Dalton Highway

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Fairbanks

   Fairbanks is the northernmost city of any size that most riders will ever reach by road, and it wears that with a certain pride. About thirty thousand people live here on the Chena River, in the middle of the Alaska interior, where summer days are close to endless and winter temperatures can drop to minus forty. It calls itself the Golden Heart City, a nod to the gold strike of 1902 that created the town, and the old gold-mining history is still part of the identity.

   Read the complete Fairbanks write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Fairbanks is where the day begins. Next is Yukon River Crossing.

2. 2. Yukon River Crossing

   Few bridges feel as lonely as the one over the Yukon River on the Dalton Highway. It is a long steel truss with a wooden deck, completed in the mid-1970s to carry the trucks that built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the pipeline itself runs alongside, a silver snake sliding across the river on its own supports. Fairbanks lies a long day behind, and the Arctic lies ahead. At this point the highway has already left pavement and certainty well behind.

   Read the complete Yukon River Crossing write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Yukon River Crossing comes up about 218 km into the recorded legs. Next is Arctic Circle.

3. 3. Arctic Circle

   Mile 115 on the Dalton Highway is the Arctic Circle, and there is a wooden sign beside the road to prove it, with a small campground and picnic area run by the Bureau of Land Management. The line sits at about sixty-six and a half degrees north, and on the summer solstice the sun does not fully set for those who stand a little further north. It is a remote, windy, mosquito-ridden spot, and it is hugely satisfying to reach on a motorcycle.

   Read the complete Arctic Circle write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 314 km into the recorded legs you reach Arctic Circle. Next is Coldfoot.

4. 4. Coldfoot

   Coldfoot is a truck stop and a handful of buildings on the south side of the Brooks Range, at mile 175 of the Dalton Highway, and it is the last place with services for two hundred and forty miles. The name is said to come from the early prospectors of the gold rush in 1900, who arrived, saw the cold and got cold feet. Only a few dozen people live here year-round, and in summer the population includes truckers, pipeline workers and a few travellers.

   Read the complete Coldfoot write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Coldfoot, about halfway. Next is Atigun Pass.

5. 5. Atigun Pass

   The Atigun Pass is the highest road pass in Alaska, 1,444 metres above sea level, and it carries the Dalton Highway through the Brooks Range, the last great barrier before the North Slope and the Arctic Ocean. The mountains here are bare, with jagged grey rock and green tundra, and the continental divide runs across the top, so that rivers on one side flow to the Pacific and Arctic waters on the other. The trans-Alaska pipeline climbs beside the road, running above the ground on steel supports so that its heat will not thaw the permafrost, and it is both a marvel of engineering and a reminder of how remote this country is.

   Read the complete Atigun Pass write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Atigun Pass sits at 1146 km, late in the day. Nothing on this route is higher. Next is Deadhorse, mostly downhill.

6. 6. Deadhorse

   Deadhorse is not a town in the usual sense. It is an industrial camp at the end of the Dalton Highway, a place of warehouses, trucks, workers' lodges and a single general store, serving the Prudhoe Bay oil field on the Arctic coastal plain of Alaska. About 414 miles of gravel and dirt road run north from Fairbanks, crossing the Yukon River, the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range at Atigun Pass before the land flattens into tundra, and the whole way the Trans-Alaska Pipeline snakes beside you, sometimes above ground on its zigzag supports, sometimes buried.

   Read the complete Deadhorse write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 799 km.