The James W. Dalton Highway is in a category by itself. At 414 miles from the Elliott Highway junction north of Fairbanks to Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean, it is the northernmost road in Alaska’s highway system, one of the most remote freight corridors on the continent, and the only surface route supplying the Trans-Alaska Pipeline infrastructure and the oil fields of the North Slope.
For commercial drivers, the Dalton is not a highway in the conventional sense. It is an industrial supply road built to serve the pipeline, and it operates under conditions that have no parallel anywhere else in the lower 48 states.
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