped at a landmark along the Dalton Highway called Finger Mountain. Not actually a mountain, Finger Mountain is more of a granite protrusion on the surface that we were able to hike around and stretch our legs. It was then a final push up the Dalton Highway about 250 miles north of Fairbanks to latitude 66°33′ north which is the geological location of the Arctic Circle. At the site, the Department of the Interior has a nice “Arctic Circle” sign for picture taking and some interpretive signs, but there really isn’t much else there. Our tour guide laid out a red carpet with a white line to delineate the Arctic Circle which was a great photo opportunity and then we ate some cake to celebrate before heading home. For those who continue north on the Dalton Highway, they would have crossed into the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, then over the Brooks Range, and finally the North Slope oilfields on the Arctic Circle some 500 miles north of Fairbanks.

The return trip from the Arctic Circle to Fairbanks was pretty uneventful. Our tour group had picked up another four guests who had flown up to Coldfoot, which is just north of the Arctic Circle, rather than taking the van up. We all stopped at Yukon River Camp for dinner around 9:00pm where I had some delicious salmon tacos literally in the middle of nowhere. I had been hoping to see some wildlife on the journey, especially in the evening hours, but the only animal we saw was an arctic hare running across the road. When we arrived back in Fairbanks at about 1:30am, it was still light for at this time of year it never gets dark at this latitude.  

Trans-Alaska Pipeline

Following the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope in 1968, plans were set in motion to find a way to bring it to market. A consortium of major oil companies formed the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company to build a 48-inch diameter, 800-mile-long pipeline to transport the crude oil from the North Slope to Valdez where it could be loaded onto tankers. Construction began on the pipeline in 1974 following the passage of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act which authorized the project and helped overcome some legal hurdles.

The massive construction project employed over 70,000 workers and numerous obstacles to overcome. Roughly half of the length of the pipeline’s path is over permafrost which required the pipeline to be constructed above ground and cooling fins added to the supports to prevent the ground from thawing. Alaska is prone to earthquakes so the pipeline is supported by cradles which can move freely on the vertical supports. The pipeline above ground is subject to thermal expansion so the engineers had to allow for this with a zig-zag configuration to allow for expansion. Finally, to complicate construction further, the pipeline had to cross three mountain ranges which required 12 pump stations to be constructed.

Finally, after three years of construction and a cost $8 billion, the first oil flowed through the pipeline on June 20, 1977. The route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline north of Fairbanks pretty much follows the path of the Dalton Highway. On my Midnight Sun trip to the Arctic Circle, the pipeline was almost always in sight and we got to inspect it a couple of times. The investors in the pipeline originally had planned for a lifespan of 20 years and a capacity of around two million barrels of oil per day. Now at the age of forty-eight, the pipeline is still in service having carried over 17 billion barrels of oil in its lifetime.