Ice road truckers: the 'reality' behind the Haul Road.

• Author: Cutler, Debbie
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

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The James Dalton Highway, otherwise known as the Haul Road, is not an ice road, never has been.

It begins about 70 miles north of Fairbanks in Livengood and ends in Deadhorse. It is the road made famous by the History Channel's Ice Road Truckers. Recently, I had a chance to tour Deadhorse, or the infamous Prudhoe Bay, and ride on an Alaska West Express truck driven by line driver Jack Binder, down the 28-foot-wide, 415-mile mainly gravel road, used by truckers year-round and tour buses and brave drivers during summer.

Alaska West alone sends about 10 to 15 trucks up and down the Haul Road per day. Other trucking companies on the road include Lynden Transport, Sourdough Express and Carlile Transportation Systems, to name a few.

"It's no Sunday outing," said John McCoy, manager of driver education and development, for Carlile Transportation Systems. "It humbles you. It will get you real quick. Weather is the most challenging variable."

DEADHORSE

The end of the road, or the beginning for me, is a place where industry meets the sea, where prefab buildings, most as old as the trans-Alaska oil pipeline itself, hold the likes of ASRC Energy Services, GBR, Colville, Halliburton, Schlumberger and about 50 to 60 other oil industry support businesses.

It's a place where meals come with your hotel stay, or camp stay as they call it, and rooms are adjoined by a shared bathroom.

You need to know the rules of the game because nobody tells you: don't pay $15 for lunch, separate your plates into different troughs for cleaning, put your towels outside your door before breakfast....

You also don't get to see the Arctic Ocean without permission by BP or ConocoPhillips, which takes quite a lot of clearance to achieve in today's tightened security, unless you are on a summer tour bus.

Hard workers, tired from the day, mostly of the male persuasion, gather in groups and talk quietly in the cafeteria or sit alone near a TV watching football, or whatever the sport of the season. Then most retire early to their small, but clean rooms, where cable TV rules and beds call out like a siren for rest.

In the morning, waking early, you don't know whether to shower or not. What time do people get up? What if the bathroom mate needs to get in there for work? Will you wake him? So you watch the news until a respectable hour, 6 a.m., and wonder how you are so close to big oil fields such as Milne Point, Point Thomson, Point Lay, Endicott Island--and the start of the oil terminal--but cannot even see them as they are too far in the distance.

THE ROAD

But, ah, the road awaits and you get your chance to see the trans-Alaska oil pipeline for the first time as you travel in a truck designed for heavy loads and hard driving. And as you pull out, leaving the last of civilization behind you until you arrive in Fairbanks about 12 to 14 hours later, you remember the day before, being picked up by Don Corr, a service center manager and former Haul Road driver for Lynden Transport. You think about his words about the North Slope and, eventually, your main concern, the Haul Road in front of you.

"Nobody lives in Deadhorse," he explains, while describing the 1,500 or so support workers there now who work 12-hour days and temporarily live in a half dozen or so camps with a variety of schedules: week on, week off, two on, two off, six on, two off.

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"It's a unique environment," Corr adds, pointing out the Arctic desert surrounding us, with little snow, but large drifts all the same...