The Other Dalton highway

Date: 10/07
City: Wiseman, Alaska
Kilometres ridden: 373
Cumulative kilometre: 52399
Street: Muddy dirt road
Weather: Cloudy, Fog, Rain, Freezing

Today we decided to start riding back. I really liked that the sun does not set here. Below is a picture that we took at 0:30 AM, no flash J.

In the morning we had breakfast and took a couple of pictures of our hotel, just to give our readers a feeling of what it looks like. The hallway, the eating area, our living room, bed room and our bath room.



In the entrance there was an area, where you had to put shoe covers on or change your shoes before you entered the hotel. I guess that was done to avoid having all the dirt in the hotel.

When we took off it was drizzling a bit, but no comparison to the rain that we had when we arrived. The road was mostly dry and it was so easy to ride! After a while we had to pull off the road to let the truck pass with an oversized load. There was no room for us on the road 🙂

As we started to get higher up it started to get foggy.

And the fog became denser and denser, up to the point where we could only see a couple of feet.

Here is Sigrid at road works, where we had to wait for a pilot car. I guess the car was for the road works – not for the fog 😉

After we went over the pass we could see the clouds that we were riding through.

The fog was gone and we even got some blue sky! It was so easy to ride the Dalton Highway without the rain. 😀
We found nice accommodation in Wisemans. This time we booked it a day before, so we didn’t have to get the expensive rooms.

 

Date: 11/07
City: Fairbanks, Alaska
Kilometres ridden: 433
Cumulative kilometre: 52832
Street: One lane highway, dirt road
Weather: Sunny, Cloudy

Eleven miles down the road was Coldfoot. It has the only petrol station for a long time. Below you can see the other accommodation available in this area at around 200 per night.

The weather today was beautiful, so we took it easy with plenty of stops and lots of photos.

Me trying to be arty 😛

After a great ride we arrived at the Yucon River Camp, our next petrol stop. There we meet Bjoern and Trinelise from Norway. That was the first time that I met somebody with the same name as me! We talked for a bit before we continued to Fairbanks.

On our way back we only had a couple of road works and all of them watered the road moderately. We arrived at the Dalton Highway sign much earlier than we thought. The ride back was really pleasant, completely different to the way up. It felt like we were riding on a different road.

On the way to our hostel was a pipline exhibition. We missed it on our way up to Dead Horse. I was always wondering what the metal pipes left and right of the pipline were. As it turned out, these are heatpipes with radiator fins at the top. They should ensure that the permafrost under the heated pipe doesn’t melt and prevent that the suppot structure sinks into the ground.

There was also an exhibit of PIGS, units that are sent throught the pipline to clean it. On the left an old model on the right a modern one.


Next stop was Sven’s Basecamp Hostel, and it felt like coming home! After we settled in our room we started to celebrate that we really made it to the top and back without breaking any bones again.

As I found out, the celebration didn’t stop there 🙂

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