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SPRING 2020 ISSUE 01 / VOL . 05
Eureka , Alaska — the winter highway to Valdez stretches out before us across the glaciers .
At 5 a . m . we launched the roundtrip to Deadhorse ( Prudhoe Bay ) and back to Wiseman , an estimated 460 miles that took us 12 hours , including stops for fuel and lunch in Prudhoe Bay and a sizeable caribou herd out on the tundra . This was the real Haul Road ; everything else had been foreplay . Imagine sections of roadbed through the Brooks Range and down the North Slope , freshly ploughed so as to make it soft and boggy . Throw in large , sharp rocks , sprinkle with gravel , then season with magnesium chloride and hydrate with water trucks ( or just rely on Mother Nature ), making the surface slick as owl caca . Then observe the massive trucks churning through it creating troughs with steep , soft berms . Wherever the surface hardens , spread tons of gravel creating the frictional equivalent of well-greased ball bearings . Add thunderstorms and no place to hide from the lightning . Heck , the puddles created in the potholes were so deep they blew my feet off the pegs and washed over