Day 12

Prudhoe Bay Hotel is great! 115 dollars a night per person but food is included. We were able to have a great lunch and dinner the day before, breakfast in the morning, and also make a bag lunch for the road before left.

Then we hit the road - starting our return to the south. We passed through the tundra area on the north slope and started to see mountains in the distance. One of the few cars we saw on the Dalton highway was a wreck on the tundra. Most of the traffic was semi-trucks, white oil company trucks, a few campers, and a quite a few adventure bikes with the panniers hanging off them.

 

 

 

There were many construction projects going and were hard to traverse. On the way up we heard of bikers behind us that crashed. Sometimes there were big rocks, a lot of very loose gravel that required a lot of power to get through, and generally very rough going.We had to stop and wait for pilot cars which caused delays of 15 or 20 minutes. They always directed motorcycles to the front of the lines because they would get through the fastest.

 

This young bored but outgoing flagger was able to get her life story out in a few minutes, and I showed her the video of the crazy KTM rider behind me swimming in the Arctic.

 

 

The Brooks range came into view and we started to climbed the Atigun Pass and had lunch at the top. We were already really dirty from the dust in Deadhorse and the previous days of riding so it didn't really matter that laid in the dirt to eat the bag lunches we made at the Prudhoe Hotel.

 

 

Graham wore his hair net the whole time and mumbled why the mosquitos weren't bugging me. I had doused my hat in maxdeet and worked it into my beard. It was greasy but it worked. :)

 

 

Then we descended the Atigun into the valley on the south side. The pipeline is mostly underground coming over the Atigun.

 



One of the worst parts of the Dalton are the semi-trucks. They drive very fast and they create showers of rocks. Sometimes I would cover my helmet visor with my hand to keep the rocks from breaking it. My headlight lens is cracked, Graham cracked a led driving light lens, Risto has a large chip in his helmet above the visor, and got hit on a toe a few times.

More pictures of the Dalton Highway.

We stopped in Wiseman to look around. It was a town with a single lane dirt road running through it and little or no signage. A guy in a loader yelled at me to tell my buddy (Graham had gone exploring) to stay off private property.

We filled up in Coldfoot. One of the interesting things I noticed were these SWPPP boards at intersections where people could post messages for others. Apparently there must be a lot of people living off the grid.

Then we headed for our next gas stop at Yukon River.

Risto and I stopped for coffee and a snack by a river. The fish didn't bite.

We stopped at the Hotspot and had a bite to eat. I asked one of the owners to take a group picture for us and the dog jumped in my lap for the picture.

 

 

One of the ladies who works there had just returned from Fairbanks getting supplies for the café and she was talking about the bad weather they had been through. Fairbanks was flooding and expecting to get another two or three inches of rain in the next day, and she said it was raining hard, was foggy, and that it was "just sh*t". She repeated herself numerous times and we figured she was talking about mud. The rain was coming it and we were concerned about Risto's street tires. It would be treacherous enough for Graham and I with our more aggressive tires so we left the decision to Risto whether we should camp in the Hotspot parking lot or head to Fairbanks. Risto said he would rather do the rest of the Dalton yet that evening before it got worse, so we jumped on the bikes and tore off down the road.

 

The road was miserable, especially the last 20 or 30 miles to the tar road. Risto was off ahead somewhere and we could see his tracks like a snake through the mud. I watched Graham almost go down in the mud. We were amazed that Risto got through all that slippery goo unscathed.

 

 

The radiators and everything were caked with mud, ourselves included. Risto was still off ahead but Graham I had a tourist and her little girl take our picture by the Dalton highway sign.

 



 

The rest of the ride down the Elliot highway was so miserable. Very hard rain, hard to see, slippery, etc. We pulled into a cheap Travelodge hotel in Fairbanks for the night and hung our gear everywhere hoping it would dry.