Galbraith Lake
Campground
The Dalton Highway — known to locals as the Haul Road — runs 414 miles from Fairbanks to Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean. It is one of the most remote roads in North America, built to service the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and it will test your vehicle, your supplies, and your patience.
But for those willing to make the drive, it opens up some of the most raw and untouched wilderness in the world. At Mile 274, you drop into a wide glacial valley bowl, and Galbraith Lake comes into view. You will know you are somewhere special.
Galbraith Lake is a primitive BLM campground — no hookups, no cell service, no hand-holding. It sits in an open tundra valley with the Brooks Range rising to the south and a wide, flat lake shimmering to the north. The wind can be relentless and the weather can turn fast, but that is part of the deal up here.
What it lacks in amenities, it makes up for in raw, unfiltered Alaska. You are above tree line, you are on the open North Slope, and on a clear night the sky will do things you have never seen before.
I have camped at Galbraith several times while caribou hunting, and there is nowhere else I would rather set up base camp for a North Slope hunt. The Central Arctic caribou herd moves through this country during the fall migration, and when they come through, they come through in numbers that will take your breath away.
Glassing from camp you can watch them stream across the tundra for miles. The key is patience — and having a solid camp you can actually live out of for several days. Galbraith fits the bill. I haul in food, fuel, and a good tent, and I stay until the job is done.
There is nothing quite like lying in your sleeping bag, staring out the tent door at the northern lights dancing above an open tundra valley with no light pollution for 100 miles in any direction. At Galbraith, that is a regular occurrence in late summer and fall.
The aurora can be subtle or it can be violent — rolling green and purple curtains crashing across the whole sky while the tundra sits quiet and dark below. If you have never seen the northern lights from above the Arctic Circle, this is one of the best places on earth to do it.