BWEP Dalton Highway RELEASED! By Brad Allen and FriendsAlong its length, the Dalton Highway is a spine-snapping roadbed of dirt, loose gravel and rocks. It cuts through boreal forests, along endless stretches of wilderness prarie and permafrost, across the Arctic Circle, up and down the unforgiving passes of the Brooks Range and deep into the reaches of an arctic coastal plain. The highway boasts, if that is actually the word, the longest stretch of unserviced road on the North American continent. For 240 miles, from Coldfoot to Deadhorse, there is nothing. There are no gas stations, no flush toilets, no auto body shops, no restaurants, no medical facilities, no hotels, no motels, no state police posts, no cellphone service, no Internet connections, no radio reception — nothing at all, for a seven-hour span, if you are lucky. Nothing but the thoroughfare itself.
In addition to these numerous signs of absolute desolance, there is also no good reason for a nonprofessional driver to drive the Dalton Highway. Hewed from the permafrost over five brief months in 1974, it originally served as an access road for construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which itself was built from 1975 to 1977, after oil was discovered on Alaska’s North Slope. Now it is primarily used by large trucks hauling equipment to the oil fields along the Arctic Ocean shoreline.
This segment of the BWEP Project starts out at the Yukon River and ends at Prospect Creek. There are several additional stopping points along the route that pilots can visit. Look on the
BWEP Web Page. You can download from there and see all of the locations available for this new segment.