I decided to drive to the arctic ocean from California in 2014, and so traversed the north half of this highway by RV.
It was a magical, difficult, inspiring and sorrowful experience.
I had never seen a black spruce before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana), but they were enormous, pristine forests of them.
But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting.
More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead.
On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass.
My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies.
They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving.
At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that.
The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling!
Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean.
It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.