Dalton Highway road surface May 2017
Greetings All
We travelled up to Prudhoe back in August 2007, while it's known as a gravel road, parts of it are tarmac and they were doing road works laying down more tarmac. My unreliable memory thinks about 25%'ish of the road was paved. I was curious to see what had changed in the last 10 years so I emailed the Alaska roads dept and the Fairbanks tourist info centre.
I didn't get a reply from roads dept but the tourist people sent back a pdf of a hand drawn map a recent tourist had made that showed the type of road surface.
The map is dated May 2017 and shows that out of the 414 miles, 136 miles are paved. I'm semi-surprised that not much has changed over the last 10 years.
Disclaimer: I don't know who who drew it up or vouch for how accurate it is so use the information with a grain of salt. Also the road surface changes according to the weather.
When we travelled up to Prudhoe while it was raining and the unpaved sections were very slippery. In places the mud was up to 4 inches deep, riding two up on an R100GS was hard work. We came back two days later after the sun had been out and everything had dried up. It was as hard as rock, I couldn't believe how quickly it had changed.
Regards
IanJ
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