Dalton Highway:
Natural Resources and Nature
Driving the Dalton Highway to Your Own Front Door
By Theresa Bakker
Have you ever come upon an old house along a busy highway and
wondered why someone would build there? Maybe the house was there
first. That's what happened to the Reakoff family.
They moved to Wiseman in the heart of the Brooks Range in the
1960's. That was before the Haul Road was scratched out of the rugged
northland so workers could construct one of the engineering marvels of
the world, the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline.
Rick Reakoff and his wife June bought some cabins in the remote
location. Rick was a pilot. He guided in the fall, and fished in the
summer, so the family of five moved back and forth between their Brooks
Range home and Bristol Bay.
Rick and June's daughter Heide Schoppenhurst was a little girl
of five when the pipeline construction started, offering her a front
row seat. "I remember looking across the river and seeing caribou
migrating up the valley and then hearing the bulldozers coming up the
same route," she said.
"It was strictly a haul road when they first built it. We flew
in and out, so we didn't use it until the 1980's. It was a pretty rough
and treacherous road even then. They used to stop people at the Yukon
River, unless you had a permit. You had to prove why you were coming up
here, so we didn't use it much."
Now Schoppenhurst and her family rely on the road to bring in
tourists. She works for the National Park Service at the new Coldfoot
Visitors' Center. She and her husband also run a business called Boreal
Lodging.
Heide's brother Jack still lives in Wiseman, too. He remembers
the Dalton Highway construction as foreboding. "The adults were afraid
it was going to change the area dramatically and affect the animals,"
he said. "It was a concern for most people, so that perception was
instilled in me.
"The construction was across the river from us. I could hear the
chainsaws and scrapers and Cats. I remember walking out on an old
mining road one day and cutting over to the brand new highway, seeing
the new signs across the river. It just seemed really weird after
knowing this place as a wilderness."
Jack Reakoff spends most of his time in the field trapping,
hunting and observing. He's been keeping a calendar of his thoughts for
over twenty years. He writes down things like the temperature and
animal sightings, and then compares the passages from year to year.
"I've noticed that the dust from the road melts the snow sooner,"
Reakoff said. "That's changed the shrubbery regime and tree growth. The
road has influenced animal populations too, because the hunters can
come up the road.
"Caribou used to migrate up and down the valley. In the early
90s, The Central Arctic Herd tried to migrate into the upper part of a
nearby drainage, but the road traffic deflected them. Now they're
wintering up to a hundred miles east of the road."
There are many more people migrating through the village these
days, thanks to increased traffic along the Dalton Highway. When Jack
and Heide were kids, Wiseman was a remote location. There was just the
Reakoff family and a few other households.
"There were a lot of old stores and cabins," Schoppenhurst
said. "That was pretty amazing, how this perfect historical site was
here. At one time when it was a gold mining community, there had been
350 people living in those cabins."
Today, the highway is a mixed blessing. It's much easier to
stock up on supplies and fuel, which are just a day's drive away in
Fairbanks. Tourists help feed the local economy. The oil pipeline has
also been an economic windfall for the state, a success that may
someday be mirrored by a natural gas pipeline. Still, the landscape has
also been substantially changed.
That's something Jack Reakoff has come to accept. At the age
of 19, he went to Anchorage and tried to live the urban lifestyle, but
soon realized he preferred his Wiseman home.
"I just like living close to nature," he said. "You're self sufficient
and things move at your pace, it's not forced. You still have to do
certain activities, like getting wood and hunting animals to eat, but
you set your own pace as to when that's going to happen. You can do it
when the conditions are right."
Some things never change, even when a highway brings the world right to your own front door.
Theresa Bakker is a researcher for KUAC's new travel show, "Anywhere, Alaska." Send her an e-mail at theresa.bakker@kuac.org.
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