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Haul Road: raw; hard to maintain, political ping-pong is challenge
Steve Sutherlin Petroleum News
Alaska's Dalton Highway is legend, serving up white-knuckle challenges for intrepid truckers and spawning a long-running reality TV series.
The lonely ribbon of roadbed snakes over vast rugged wilderness from civilization to North Slope oilfields; a vital lifeline to the heart of Alaska's economic engine.
The "Haul Road" -- the utilitarian handle by which it is locally known -- was privately constructed and was once restricted but is now open to the public. Services along the highway are few. Rental car contracts typically forbid driving the road.
The challenge of maintaining the Haul Road falls to the state of Alaska. The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities routinely battles pavement-eating frost heaves, wind and water gravel erosion, blizzards, avalanches, ice, floods and earthquakes to keep the road open for safe passage.
According to Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Boyle, the most vexing battle the state faces to maintain the Haul Road is political, frustratingly unnecessary, and fought with bureaucrats in faraway Washington D.C.
A very important corridor The transportation corridor that holds the Dalton Highway also hosts the trans-Alaska pipeline, and it is the right of way for much of the proposed natural gas pipeline from the North Slope to the tidewater of Cook Inlet. The state manages these assets, but most of the corridor north of the Yukon River falls under jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. South of the Yukon, the land falls under state jurisdiction.
The Haul Road is of vital importance, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System is the economic lifeline of the state, Boyle said in remarks to the Resource Development Council's 45th Annual Alaska Resources Conference Nov. 13 in Anchorage.
"Having management of those lands is critical," Boyle said. "In October it was announced that some consortium of environmental groups and others are actually challenging of BLM's authorizations for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, citing climate concerns and other things, so having that area under federal management -- particularly federal management that is antithetical to the interests of the state of Alaska -- is problematic."
Alaska remains entitled to nearly 6 million acres of additional land entitlement from the federal government that it has yet to receive, based on Alaska being admitted as the 49th state of the union, Boyle said. Of those acres, the Dalton Highway corridor -- currently covered under Public Land Order 5150 -- "represents the state's number one priority in terms of the lands that we're most interested in in getting our hands on."
Federal control complicates and delays even such basic tasks as obtaining gravel to improve and maintain the highway during the short summer construction season, Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson told conference attendees.
Anderson said the state conducted a study that found that due to wind and heavy truck traffic, the highway loses 3/4 of an inch per year of surfacing during the season.
"On the Dalton, it's not easy to find good gravel sources in a lot of places and so we're really pushing out just to try to find those good materials and build that road that'll last," he said.
Boyle expressed frustration that the Secretary of the Interior had the opportunity to grant the state those lands within the 5150 corridor earlier in 2024 as Interior was working on its Central Yukon Resource Management Plan -- a planning effort BLM had undertaken over the past decade.
"They were looking at alternatives from completely conveying the 2.1 million acres that the state has selected in that quarter to not conveying any element at all," he said.
A promising field trip Boyle said he had reached out in good faith to BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning in 2023 and was invited, along with DNR Deputy Commissioner Brent Goodrum, to join Stone-Manning for a ride up the Haul Road to a BLM camp north of Coldfoot.
Despite a vast divide in political philosophies, it was a good trip, Boyle said.
After crossing from state land over the Yukon River bridge to BLM land, Boyle had a chance to chat with Stone-Manning and make a point.
"We just spent the last couple of hours driving around the part of the Dalton Highway corridor that's managed by the state, and as you can see it's not some kind of hellscape that we've cut down all the trees, and we've stripped mined everything and it just looks like some kind of barren wasteland," he said. "It's beautiful pristine Alaska wilderness and so you know shifting from federal to state management isn't some kind of dramatic shift in how these lands are going to be managed.
Boyle said the state refined its proposal, instead of asking for 2.1 million acres it shrunk down its ask to its most important points: to have the Dalton highway; to have the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System right of way, and to have the right of way for the future Alaska LNG pipeline. In addition, the state requested material sites needed to maintain the highway; some placer mining deposits in the Wiseman area; and most importantly access corridors off the highway to places like the Ambler mining district, the Ray Mountains and other state land holdings that are currently isolated.
"I actually got a commitment from Director Stone-Manning and the team here in Alaska to work on analyzing the state's revised proposal and to work with us through that RFP process to actually arrive at a solution that would give the state titles," Boyle said. "But as was the common practice in the Biden/Harris administration, that decision making was sucked back into D.C., and it was pulled up into that unknown ethereal layer that didn't really rest with the Interior -- that's somehow connected to the people in the White House that are that are calling all the shots and particularly calling the policy shots for Alaska."
--STEVE SUTHERLIN
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