The Haul Road
01/98
“Hey, Thanks for the ride.”
“You bet. They say we’re not supposed to pick up hitchhikers but I say ‘fuck ‘em’.”
“Well I sure do appreciate the lift. I’m Jeff…” as I stick out my hand to shake.
“Bill.” Comes the reply with a nod
I smile and lean back into the jump seat. Bill works the gears of his muddy Kenworth. We’re traveling south on Alaska’s Dalton Highway, 110 miles north of the Arctic Circle, through the heart of the Brooks Mountain Range. Known most commonly by its’ utilitarian name, “The haul road”, the Dalton Highway was built 30 years ago as a supply road for Alaska’s arctic coastal oilfields. Along its’ 420 mile stretch there is only one cop, two truck stops and maybe 30 year-round residents. The rest is nothing but a pipeline and beautiful Arctic landscape. To many the Haul Road is a laceration through the heart of America’s only remaining wilderness. To others it is a small footprint in a hostile environment. To me it is a way in and out of my favorite mountain range.
“I’m only going about 30 miles - to Wiseman”, I say, indicating the village of perhaps 20 people located on the southern flanks of the Brooks Range. Wiseman is the only population center on the Haul Road and I’ve left my car there with friends.
Bill nods in agreement but has already drifted off to that subconscious state that long-haul truckers occupy. Their breathing slows to a crawl as their eyes glaze over and an extreme economy of movement sets in. I have seen this on rides with truckers throughout most of the US, Canada and Britain and assume it is a prerequisite for this type of work. Psychologists know this by the term “Flow State” where signals actually pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles – bypassing the cerebral cortex. Just by looking, I can tell that Bill’s cerebral cortex is on vacation. Aside from slight wheel movements, drinking coffee and chain-smoking cheap cigarettes was the extent of Bill’s physical effort.
“You look like it’s been a rough trip”, I say. I am hoping to spark some sort of conversation with the first human I’ve seen in several days. Dalton haulers are a wild lot. Many are borderline sociopaths who couldn’t stay out of trouble in the American West and needed more space to spread their wings. They are willing to drive this God-awful road purely for the freedom it brings.
“Hell, this is my 7th trip in 9 days, I’m beat”.
Now I’m sure this is an exaggerated statement but I hesitate slightly before calling bullshit. Years ago I had traveled the Haul Road with a trucker named Mark and the experience left a considerable impression on me. We spent two nights on the road and I was physically wasted by the time we returned to Fairbanks. Even doing two trips sounds like an epic to me.
I first met Mark while between jobs. This sounds like a reasonable statement but the truth is I had just spent three days picking blueberries outside of Healy. Melinda was renovating an old army bus into a bakery and since the season was upon us, blueberry baked goods were her specialty. She later told me that I was an easy mark – a young kid outside Denali Park looking for a ride north. After weeks of ramen noodles, one blueberry muffin was enough to garner my attention. Pay for those three days was no more than food and beer but at the time nothing could have satisfied me more. The job I held after meeting Mark was at the carnival in Fairbanks but that’s a far different story.
My first trip up the Haul Road began at the truck stop in Fox, north of Fairbanks. I filled my belly with the best chicken fried steak north of Amarillo and spent the next five hours trying to score a ride north. Back then the Haul Road was still owned and operated by the Alyeska Pipeline Company so the only traffic was 18-wheelers hauling supplies to the oilfields in Prudhoe Bay. For 5 long hours, drivers explained that their employer’s insurance restricted them from picking up hitchhikers. Late in the dejected evening, a gregarious trucker named Mark said; “Hop in. I’m not supposed to give you a ride but I don’t give a fuck.”
After quick introductions Mark asked me if I knew how to roll a joint. I lied with an “uh-huh”, and he tossed me a plastic bag full of marijuana. Watching me struggle, Mark gave me a quick lesson in rolling then put the truck into gear and headed us north. “Roll one for me every hour, on the hour and we’ll be good to go” he said. For me it was the start of a great adventure, for Mark it was just another day at the office.
Mark was like a comedy show on wheels and we laughed and talked as America’s wildest scenery slipped by. The warm arctic sun held everything in a beautiful orange glow late into the evening. Trees grew shorter as we rode north and the sun eventually dipped below the horizon straight ahead. Past the Manly cut-off things really began to open up and the feeling of freedom and the open road settled in like an old friend.
We drove through the pink-gray night gaining latitude with every mile. Mark was one of the few rowdy long-haul truckers I’ve met. He hailed from South Dakota, told great stories and was outrageous on the CB to his passing compatriots. Everyone that wasn’t a trucker got a loud blast of the air horn and a middle finger in salute. It was clear that Mark felt this road was for big rigs only. Government and oil company vehicles got the horn and two middle fingers pressed up against the windshield. It didn’t take long ‘til I got in the spirit and the number of fingers in our windshield doubled.
We were hauling 68,000 pounds of drilling mud to Prudhoe and Mark loved having a captive audience for his tales. As we neared Atigun Pass, he pointed to a ten-foot wide swath through the trees off to our left. It was here that another 18-wheeler stalled out while downshifting up the steep grade. On the icy winter road the fully loaded truck began to slide backwards down the road. Gaining speed, the truck slipped off the road and down to the trees. The thin taiga snapped like matchsticks as over 40 steel-encased tons flattened a narrow path more than 1,000 feet to the valley floor. The driver survived the crash and then froze to death.
Mark also told me stories about idling for hours as tens of thousands of caribou migrated across the road. Other tales involved wolves, ravens and fixing flat tires at 70 below in 24-hour darkness. I was a kid from coastal Louisiana and never imagined such an exciting lifestyle as wide open as this. I was enamored by the whole romantic ideal of this life and the thrilling experiences Mark had enjoyed over the years.
The unpaved road was bone-jarringly rough and my vertebra rattled like a snare drum on the infinite washboard. By the 2nd afternoon we had cleared the Brooks Range and were out onto the Arctic north slope – A flat plain of tundra that runs smooth as a soccer field all the way to the Arctic Ocean. I remember the road running straight as an arrow for miles then bending in a long curve around a small pond. Mark told me that avoiding ponds like this was one of many concessions made to environmental groups during the planning of the Pipeline and Haul Road. A fat grizzly sleeping 20’ off the shoulder was our only other real scenery along the slope.
Mark and I arrived at the Prudhoe complex a little after 5:00pm in a cold drizzle. We wandered through countless checkpoints until reaching our dock point on the coast. It’s here that the earth gently recedes before rising again to Russia. The date was late July, which meant the ice shelf was fully receded for the year – about 30 miles off shore. I went over to touch the frigid water as Mark went to find a forklift operator. The 33-degree drizzle erased my ambitions of a swim. It’s wonderful to look north standing on land that is connected by ice to Russia during its nine month winter.
Mark roared up driving a knobby-wheeled forklift and quickly went to work unloading our cargo. I wasn’t paying attention as two guys drove into the depot yard and started screaming about a stolen forklift. With amazing flair, Mark talked his way out of a felony and Tom Sawyer’d them into unloading the rest of our cargo for us.
We retired to the local dining hall, a real working camp cafeteria. Within minutes we had been thrown out of Prudhoe Bay and were out in the rain headed towards our unloaded truck. It all happened as a blur. Mark got into a shoving match with some fat guy in the food line. Why they got in a fight, I have no earthly idea. I don’t know why we were in the rain and the other guy wasn’t, but I do know that we still hadn’t eaten. Mark was pissed and didn’t want to talk about it. I was about not eating. There would be no food until we crossed back over the Brooks Range. We were headed all way back to Coldfoot, home of “The World’s Northernmost Truckstop”.
We fueled up, burned a doobie and headed south, away from the coast. Feeling liberated with our empty trailer, Mark pushed our speed up. We soon realized that just above 120 mph our truck skimmed above the washboard and the ride became butter smooth. This is how we drove across the slope – not having slept in 36 hours or eaten in twelve.
My trip with Mark ended a day later in Fairbanks. Memories of the length and exhaustion of that trip remain with me today. That’s why I’m having a real tough time believing that Bill’s driving his seventh trips in nine days.
“Bill, that sure seems hard to believe. Seven round trips in nine days, all the way from Fairbanks to Prudhoe and back? I did one round trip eight years ago with a guy named Mark and it wasted me.”
”Yea, seven days, but I haven’t slept in four. My wife would kick my ass if she knew I’ve been after it this hard. Well, this is the last one and I’ll be home sometime tomorrow morning.”
Suddenly the four days I’d just spent in the mountains and being chased out of camp by a grizzly all seemed picayune compared to Bill’s current adventure. He proceeded to tell me about his driving “Outside” and how he, alone, used to race 2-man driving teams on his weekly trip. They would speed from his truck lot in Montana down to Los Angeles then up to Edmonton and back Montana. The trip itself took 5 days and Bill lived another 5 hours from the truck lot. Bill’s secret was simple; drive 100mph without sleep.
“I’ve always been able to drive without sleeping and nowadays you can’t drive anywhere down there without the Feds limiting your time”. This line of thought segues into a brief diatribe on the Regulated States of America. We talk about the New World Order for a while then I transition the conversation; “Hey Bill, what’s that you have on back?”
It’s an asphalt paver I picked up in Dead Horse. The son-of-a-bitch is off center so it’s a real pain in my ass.” Bill is still in his lowered state of consciousness, fueled by cigarettes and coffee. It’s not so much that his asphalt paver is bothering him, it’s that his trailer brakes are out and the heavy load makes it difficult to stop. There is probably a law somewhere about hauling multi-ton loads through the mountains without trailer brakes. To Bill this is simply a ‘pain in the ass’.
It’s almost midnight as Bill and I wind our way past Mt. Sukakpak, crossing back and forth over the Koyukuk River. Bill applies the engine brake well in advance of the Wiseman cut-off and slowly works his way down through the gears. Once stopped, I thank him graciously and step down to the gravel. Bill slips the rig back into gear as we say our good-byes. The cool July evening has a slight frost in the air and I’m embraced in its grip. I shoulder my pack and head off toward Bernie and Uta’s cabin. Pausing to admire the pink arctic sky, I watch the dust plume following Bill as he fades into the evening light.