Breakdown Dead Ahead
Me and Sky Pilot Larry are cooling our heels here in the Ford dealer garage waiting room at Fairbanks, a lavishly appointed corner of the main bays with coffee and a popcorn machine. But … they have a bathroom and a couple of chairs and a desk with internet hookup. Fairbanks is wired! Course, it’s the first cellphone coverage since the bubble in Prudeau provided courtesy of Alyeska.
We got truck problems, a hub grinding away in the front wheel where a 4 wheel drive assembly balked at the Dalton Highway’s mud and grit and thrown rocks. The road to Prudeau is called the ‘Haul Road’ because most traffic is semi-load of material for the North Slope drilling. Tourists are mostly nuisances to the big rigs — that, or potential roadkill targets as they sluice and slide down mudsloped roads like amphetamine hogs in a 9 degree trough. The fun is swerving away suddenly like a matador’s cape and not drive off into the tundra.
You pay a price for a fevered run at the Arctic Ocean. We got two chips in the windshield, broken sidelights, perforated trailer shell, mud in the truck bed back to the floor of the trailer. And this busted 4 wheel drive hub…. We got off light. This morning we spent an hour washing thick mud off everything stem to stern. The rig looked like a good ol’ boy’s offroad 4×4 up some river bottom, roof to muffler in permafrost mud. So did we.
Larry’s truck is a 4 wheel drive diesel brute, double gas tanks, high riding, 8 ply tires, extended cab, but no match, really, for the Alaskan Outback. It takes cojones and a copious amount of happy-go-lucky insanity to go mano y mano with frost heaves, drop-offs, sloughing shoulders, wayward moose, aggressive Kenworths, heavy fog, potholes the size of mastodon footprints, rockslides and mountain passes. If you asked either Larry or me, we both would do it again in a South End minute. Who says you get wiser with wisdom?? Sometimes in life, wisdom should take second fiddle. Otherwise, where’s the adventure?
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