For one of the best opportunities in Alaska to stand beside (and beneath) an elevated stretch of the insulated, eight-foot-diameter Trans-Alaska Pipeline, check out the Alyeska Pipeline Interpretive Area about 12 miles south of Copper Center, across from Willow Lake. A loop gravel road at Mile 88.2 leads west from the Richardson Highway to a parking area with interpretive signs.
This unique access to one the state’s major industrial assets—the 800-mile-long pipeline that carries crude oil from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to a tanker port on Prince William Sound in Valdez—is something that you might find only in rural Alaska hundreds of miles from a large town. Oil will be surging through the pipe right above your head in real time.
