If you stick your rig in the ditch along Alaska's treacherous Haul Road, the word starts traveling before the white leaves your knuckles. For the next two weeks, every trucker you meet is a wise guy. You may stop for a bowl of bean soup at Coldfoot and find a Polaroid of your wayward load tacked to the bulletin board. If the R-rated, irregularly published Chuck Hole Gazzett is up and running, you can expect your bad day to be immortalized in headlines like "Abe Omar Plows Snow," or, "A Shooting [Western] Star." But nobody laughs too hard or too long. Because up here, they have a saying about drivers who exit the Haul Road unexpectedly: "There are two types of truckers: Those of you who have, and those of you who will."

Tom McAlpine won't talk about whether he has or hasn't. "That's voodoo," he grins, and changes the subject. McAlpine has been making the run between Fairbanks and the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay since 1978, with a three-year break beginning in 1986, when the oil business tanked. He headed for the lower 48, where he worked on a ranch and ran produce. He refers to it as time he spent "outside."

When the oil field action picked up again, he returned to Fairbanks, and he's been running the Haul Road ever since. Currently, McAlpine makes roughly two trips per week as an owner/operator for Alaska West Express, Inc. (907-452-4355). In early November, he let Road King ride along. The Haul Road is officially known as the Dalton Highway. Completed in 1974, it runs alongside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, terminating at the Arctic Ocean. Its primary purpose is to supply drilling operations in the gigantic Prudhoe Bay oil field, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The map may say "highway," but down where the rubber meets the road, the Dalton is a skinny 400-mile scar of chuckholes, dust, mud, snowpack and black ice that winds its way up and down through swaths of forbidding pine forests, ragged-edge mountain passes and endless sweeps of tundra.

Moose, melting ice just two of the hazards

The head of the Dalton is around 85 miles from Fairbanks ¬ the only stretch of what could be reasonably called "highway" on our route. We pulled out of Fairbanks at 10:30 a.m., grossing 101,400, our four-axle trailer loaded with 9,426 gallons of methanol, used in the oil fields to keep drill holes from freezing.

Almost as soon as we got started, we pulled off the road to fuel the trucks and ourselves at the Hilltop truckstop, the last full-time services for 500 miles. The truck gorged on diesel, and we gorged on hot biscuits slathered in 90-weight gravy, served with fried potatoes on a plate half the size of a fifth wheel. Then we struck out.

As Tom McAlpine puts it, the first 130 miles of the Haul Road are "nothin' but shiftin.'" We took many of the hills at 15 miles per hour, and McAlpine kept up a running commentary: "This one here has caught its fair share of trucks ... See there where all those trees are flattened? Buddy of mine went in there a few weeks ago ... This one's called Five Mile Hill ... I stopped to dig a guy out of a car on this one..." The litany continues: Gobbler's Knob. ("Misjudge that one, and you learn to back with your brakes locked!") Oil Spill Hill. The Roller Coaster. Sand Hill. ("This one will eat your lunch.") The Beaver Slide. ("Guy lost it here once, jammed it in a low gear and wound the engine up ... there were wrist pins and connecting rods all over the road.")

For mile after rough mile, the big 600-hp Cat in McAlpine's '99 Western Star 4964EX is either chomping up a grade or riding the Jake. We stop atop Two-and-a-Half-Mile Hill and walk around the truck, performing a visual inspection. Up here, the pines are daubed with fat licks of snow, and packed snow has taken much of the roughness from the road. "In the summertime, you stop here to count your tires, see how many you have left," jokes McAlpine.

The nature of the Prudhoe Bay run imposes itself on the trucks and truckers in many ways. McAlpine had to replace the peg on his CB mike with a steel bolt. "The bracket vibrates so much, it saws right through the plastic one," he says. Tires are run at low pressure to extend their life ¬ still, they last only about 30,000 miles. Once started, engines are rarely shut down; all that idle time adds up to a 3.3 mpg lifetime average.

Twin spotlights in the mirror racks are aimed at both ditches to pick up moose ¬ they like to run the Haul Road when they get tired of fighting deep snow. The intense cold can freeze wheels in an instant; McAlpine always puts his truck in motion with a gentle left-to-right swerve, checking in the mirrors to see that all the fluorescent orange stripes painted on his trailer wheels are spinning.

Sometimes it's not cold enough. "Zero to 10 degrees, that's pretty good truckin'," said McAlpine as we left Fairbanks. But later that night, when we inched up Atigun Pass and over the Brooks Range, the Western Star's thermometer read 33 degrees ¬ just the right temperature to turn the snow pack into a water slide.

Almost a 'tombstone every mile'

McAlpine drove on the edge of his seat. We had stopped to chain up before the climb ¬ "Chains decrease the pucker factor," he says ¬ but it was still a tense ride, waiting for the wheels to slip like someone waiting for a balloon to pop. Tom kept looking in the mirror to check his tires. Tires that run white are getting a good grip on the snow pack. Tires that run black are too warm ¬ they're melting, not gripping the snow. Our tires were running black, so Tom kept one eye out for traction-giving loose gravel at the edge of the road; at the same time, he has learned to distrust that edge ¬ a sharp shoulder might be nothing more than graded snow.

Any trucker who has run a variety of weather and terrain will tell you the jokers in the Haul Road deck aren't unique. What is unique is how often those jokers come up. For 500 miles, the road demands constant attention. There's a gremlin waiting every quarter-mile: an icy switchback, a love-crazed caribou, a whiteout, a chuckhole blowout that hangs your snout out over some godforsaken ravine.

One of the old hands, a man who goes by the handle of "Pappy," puts up white steel crosses where anyone has died. It's hardly the "tombstone every mile" Cowboy Dick Curless sang about, but there are just enough of Pappy's crosses along the way to help you think about who's waiting at home and grip that wheel a little more tightly.

Truckers meeting atop narrow Haul Road hills have been known to clip mirrors, but such incidents incite more ribbing than road rage. Out here, a sort of rough-hewn courtesy prevails. Each time we met an oncoming truck, each driver slowed, reducing the amount of gravel in the air. McAlpine's windshield is filled with cracks and stars, almost all of them put there by four-wheelers who don't know the rules (the Dalton Highway was only recently opened to the public).

When a pickup full of oil field workers catches us crawling up the 9% grade of the Beaver Slide, they wait until we're about to crest, and then radio us. "Yeah, can we get around ya there?" McAlpine gives them the all-clear. "Thank ya!" they radio as they zip past. The same thing happens when we're caught by a reefer running produce.

The old rules of trucking live on in the Arctic

The pass is arranged before it's executed. Every time we meet a truck, McAlpine greets the driver by name. They update each other on road conditions ahead and behind, maybe rib each other a little, but there's very little yakkety-yakkety. "Down there on the 'outside' the CB is a toy," says McAlpine, "but up here it's a necessity." He likes the fact that he knows everyone on the road, likes knowing that if he gets in a jam, the next truck through will pull over to help. "The old rules still apply up here," he says.

It was long dark when we hit Coldfoot, the unofficial halfway point of the Prudhoe run. Coldfoot is a lonely little outpost with a restaurant that, depending on staffing, is sometimes self-service. Midway through our bean soup, we were joined by Tom's father, Del. He was running cement and had been playing catch-up all day. He would make the rest of the run with us.

It was a Monday night; on our way out the door, we walked past a handful of truckers watching TV. Many time zones away, the Dallas Cowboys were spanking the Philadelphia Eagles, 34-0. The twin Western Stars were idling in the lot. "Dad doesn't like to have anyone out front of him," laughed Tom, and right on cue, Del poured the cobs to 'er. The big blue cab torqued and bounced, and off he went, his moose spotters punching a hole through the night.

In general, the Dalton Highway passes through three types of terrain: aspen and pine-covered foothills on the Fairbanks end, expanses of tundra on the Prudhoe end, and in between, the grand, upheaved bulk of the Brooks Range. The stark breadth of the land is stunning. "Sometimes out here," says McAlpine, "it's like somebody shut all the lights off, turned the heat down, and went home."

Land full of beauty overrides desolation

But desolation is trumped by beauty. "Look at this," he breathes in a voice as awed as a first-timer. We're in the Brooks Range now, running with a view to the valley ahead. The moon is fat and incandescent, cradled between two bleached peaks like a bright bead in a gunsight. Ahead of us, and to both sides, everything glows an electric white. "Sometimes," he says, "it looks like a giant black-light poster."

We heave and lurch through moonlight, the mountains beginning to flatten into rolling tundra. The 'Star's 306-inch wheelbase takes some of the jolt from the road, which is actually much smoother now that we've reached the point where water trucks have been running, covering pits and ruts with a smooth layer of ice. Occasionally, an ice chunk or a rock will deliver a ringing shot to the frame.

By the time we hit the oil fields, it's 1:30 a.m. and I'm nodding off. Everything is socked in fog. Drilling superstructures, studded with halogen beacons, loom through the haze. Over the CB, we bid good night to Del, who will be unloading at another site. Then we park.

As soon as the truck stops, Tom hauls a spill pad from his toolbox and puts it beneath his oil pan ¬ environmental regulations forbid even the tiniest drip of oil on the snow. Then he pokes his head into a portable office and checks the unloading schedule. He's in line to be unloaded and on his way home well before noon. He climbs in his bunk, and I sling my bedroll on the sleeper floor. And then, snug in my sleeping bag, I let that big Cat engine purr me off to the best night's sleep I've had in months.

There are times out on the tundra, when the mercury slides to 40 or 50 below and the wind pushes the flexible delineators flat and puts up a horizontal wall of snow, that McAlpine pulls the rig over and idles for three days. He huddles in his warm little cube of air, eating MREs and waiting for the storm to pass. And there are times, when he's babying a trailer full of methanol up one side of the Brooks Range, wishing he had chained up and waiting for the tires to slip; that the fan on his Cat 600 kicks in, and he flinches like someone set off a cherry bomb in his sleeper.

And then there are those times, on the homeward end of a run, when he rounds yet another curve shouldering out over the pine tops and he sees one of Pappy's white crosses, that he's reminded that you don't run this road; it runs you.

But it's not all bad. As we left Prudhoe Bay the next morning, we saw two signs. One said we had 494 axle-busting miles to go; the other said, "DON'T BE GRUMPY." And for all the nasty surprises the Haul Road can spring, Tom McAlpine knows his run holds at least one attraction every trucker dreams of: "Once you get up here," he says, "you've got to go home. It's the end of the road." *