Travel Guide to the Countryside: Ice Trucker's Highway to the Arctic Circle

We traveled 200 miles north of Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle on “the Ice Truckers Highway”. The road was a bumpy gravel road that is primarily used by truckers to haul freight to and from the pipeline at Prudhoe Bay. Our driver and guide is actually an ice trucker in the winter so we found out about what it’s really like to drive the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay when it’s 50 below zero…. They have to find a level spot to park because they can’t apply their breaks because their breaks will freeze and – they can’t turn their engines off for their entire trip because they won’t start up again in the cold! Plus – they aren’t really in danger of the truck falling through the ice – it’s only 2 feet deep!

We stayed at the Walmart in Fairbanks for 6 nights – a record length of stay at a Walmart for us. We were hoping to see the northern lights but the only lights we saw were the lights in the Walmart parking lot! Fairbanks has lots of things to do so we stayed really busy while we were there plus we got to see our friends Joni and Rod that we went clamming with on the Kenai Peninsula!

It gets so cold in Fairbanks that companies like Walmart provide electircal outlets (on the orange posts) for employees to plug in a heater in their car to keep the engine, transmission and battery from freezing!

Molly showing off her Husky Wanna Be kerchief from Walmart! It's her souvenir from Alaska......She's still practicing to be a sled dog!

After Fairbanks, we started our journey south on the Alaska Highway . We will drive the entire length of the highway 1,422 miles plus another 400 miles to get back into the lower 48! We had planned to drive back through Chicken, Alaska and Dawson City – destination of the 1898 gold rush stampede but the road past Chicken to Dawson City was washed out by mud slides and closed “indefinitely”. So, instead, we took a side trip to Chicken - we just had to see it. It’s a quirky little gold rush town where people are still prospecting for gold. It’s 66 miles off the main highway and there’s no water, electricity or phones in Chicken – the summer population is 40 and in the winter it drops to 15! It was named Chicken because the miners who lived there couldn’t spell Ptarmigan which is the name of the state bird and the name they wanted to use for the town. We were tempted to stay in Chicken and prospect for gold ourselves with the price of gold now but winters on its way and we're headed south!

Our campsite on our way south…..a sunset over the Kenworth truck that was next to where we were parked! Oh how we wish for the campsite at Deep Creek with the view of the volcanoes and the ocean lapping at Rose’s tires!!

Our Alaska adventure is sadly coming to an end , we can’t believe we’ve been up here almost 3 months! We have one more stop in Skagway and then we travel almost 1,800 miles through Canada to get back to the “lower 48” where we plan to visit a few more national parks before we “high tail it” home!