Despite Opening to Public, Highway Remains Path Less Traveled

A generation ago, writer Edward Abbey interviewed writer Joseph Wood Krutch, and they got around to the subject of cars and highways. These men were philosophers and environmentalists, and their thinking continues to influence conservation debates. They voiced resentment about the casual intrusion of automobiles into whatever wild places were left in the country.

More precisely, as Krutch put it, America needed fewer good roads into the wild and more bad ones: “There’s nothing like a good bad dirt road to screen out the faintly interested and to invite in the genuinely interested.”

Today, no highway proves this point as emphatically, as colorfully, with as many superlatives, or as much lingering controversy, as Alaska’s “haul road” to Prudhoe Bay, the most northerly road in the USA.

One-and-a-half lanes wide, this rough, corrugated, dead-end road travels more or less directly north from Fairbanks--73 miles on an approach road and 414 miles after that. Ninety percent of the journey is over dirt, mud and gravel.

North of Fairbanks 133 miles, the haul road crosses the Yukon River--the only place in the nation where the continent’s third-largest river is bridged.

Another 55 miles and the road intersects the Arctic Circle--that eerie-strange latitude above which the sun never sets during summer.

Lumpy, twisty, with heart-stopping grades, icy-treacherous in winter and dust-choked at other times, the road continues 122 more miles and crosses the Continental Divide of the Brooks Range mountains, the loneliest in America.

Before the summit is a sign that says “Do Not Cut,” marking the northernmost tree along the highway corridor, a spruce. Beyond here, trees have not yet gained root against the savage eight-month winters.

The remaining 177 miles travel down the north flank of the Brooks Range and across the vast Arctic coastal plain, a flatland of tundra and pond, a colossal breeding ground for mosquitoes and migratory birds, summer home for huge herds of caribou and the site of America’s largest oil field, Prudhoe Bay.

Along the entire road, there are only two roadhouse gas pumps and three unimproved pullover campgrounds. There are no grocery stores, no fast-food outlets, no ambulances. On a recent trip up the road, signs of human habitation were vastly outnumbered by musk ox, grizzly bear, caribou, tundra swan, goshawk, fox and ermine. A single state trooper is assigned to patrol the road, but only for five days per month. Watch your speed anyway. Perhaps no road in the hemisphere results in so many cracked windshields per vehicle mile as this one.

Surely no road goes so far through so much without getting there. That is, the haul road travels all this way north only to be blocked--sorry, travel by permit only--11 miles short of the Arctic Ocean. Out there are the oil fields, and casual motorists are forbidden.

After all, oil is the reason for this highway. The road’s very name, the haul road, suggests its origins: completed in 1974 for the sole purpose of permitting trucks to haul supplies to Prudhoe Bay. Along most of its route, the haul road is within sight of the $8-billion oil pipeline, which carries Arctic crude south to civilization.

For 20 years, private vehicles were prohibited along most of the haul road. In fact, one of the solemn covenants for congressional approval of the pipeline was the promise never to open this road to public travel. The reason, as Edward Abbey or Joseph Wood Krutch could have forecast: With highways and tourists come permanent development and environmental degradation. And the Arctic is a fragile ecosystem that is impossibly slow to heal itself from damage. However, a road--even a dangerous, hardscrabble working road like this one, a road where trucks scream along at breakneck speed and toss up epic clouds of gravel and dust--is a hard thing to keep Americans off of. Incrementally over the years, the no-trespassing gate was pushed north. Hunters in particular and allies in the tourist business demanded the “right” to drive on any road they pleased.

Finally, in 1995, all restrictions were lifted for travel to Deadhorse, the bleak oil boomtown erected just outside Prudhoe Bay. The haul road became Alaska Highway 11, the James Dalton Highway, named in honor of an oil engineer.

Since its opening, the highway has begun to produce the twin harvests of modern tourism: a light coating of litter along the right-of-way and the get-rich development schemes of those who envision attracting what Krutch would call the “faintly interested”: those who wouldn’t come just for the mountains, rivers and open space, but who might if enticed by fast-food stops, do-it-yourself gold-mining plazas and other amusements.

So far, none of these stratagems has found a backer. Mosquitoes, the windshield-busting gravel, the 60-below winters and the prospects of getting into serious trouble out here, it seems, hold back all but those Krutch would find “genuinely interested,” proving his point that a truly remarkable road can be downright awful. Any maybe it should stay that way.