London, Paris, Fairbanks

This is one of the promised instalments of my impressions moving to the Alaskan Interior after 15 years living in European capitals. Today: Roads.

Roads were on my mind on my very first visit to Alaska. The last leg of my long itinerary left Anchorage and its agglomeration (population approx. 375,000) on a night of October 2009. I had a window seat, looked down, and saw nothing. Occasionally, a patch of light, then darkness again for long stretches. When Fairbanks (population 50,000, counting the urban area) showed up, it looked remote and isolated, despite quickly revealing itself as a modern and reassuringly ordinary city. With regular roads like any other. 

The fact is, there aren’t that many roads in Alaska. Take a look at an online road map:

Apart from the streets in built-up or residential areas, that’s basically it. And if you scroll west and north on the live map, you’ll see a large number of places with no roads connecting them to anywhere: I have made people smile with the (slightly wrong) statement that there’s typically either no road or one road going to any given place in Alaska.

The concept of being off the road system was new to me and still slightly boggles my mind. It is quite ubiquitous. Walmart (of all places!) has a special counter to arrange air shipping to what is called without irony the Bush (usually upper case). While many Bush communities may only have a few hundred inhabitants, there’s a good number of small towns in the region of 3000-8000. Of course the state capital, Juneau in the far south-east, isn’t on the road system either, though for slightly different geographical reasons. That’s a lot of people.

I have the privilege of occasionally travelling to Barrow for work, which is the northernmost settlement in the US and the seat of the North Slope Borough and its school district, has a wonderful public library, medical services, a small post-secondary college, a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant. Barrow is also a largely Native (Iñupiat) community that practices whaling and hunting (seal, caribou), and artistic traditions. And people have cars there — private pickup trucks, police patrol cars and even yellow school buses. So where do these come from?

First answer: they are brought in by barge. One thing that’s obvious from the map is that most off-the-road-system communities are either located along the coast or along the major rivers. This means snow machine traffic is possible in winter and boats can access the communities in the summer. But surprisingly this is not the only answer. When one of my Barrow co-workers got a new truck last March, a group of three drove over the sea ice and frozen tundra over to Prudhoe Bay, where they could catch the Dalton Highway towards Fairbanks: a trip of something like 24h one way. The Toyota Tacoma pickup truck was bought at a dealership and driven back up. A regular temporary ice road materializes every winter, overseen in some fashion I’m unclear on by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency), which declares the road closed every spring as soon as the tundra has melted too much. 

Easy to imagine how glad the locals are that Amazon, for example, delivers to these localities, though anything beyond book-sized parcels is a problem anywhere in Alaska, even in the large cities.

Another way at looking at the road system is to consider the border between Alaska and Canada. It is roughly 2500 km / 1500 miles long. Number of road crossings? Have a look at the road map. Yes: four. Two of them are in the extreme south-east, and one is closed in the winter, and regularly at other times for reasons such as flooding or earth slides. 

Of course I didn’t know any of this before I started visiting, but back in 2009 I expected roads to be rough. Sure enough, some of the highways have a reputation of not being for beginners, and residential streets outside city centers are usually unpaved. But others are perfectly fine.

As for “our” road, Chena Hot Springs Road, which leaves Fairbanks to the east, Melinda initially mentioned “frost heaves”, something I was unfamiliar with, but I expected rough roads. To my surprise CHSR was in a far better shape than most roads along the outskirts of London, where potholes are legendary. Indeed, having seen my first Alaskan spring and summer, I’m highly impressed with the speed and planning of the road crews that take care of the yearly maintenance. Given the demands of climate, budget and the short work season, tradeoffs are inevitable and may be controversial (and I wish they’d use less chipseal), but I think the authorities are overall doing an impressive job maintaining the roadways.