We fly to Barrow in a Piper Chieftain, a twin prop, 8 passenger plane with dual GPS avionics up front.
Just outside of Fairbanks at around 1000 feet (clear weather so we fly low to see stuff), we in the true interior. No roads, and as Gary our pilot puts it, you're now IN the foodchain. The muskeg below would be hell to traverse but the burnt boreal forest is interspersed with colorful Fireweed. It looks like someone took a paintbrush of purple, green, and black and made random strokes on the taiga. The area around Fairbanks has been subject to numerous lightning induced forest fires for the past few years. The haze on the horizon is in fact due to some burning west of the city.

A stop in Coldfoot to refuel the plane and we're off over the Brooks Range. Normally the weather over these mountains is poor enough to force transport down into the valleys, but blue skies and sun await us. We get a 7500 foot view of this massive, beautiful, and virtually untouched range that extends for 200 miles in each direction.

After 30 minutes or so we start descending. The peaks taper off to foothills, and then we are flying low over the most massive expanse of Flatness I have ever seen: The North Slope. Covered in small ponds and streams, we swoop over only 500 feet off the deck. The clouds above forcing us down. If we pop up through them, we won't be able to descend into Barrow - this flight is visual only, and we can't change to a IFR flight plan despite the $50,000 in avionics onboard.

About 50 miles outside Barrow, we have to pull up through the clouds. They've pushed us down to 300 feet and we just can't go lower. A minutes traverse through nothing but whiteness and we're in blue sky. Gary gives us the option of pushing on to Barrow in the hope that a small clearing will form.

The road trip gods smile on me again, and as we approach where Barrow should be, I hear the hydraulic acuators lower the flaps. We're landing. Gary banks hard into an opening that I didn't even see until now and swoops along the coast. The ice pack is still holding a hundred yards offshore. A massive sheet of white with blue schards pushed up periodically. We land and climb into a van.

The van takes us to Point Barrow, the northernmost point of North America, and then around this Eskimo town. Thanks to well managed oil money, this town has running water, a bus system, 8 cops, courts, supermarkets, everything. In a place where complete darkness occurs for 2 months of the year.

We stop in at the cultural center, watch a presentation of Eskimo dancing and singing, and then head back to the plane. 3 hours later we arrive back in Fairbanks. I step off the plane actually glad that things didn't work out with the van ride up to Prudhoe Bay.