thumb|300px|[[Sukakpak Mountain is a landmark at MP 203 Dalton Highway]]
The James W. Dalton Highway, usually referred to as the Dalton Highway (and signed as Alaska Route 11), is a road in Alaska. It begins at the Elliott Highway, north of Fairbanks, and ends at Deadhorse (an unincorporated community within the CDP of Prudhoe Bay) near the Arctic Ocean and the Prudhoe Bay Oil Fields. Once called the North Slope Haul Road (a name by which it is still sometimes known), it was built as a supply road to support the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1974. It is named after James W. Dalton, a lifelong Alaskan and an engineer served as a consultant in early oil exploration in northern Alaska. The road is about one-quarter paved and three-quarters gravel.
History
In 1966, Governor Walter J. Hickel opened the North Slope to oil extraction. To improve access to the oil fields, a winter road was planned between Livengood and Prudhoe Bay. Construction started in November 1968, and the "Walter J. Hickel Highway" was completed by March 1969. Due to poor engineering, the construction of the road exposed the underlying permafrost to thawing, and the road was abandoned by April of that year. Maintenance was not performed as the route was farther west than the planned Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
Following the failure of the Hickel Highway, oil companies still needed a route to the North Slope. The Alyeska Pipeline Service Company funded what would be the first stretch of the Dalton Highway from Livengood to the Yukon River in 1969. Within 5 months, of the road were built and construction was finished. The pipeline would not be completed until 1977.
In 1979, Alyeska turned over control of the road to the state of Alaska, who gave it the official name of "James W. Dalton Highway", named after the prospector of the North Slope, James W. Dalton. In 1981, the highway was opened to the public up to Disaster Creek at mile 211. In 1994, the public was allowed access to the entire length of the highway. Wiseman (pop. 12) at Mile 188, and the Roller Coaster. The road reaches its highest elevation as it crosses the Brooks Range at Atigun Pass at .
The highway is the featured road on the second (episode 7), third, fourth, fifth and sixth seasons of the History reality television series Ice Road Truckers, which aired May 31, 2009, to November 9, 2017. It is also the subject of the second episode of America's Toughest Jobs and the first episode of the BBC's World's Most Dangerous Roads featuring Charley Boorman and Sue Perkins.
In 2018, a section of the Dalton was moved to avoid a debris flow known as "the blob." A roughly long lobe of dirt, ice, and trees, the blob threatened to bulldoze the section of the road north of Fairbanks in the next three or four years at a speed of per year. It will likely have to be moved again in the next 20 years before the blob can threaten it again. Truckers were directed to a new gravel road that avoided the landslide.