The Sag River has turned the Dalton into one of it’s branches. This video was taken on the first day of April. Road conditions have been getting steadily worse. The road is currently closed because blowing snow is reducing visibility and they can’t see to clear the road.
More to come.
The Dalton claims another truck!
Jack calls this kind of trailer a bulker. It carries dry powders like concrete, sand, or ammonium nitrate. This one probably carried concrete or sand. He says they use air to transfer the product from one place to another. Unloading a bulker is called “blowing it off” to the people who do it. In Prudhoe they store the product in silos.
Don’t forget you can increase the resolution on a YouTube video by clicking on the settings symbol in the lower right hand corner and choosing a higher number than what YouTube picked for you.
Another truck goes off the road! This one is about 20 miles from Prudhoe.
Happy Sunday everyone! We’re having a beautiful sunny day after some snow and a wind storm that cut out our electricity for a couple of hours last night.
I snapped these on Friday when this truck was fueling up to head north.
Jack says they are used for crude oil and that they lay on their sides, not upright like on the truck. You can see the actual metal portion of the pipe that is colored green with anti-corrosion paint. The black is thinner metal and in between the two is foam insulation.
This load is obviously going to Deadhorse or Prudhoe Bay. (FYI: Deadhorse refers to the “town” where companies have their operations, and Prudhoe Bay refers to the actual oil fields and is a much larger area.)
Click on the photos for larger images.
Jack snapped these shots after going through numerous snow drifts before he got into Prudhoe Bay. The engine is operating fine and he didn’t need to do anything, but it’s interesting to see how the snow gets into all the available spaces. The keypad looking thing is actually the air intake for the cab and the vent above it is the intake for the motor. Even though the engine is 200 degrees plus it’s still not enough to melt the snow at these temperatures, about 20 or 30 below.
Hard to believe this was 10 years ago, Jack says. This is a mod lift at the Alpine oil fields (mod is short for modular), back when he was doing heavy haul. Since it’s been so many years all he had to say about it was that he hauled this prefabricated unit to Alpine from Valdez and the workers there got busy lifting it off his truck. It took all day actually. That was one part of heavy haul he doesn’t miss.
A few years ago Jack and some other truckers took these pipe rack units from Fairbanks to Alpine, an area of Prudhoe Bay owned by Conoco-Phillips. You’ll see the units being loaded, then Jack driving behind other units. You can see the pipes in the middle of the structure as well as the valve controls on the top. These units are lined up next to each other and connected as part of the process of extracting oil and getting it into the pipeline to go south. In one of the ice road photos you can see a pipeline on the right.
They drive through tundra, over mountains, and finally on the ice roads of Prudhoe Bay. The last couple of photos, the ones where the road doesn’t look particularly icy, they are passing over a river. If you are also rather astute (and here I am giving you a clue) you can also see Jack’s reflection in the mirror, as well as a reflection of the small fan that he had mounted on the dash that could turn toward the windshield to defrost it or toward him on hot days.
(The best way to view the photos is to click on the first one and then click on the right arrow.)
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