Alaska Highway crosses pipeline at Delta

For more than 30 years, now, a man-made object has caught the attention of Alaska's visitors, the trans-Alaska pipeline. Like it or hate it, the pipeline is a fact of life in Alaska and in the United States. Some 25 percent of the nation's domestically produced oil flows through this pipe every day. The pipeline crosses the highway at Delta Junction, the true end of the Alaska Highway as the road that continues another 90 miles to Fairbanks is actually the Richardson Highway.

There are only a handful of places near paved roads to get a good look at the pipeline. Perhaps the most spectacular of these is a few miles east of Delta Junction where the Richardson Highway and the pipeline cross the Tanana River side by side. A large parking area serves a boat launch between the road and the pipeline, and it also provides plenty of parking for large RVs so you can get out and walk over to the pipeline. You can, as this pictures shows, stand right underneath the pipe itself.

Statistically, this is a four-foot-diameter, hot-oil pipeline about 860 miles long running from the edge of the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's north coast to tidewater at Valdez in the rain forest surrounding Prince William Sound on Alaska's south coast. Currently, about 800,000 barrels of oil flow down the pipeline every day. At peak production a decade or so ago, some 2 million barrels of oil flowed through the line each day.