On Sunday, I went with 5 of my labmates on a road trip to the Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean. I was very excited to dip my toes in this ocean that so few people have been to. Even the insistence of the Prudhoe Bay veterans that touching the water at Prudhoe was not something that I wanted to do, could not dampen my spirits. Why do you not really want to get the Arctic water on or near you? Because Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil and gas producer in the United States, and you have to pass through miles of oil wells and refineries to get to the ocean. Needless to say, the waters lapping up on these shores of industrial activity are not the cleanest. To even see the ocean, you have to take a tour of the oil fields. There’s only one road, and it goes to Prudhoe, there is physically no other way to even see the ocean without taking tour. So we signed up to take the tour.

The trip up was about 2 hours and a half of dirt road and rolling tundra. The road follows the Sag river, short for Sagavarnirktok (I had to double check the spelling), through a very uniform landscape of flat green tundra. About half an hour before getting to Prudhoe, we pass the Franklin Bluffs, a long series of cliffs that were names for John Franklin, an explorer who apparently spotted the cliffs all the way from the ocean. We pass a mileage sign to Deadhorse. So I’m a little bit confused about our final destination, is it Prudhoe or Deadhorse? Deadhorse is the name of the “town” in Prudhoe bay. I put “town” in quotation marks, because it isn’t really a town. No one actually lives there permanently. But it has housing and facilities for the 3000+ seasonal workers that come to work in the oil fields. As we approached Deadhorse we could see the industrial facilities stretching out in a line on the horizon. It was enormous. Easy to understand that Prudhoe bay and Deadhorse blur into one big mass.

As we were a little early for our tour, we first drove around to see what Deadhorse has to offer. As we soon discovered, it was not a whole lot. There is a general store, where we stopped to browse the selection of souvenirs that shamelessly take advantage of the ridiculousness of the town’s name. There is a dining hall. And, as a spectacular bonus, there’s a tanning salon. And that’s basically all the entertainment that Deadhorse has to offer. What it did have in abundance were a lot of prefrabicated boxy buildings, the purpose of which were hard to discover. I guess housing possibly? It was definitely a very weird place to be. It looked like a settlement on an alien planet. All these buildings were very colorful, but covered in a thick layer of dust. That and the lack of people milling about gave it a very ghost town feel. After buying our souvenirs, we walked around a little bit, trying unsuccessfully to find signs of life. I got the feeling that this would not be a very fun place to live, especially in the winter during 24 hour darkness. There’s really only so much tanning you can do.

We finally found Deadhorse Camp, a two-story derelict mustard building which served as housing for tourists, and waited for our tour to begin while watching a band of caribou frolic next to Dalton Highway. About 10 minutes after the tour was supposed to begin, a man in a blue jumpsuit presents himself as our tour guide and invites us to board a dust-covered minibus. Our final destination was the east docks, about 45 minutes away. The tour was quite interesting, the guide pointed out the functions of different buildings, told us about life working at Prudhoe (you get two weeks of daily 12 hour shifts then two weeks off, and you get paid a ridiculously high salary), and some tidbits about the hardships of working in the winter. I just couldn’t get over how vast the oil fields were. The west docks were so far away that rather than using the airport at Deadhorse, it is more economical for them to have their own airport. Crazy. It just went on and on and on.

After 45 minutes of driving past refineries and oil wells and gravel pits, we finally made it to a little spit of gravel that jutted out into the Arctic Ocean. I saw immediately that the warnings of my friends about the unsanitary nature of the water were not exaggerated. There were rusted barrels jutting out and who knows what else hidden in the water. But who cares, I was at the Arctic Ocean, a whole ocean that I had never seen before!! Pretty incredible. Once we were done admiring the view of the water and the refineries-dotted coastline, we piled back into the bus and headed back to Deadhorse. It was getting late, and we had seen what Prudhoe had to offer. Time to go back to Toolik.

While we were on the road, I thought about the oil fields and how revolting they were in their industrial opulence. But the ironic thing is, the road that made it possible for me to get to Toolik only exists because it is necessary for trucks to make the haul between Prudhoe and Fairbanks. Without the oil fields, there would be no reason to have such an extraordinarily high-maintenance road, and without the road, there is no way that Toolik could exist. A strange connection to have, but enabling awesome science slightly redeems Prudhoe in my eyes, even though it was unintentionally done.