Few Alaskans refer to the James W. Dalton Highway by its official name. It's the highway part that trips them up.
The 414-mile agglomeration of dirt, gravel and mud, one and a half lanes wide with nary a convenience store the entire way, seems beyond the elasticity of the word highway.Instead, the route is widely known in Alaska as the Haul Road. And, utilitarianly speaking, that's precisely what it is - a road, built in 1974, to haul equipment for the trans-Alaska pipeline, which it roughly parallels, and the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay, on the frigid shores of the Beaufort Sea.
But the Haul Road also offers one of the world's most extraordinary drives. It bisects an untouched wilderness - an area the size of 50 Yellowstones, where most of the mountains haven't even been named, let alone climbed; where herds of caribou 100,000 strong embark on annual migrations the equivalent of wandering from New York to Miami without encountering a single human settlement; where grizzlies and wolves still enforce Darwinian laws.
The road begins at one theatrically named town, Livengood, then heads unwaveringly north, 300 miles beyond the Arctic Circle, until it ends at another, Deadhorse.
Between, it passes through four distinct climatic zones: boreal forest, arctic mountains, mossy plains and frozen tundra.
Last summer was the first that public traffic was allowed on the entire Dalton Highway (the southern half has been open since 1981).
During a visit to Fairbanks last July I learned of the highway's newly accessible status and, smitten with the idea of venturing to the very top of the United States, promptly decided to drive it.
I loaded up my camping gear, bought a week's worth of provisions, and set out alone in my small two-wheel-drive passenger car.
The Haul Road officially commences 84 miles north of Fairbanks: The pavement ends just as the radio reception does, save for occasional bursts of religious programming.
Summer in northern Alaska is short but intense - for two months the sun crisscrosses the horizon and refuses to set fully - and the trees, trying to cram a year's worth of growth into a handful of fortnights, appear not merely green but electric green.
These are not big trees. Spruces predominate, both white and black, and they cluster in the shallow valleys looking healthy but spindly - a collection of pipe cleaners.
It takes about 300 years for one of these trees to reach a diameter of five inches. Some never get taller than chin-high. When I pulled over and took a short hike I felt like Paul Bunyan.
A few miles later, though, at the top of a small hill, I experienced precisely the opposite sensation.
I parked and the world spread before me, 360 degrees of rolling hills and roiling rivers, a thread of brown road and zigzagging silver pipe, on and on until land meshed with clouds - a vast, swooning openness.
Soon, without any forewarning, it started to rain. Alaska weather is, to put it mildly, erratic.
A popular T-shirt for sale in Fairbanks shows a map of the state divided into three regions, labeled "partly rainy," "mostly rainy" and "entirely rainy."
What I found astonishing, however, was not the frequency of the rain but its intensity: brilliant slashes of lightning, drops crashing like pellets, overpowering the windshield wipers and reducing the road to porridge.
An hour on the Dalton and my car was caked with glop.
The storms were frequent but brief: One minute visibility would be nil; the next - poof! - blue skies, with double rainbows wicketing the road. And then a few moments later, more rain.
Equilibrium, while it lasted, was a sky the color of ragg wool.
Driving the Dalton is slow but not difficult. When it was pouring I parked in a pullout, of which there are many. When clear I cruised at about 40 miles an hour. Traffic was extremely light. Everyone waved. But each passing truck also brought a hailstorm of pebbles.
If you drive the Dalton, paint scratches and windshield chips aren't a matter of if but how many (one of the main reasons rental car companies do not allow their vehicles on the highway).
A good spare - preferably two - is a must. Gravel is an abrasive surface. The road is littered with blown tires. A tow back to Fairbanks can cost $2,000.
Rules governing camping and hiking along the Dalton are extremely permissive - basically, there are none.
The land surrounding the highway is almost all state or federally owned (the road passes by three enormous wildlife preserves and the eight-million-acre Gates of the Arctic National Park).
You can camp and hike wherever you want for as long as you please, a wondrous freedom found virtually nowhere in the Lower 48. It's genuine wilderness, without a safety net - unpatrolled by forest rangers and devoid of rescue services.
I spent my first night camped about two miles off the road, on a willow-covered knoll providing another endless view.
The rains seemed to have stopped for the day. The temperature was a comfortable 50 degrees.
By the time I'd finished cooking a pasta dinner it was nearly midnight, but the skies were scarcely darker than at noon.
Both a bright sun and a full moon were overhead. My internal clock was confounded. Also, though the risk of attack was tiny, I couldn't help thinking of bears. Sleep was slow to come.
In the morning, hoarse bird calls woke me. I poked my head out of my tent: Three ravens, big as kites, circled in the milky sky.
The air tasted damp and piney. It was good to be outside. I cooked breakfast, then drove on, the trees thinning and the land becoming more meadowy.
I passed fields of wildflowers: gorgeous cottongrass rippling in the breeze, lipstick-pink fireweed igniting the landscape.
Here and there odd rock formations called tors - granite pinnacles left standing after surrounding softer rock has eroded away - pointed skyward like bony fingers.
Best of all was the discovery of arctic blueberries: swollen to the size of marbles beneath the midnight sun and explosively sweet - by far the most delicious I've ever tasted.
I spent an hour filling up a water bottle, then snacked on them the rest of the day.
My constant companion, the pipeline, snaked alongside the road. The tube is four feet in diameter and raised on H-shaped stilts that allow the pipe to slide back and forth so it won't buckle with temperature changes.
I stood beneath the pipeline and listened: It emits a funny glugging sound, like someone drinking from a container of milk.
I crossed over the broad, silty Yukon River - the sole bridge over the Yukon in the 1,500 miles it courses through Alaska - then passed a sign demarcating the Arctic Circle.
Sixty miles later I stopped for a gas-up and meal in the encampment of Coldfoot, which advertises itself as the world's northernmost truck stop.
Inside Coldfoot's diner, the seven wooden tables were crowded with Dalton truckers - suspendered, baseball capped and impressively bearded, all carrying half-gallon coffee thermoses.
Several of them, I was told, have logged more than a million miles on the Dalton, driving the road year-round. In winter, conditions can be brutal.
One wall of the diner is devoted to a photo collage of jackknifed and overturned semis.
I ate a thick and delicious cheeseburger and read a list on the back of the menu titled "10 Reasons Out of a Possible 1,000 That Make Living in Coldfoot Unique."
No. 10 was my favorite: "The wonderful lack of television, politics, news, crime, pollution, freeways, congestion, lines, rudeness, hurriedness, traffic, and all that blather about O. J. Simpson."
Still, life at Coldfoot has its attendant hardships. For 17 consecutive days in January 1989 the temperature did not rise above negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit. All windows in Coldfoot are constructed with three panes of glass.
The day I arrived the gasoline pumps were broken. There was no choice in the matter: I and nearly everyone else were going to stay until they were fixed.
Instead of waiting around, I took a room at Coldfoot's Arctic Acres Inn, which is actually a string of attached mobile homes, and set off to climb a nearby mountain with a Coldfoot waiter named Tim, who insisted on bringing a rifle to defend us from possible bear attacks. I carried pepper spray.
As we climbed through the taiga (Russian for "land of little sticks") we saw bear scat and bear beds but fortunately no bears.
Instead, there were flocks of willow ptarmigan, Alaska's state bird, foraging lazily in the alder brush.
And there were bugs.
My goodness were there bugs.
Mosquitoes and black flies by the billions, literally forming a dark, thrumming cloud around us. With a single slap to my forearm, I could kill two dozen of them. (Tim blithely informed me that the one-slap record was 163.)
We repeatedly applied high-octane bug dope and still had to hike with our mouths closed. It was only after we emerged above the treeline and the wind picked up that the bugs dissipated.
At the top our efforts were rewarded with a euphoriant view: wave after wave of craggy, glacially scrubbed mountains - the core of the Brooks Range - wind-hammered and barren, looking like huge mounds of volcanic ash.
On the descent we heard the distant howling of wolves.
By morning the gas pumps were operational and I continued north, past a sign that read "Next services 244 miles" and into the foothills of the Brooks. The road climbed and the trees thinned.
Finally, I passed a solitary spruce aside the road, labeled "Farthest north spruce tree on the Alaskan pipeline - do not cut."
After that the terrain shifted dramatically. I drove up Atigun Pass, at 4,739 feet the highest point on the Dalton, encircled by serrated ridge lines and slopes veined with snow.
Moss huddled on the lee side of rocks. A group of Dall sheep perched tenuously on a ledge.
Even in a car the place seemed brutal, dangerous - clearly not meant for human habitation. Driving the pass was the highlight of the trip.
I kept going. Beyond the Brooks Range, in a region called the North Slope, the land swiftly eased into smooth hills and gentle mesas.
Hiking here was all but impossible: The earth was a kaleidoscopic tangle of alder thickets and sedge tussocks and moss campion so soft it swallowed your foot like quicksand with each step.
Flatter still was the final stretch of road, the Arctic Coastal Plain, a seemingly endless expanse of grasslands atop a 1,000-foot layer of permafrost.
The area is startling in its nothingness. Save for a few pingos - small, conical mounds that form when underground springs freeze above permafrost - the land runs dead straight in all directions to an unbroken horizontal horizon.
The only caribou I saw out of the million-plus in northern Alaska I spotted here, a quartet of majestically horned bulls grazing peacefully by the road.
Flocks of gulls informed me that land's end was approaching. The lights of the oil fields shone in the distance and I drove into Deadhorse, home to Prudhoe Bay's 1,500 oil-field workers. It's an ugly, apocalyptic town. Truly the end of the Earth: corrugated-steel structures, giant trucks, tremendous hunks of machinery - everything covered with mud, function utterly eclipsing form.
An hour in Deadhorse made me yearn for the open road. So I filled up with gas, turned my car south, and headed back the way I came.