We knew going into the trip that we wanted to drive the Dalton Highway to Deadhorse, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. It is the furthest north you can drive to in the continental United States. That has always intrigued me. We set out knowing we couldn’t drive to the Arctic Ocean like we did at Tuk. That was it’s own adventure. We traveled 415 miles up the Dalton Highway following the pipeline to Deadhorse. We took the loop road up around Colleen Lake and reached latitude 70* 13′ 32.0448″ N (70.2255680).
We didn’t realize that we were going to be at the furthest west point you can drive when we went to Manley Hot Springs at the end of the Elliot Highway. We were there to drive Tofty Road in the Jeep as a fun day trip as recommended by a friend. It was a new road from Manley Hot Springs to the Yukon River that was completed in 2016 as a supply link for the town of Tanana, AK across the river and downstream a few miles of the end of the road.
The bartender at the Manly Roadhouse told us this is the furthest west point you can drive. So now we have driven to longitude 151* 56′ 6.1872″ W (-151.9350520). This is as close as I can get to the longitude as Google maps are not up-to-date for this area and I had to approximate where we met the river based on a road proposal document I found on-line that said the road meets the river six miles upriver of Tanana. This is very close in longitude to a point in Anchor Point, AK near Homer at 151* 51′ 49.2084″ W (-151.8636690).
We visited that site as well and there was signage for being the westernmost point, but we are pretty sure the end of Tofty Road is the new most western point. The points we drove to are able to be reached by contiguous roads to the rest of North America. There are roads in Nome and other more western communities that you must fly into in order to drive around.
We decided to drive down to the Florida Keys and get to the southernmost point in the continental US. This is a well documented site and has a concrete buoy marker proclaiming you’ve made it to the Southernmost Point of the Continental US. This is at latitude 24* 32′ 47.7024″ N (24.5465840). We made it to this milestone just after the new year on our loop around North America.
We would like to have added the easternmost point to our trip and get to the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lupec, Maine and be at the most eastern point in the continental US at 66* 57′ 3.0910″ W (-66.9508586), and complete this odd quest. We will add this to a summertime NE North America trip in the future.
We didn’t start out our trip trying to hit these four points. We were going to drive the Dalton and maybe down to Key West, but when we found out our last minute side trip got us to the westernmost point, we decided to add the southernmost and will eventually get to the easternmost point as well. It’s a strange endeavor, I know, but we travel differently than most. This is a fun adventure that very few people do and engages my curiosity in maps so I guess that’s why we decided to drive to the Further Places.
Your adventurous endeavors are interesting…