Day in Deadhorse & Prudhoe Bay

Bas', Dorus', and my bikes parked outside the Prudhoe Bay Hotel entrance.

Modular construction is the rule here. Everything comes on the back of a truck up the haul road, or by barge during the few pack-ice free months of the year.

Vehicle heater hookup cords line the walls. Hitch her up here!

Vehicle Heater Cord

My personal heater cord, comes up right in the crotch area of the bike!
This is the electrical connection for my heated vest that I installed during the trip back at Greg's house in Olympia. It has been SO nice to have. To give you some idea, before getting the vest I was wearing a polypro base layer, t-shirt, long sleeve t-shirt, fleece jacket, and my extreme weather motorcycle jacket with its liner, and still getting cold in the rain. Now when it's cold and rainy, I add the heated vest to the above as the second layer (over the polypro base layer) and under all the rest. It has low, medium and high heat settings, each the equivalent of approximately 1-3 additional layers of clothing, respectively. Dial a layer!

This is the hotel cafeteria buffet line. All the hotels up here are designed for only one purpose: to house oilfield workers. Not tourists. I was lucky to get a room in the Prudhoe Bay Hotel. It was $125 a night, including tax and all meals. The dining room was open 24 hours, with hot food served during generous hours for breakfast, lunch and dinner (for example, hot breakfast was served from 0415 to 0800). Outside hot meal times, make your own sandwiches, cold and pre-made microwaveable food was always available. The food was good and I ate plenty of it. Get this: use of the laundry facilities, including all detergents, etc, was also included. I took full advantage and washed everything I had (or I would have if i coulda run around naked!). The oil field workers work 6 or 7 days a week, for 2-3 weeks at a time, so they deserve to be taken care of. I thought this was an excellent value, especially given its remoteness.

My rear tire looks great and shows amazingly little wear from 500 miles on the haul road. These are Continental Road Attack 2 tires, and had about 2,000 miles on them before I started this trip. Now they have about 6,500 miles. The manufacturer says they are have harder rubber in the center tread area for prolonged wear and I believe it (sport bike tires have very soft rubber for cornering traction and are notorious for fast wear). My Dunlop OEM tires lasted only about 8,000 miles. I think these Continentals may make the entire trip, another 5-6 thousand miles.

One of today's prime goals was to find a way to clean this...

...and this.
The haul road is treated with calcium chloride, a salt, to congeal and harden the dirt to prevent dust in dry conditions. But when wet, it forms a concrete-like mud that hardens like cement and is extremely corrosive. It formed deposits up to about an inch thick.

The radiator cooling fins were pretty well filled with it. I forgot to get a photo, but the fan motor and blade that sit behind the radiator were completely encased in a solid block of dried mud. Fortunately, this is the arctic, so the cooling system was not trying to operate the fan for cooling. If it had, there was no way that fan was going to do anything encased in concrete!
We're thinkin' a power washer might clean this very nicely but what's the chance of that here in Deadhorse? We'll settle for a hose. Except there seem to be none. Oh yea, they'd all freeze...any time of year.

The mud formed wave-like patterns on the engine side covers. Weird.

How did Dorus' Kawasaki KLR 650, $6,500 new, fare?...

Its radiator completely impacted. No wonder it was overheating on the way into Deadhorse. Otherwise perfect.

Bas' BMW, designed for the ultimate back-road riding experience: air cooled, so no radiator to clog or fan to seize; shaft drive, so no chain to wear out or corrode. It fared the best.
Yours for only $23k.

On with the search for a way to clean the bikes...

On the way, Dorus, Bas and I stop to top up for the long ride back. We found the hoses and nozzles, but where are the pumps?
Bas says, "Hey guys, look in here!"

There were the pumps and the credit card reader, protected from the elements, of course, why didn't we think of that? Now all Dorus had to do was figure out which way to insert his credit card... We helped him along.

 Dorus pulls the trigger and wonders why no gas will come out. I walk over to see what's going on. He pulls the nozzle out of the tank and shows me how no gas comes out when he pulls the trigger... except the gas comes out now and hoses all over the front of me!

After making me highly flammable, he tries to blow up my bike too!

Talking to a maintenance guy, we get a tip that there is a mobile power washer washing the hotels in town...we cruise on over to the Aurora, the "big yellow hotel", and what do you know, there they are, washing the hotel. Would you guys wash our bikes? Sure!

Not only is this a pressure washer, it's heated! See the steam, 180+ F.  They guys were super and done in a few minutes.  We asked how much we owed them, they said, "Hey, we're up here washing walls 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, two weeks at a shot, this was fun, glad to do it", and sent us on our way. Talk about generating goodwill. Things like this happen up here all the time. People in challenging situations helping each other "get it done".

What a difference! I can see the fan!

All the important parts are squeaky clean.

Including the chain, on which we can now see the effect of that salty mud; this chain was perfectly shiny when I left Fairbanks.

Three Baldies*
We found this sign and it was perfect for a parting group shot.  Dorus and Bas were eager to get off dead center. After coming all this way, they had not yet begun; this was mile ZERO for them on their way to Argentina! I stayed in Deadhorse to do the oilfield & arctic ocean tour this afternoon.
(*Chuck, this is copyrighted, you have to pay if you want to do a painting!)

Things I saw on the tour:

Clear skies and SUN over the "Prudhoe Bay National Forest"

Huge balloon tires allow this monster to travel over the tundra without damaging it. They say it has such a big footprint that it can roll right over a man without hurting him and that's exactly the way the inventor got the contract -- he laid down and let them drive over him.

Well head valve assembly called a 'Christmas Tree'.

There is a Christmas tree in each of these small blockhouses, from which flexible drilling technology allows wells to radiate in all directions for miles, centralizing the wells instead of spreading them all over the tundra.

Long shot of an arctic fox

The Beach!

Feet Wet!

Very sexy, do you not think?

Driftwood comes from the Mackenzie River in the NW Territories that empties into the Arctic Ocean and then gets pushed here by pack ice. There are no trees here.

One of the few things that grows here...briefly. And driftwood.

Arctic swans.