Arctic Adventure part 1

Ah, the Arctic what an adventure indeed! This will of course have to be a multi-part post so please be patient as it will take me some time to get everything sorted out, especially since I have photos and videos not just from my camera but from Travis as well.

To start from the beginning we stuck pretty close to our plan and left Fairbanks, a little later than noon, 3:30pm and made our way up the Elliot Highway then onto the Dalton Highway. Not too much tell about the first few hours of the trip other that the Elliot Highway was a lot more hilly and winding than the Dalton Highway.

We arrived in Coldfoot, a mining town about 3/4 of the way to our final destination, around 10pm and had some dinner at the truck stop. Coldfoot is the last place to get fuel on the Dalton Highway until you get to Prudoe Bay at the end if the highway on the Arctic Ocean. The only problem with getting gas there is that it costs $4.50 a gallon! So what we did is hauled an additional 40 gallons of gas in cans on a hitch rack and a couple in the back of the van. Doing this also gave us added traction on the steeper parts of the highway, with the idea that we would replace the used fuel weight with caribou.

After our dinner at the truck stop we made our way outside and found Buster, Travis's dog had got loose. So we wandered around the truck stop for about 20 minutes, then Buster wandered out from behind one of the buildings. We got him back in the van, shut the doors and the blower motor for the heater stopped working. Hmm, we decided to keep moving and see what what happened. We found that if we kept moving the windshield would stay mostly defrosted with a little help from our "credit card window scrapers." A few miles north of Coldfoot Travis pulled off the road to camp for the night. We decided to re-evaluate the fan situation in the morning.

We decided to to just un-load our gear from the van and sleep in it for the night. And upon sorting through the gear outside the van we discovered Travis grabbed his .22 cal. rifle instead of his .30-30! Opps! Well, we decided to go for it anyway and us our hand guns instead. Quite a challenge of course but we're up to it.

The next day we loaded up the van and continued up the Dalton. The window continued to stay

clear enough to see through, with a little help from our scrapers. Up and over the Brooks range we went and drove back and forth on the Dalton on the North Slope until we found a suitable camping spot of the road.

The pics I have today are beginning on the Dalton, our mess of gear outside the van camping outside of Coldfoot, a view from the Dalton Highway north of Colfoot before the Brooks Range, looking down from Atigun Pass at the Pipeline and the stretch of highway we were just on, the Dahl sheep that greeted us as the top of Atigun pass and finally the North Slope just over the Brooks Range.

More to come....