Dalton highway closure: ice, water, and backed up lines of supplies.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

On a sunny day in early April, an aerial view of Alaska's North Slope shows a line of tractor-trailers inching across a vast flat plain of ice. The road itself shimmers between the white drifts of snow lining it. Despite the below-freezing temperatures, the roadbed is covered with water, almost two feet deep in places. It looks like a shallow river, with vehicles creating riffles in the water as they pass through.

Truckers, used to dealing with high winds and drifting snow on the remote stretch of road, instead found themselves bumper-deep in ice-choked water, with more ice underneath their tires.

"My front bumper is only about six inches above the ground and I've been pushing ice," one driver called out over the radio.

"It took me an hour plus to go maybe five miles, but we made it," another driver noted in a video posted to Facebook.

Still, they persevered. The Dalton Highway is a critical supply route for Alaska's oilfields. If they could get there safely, they went.

"It's a challenge on a good day," says Aves Thompson, executive director of the Alaska Trucking Association. "With the flooding it became very difficult."

Drivers, however, maintained a sense of humor throughout the ordeal.

"The trouble with ice roads is they are inherently slippery," one said. Another asked, tongue-in-cheek, "Does your seat bottom double as a flotation device?"

Three-Month Ordeal

The overflow and then flooding devastated the northern portion of the Dalton Highway over a period of three months this spring. The highway, commonly referred to as the Haul Road, was shut down several times, the longest for eighteen days. Governor Bill Walker declared a state disaster twice.

Between 150 and 250 trucks travel the road daily, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The closures stranded truckers and cut vital supplies of food, fuel, and drilling materials to the oilfields. The road itself suffered millions of dollars in damage. Operations for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline were not affected, but some oil workers went home early because they couldn't access the drill sites. Diesel fuel, fresh food, and other items were in short supply.

The Dalton Highway is the only road into Alaska's North Slope oilfields. The 414-mile, mostly gravel highway, which starts at the intersection of the Elliott Highway near Livengood, cuts a ribbon through the wilderness north of Fairbanks. Paralleled by the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, the highway snakes up and down the hills of Interior Alaska before crossing the Yukon River at Mile 56. Only a handful of businesses dot the road. Gas stations are far apart and expensive.

The highway climbs into the Brooks Range. Sightings of moose and bears give way to glimpses of musk ox and thousands of caribou. Clouds of mosquitoes wait in attack.

Skirting the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Dalton tops out at Atigun Pass, 4,739 feet above sea level. With its 12 percent grades and avalanche potential, not to mention a huge slow-moving blob of frozen rock and soil creeping toward the road, Atigun Pass is usually one of the major obstacles for truckers. But that wasn't the case this spring.

As the road descends from the pass, it enters the North Slope, a giant floodplain crossed by north-flowing rivers birthed in the Brooks Range that drain into the Beaufort Sea. One of these, the Sagavanirktok River, spawned the most devastating floodwaters in the more than four decades of the Dalton's existence.

"This [flooding] isn't something that's common," says Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) spokeswoman Meadow Bailey. "Really, the most challenging thing we deal with in this area is drifting [snow]."

Hydrologists working with ADOT&PF, Alyeska Pipeline Service, and University of Alaska Fairbanks say the flooding has its roots in an unusually rainy summer in 2014. The heavy rains saturated the ground. As winter moved in, the Sag River continued to run, but the ground was unable to absorb any more...