What the Road Is Doing Right Now

Air and road-surface temperature, wind and what is falling at both tunnel gates and the highway junction — measured by the state's own instruments, with its latest camera frames.

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Town Tools builds free, public tools for Whittier and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

What a reading near freezing means here

A road-surface reading is not an air reading. Dark tarmac in weak sun runs warmer than the air; a shaded cut or a bridge deck runs colder. At or below 32°F the surface can hold ice whatever the air is doing — and it can also be perfectly dry, because ice needs water as well as cold. The tunnel has a freezing rule of its own: when it is freezing it opens for only the last five minutes of each window instead of the usual fifteen, so be at the staging area early. The schedule is on /whittier-alaska-us/tunnel.

Station by station

Whittier gate, Camp Road

The gate you drive to when you leave town, at the head of the canal. It is the only instrument on Whittier's side of the mountain.

Road surface: 42°F
Air: 40°F
Wind: 1 mph from the south-east
Gusting to: 2 mph
Fell in the last hour: 0.00 in
Dew point: 38°F

Read 8 minutes ago.

The latest highway camera frame at Whittier gate, Camp Road — Frame taken 18 minutes ago.

Bear Valley gate, the far side

The gate you come out of, with two and a half miles of rock in between. It stands higher and further inland than the Whittier gate, and on the same morning the two often do not read alike.

Road surface: 39°F
Air: 37°F
Wind: 1 mph from the north
Gusting to: 2 mph
Fell in the last hour: 0.00 in
Dew point: 36°F

Read 8 minutes ago.

No camera frame right now.

Seward Highway junction at Portage

Where the Whittier road meets the Seward Highway. If you are carrying on to Anchorage this is the first highway you join, and the first place the weather stops being Whittier's.

Air: 37°F
Wind: 2 mph from the north
Gusting to: 5 mph
Fell in the last hour: 0.00 in
Dew point: 37°F

Read 8 minutes ago.

The latest highway camera frame at Seward Highway junction at Portage — Frame taken 18 minutes ago.

Who decides whether the road is open

Alaska DOT&PF operates the tunnel and is the only body that decides whether the road and the tunnel are open. Nothing on this page is that decision. Closures — for avalanche control, for weather, for a train — go to Alaska 511 and to the department's own tunnel page. In an emergency, call 911.

Alaska 511 — closures, incidents and camerasThe state's own live road report. This is where a closure appears first, and it carries incidents and avalanche-control work that no thermometer can see.

Alaska DOT&PF — Whittier TunnelThe department's own tunnel page: opening times, tolls, and notices of maintenance closures.

Alaska DOT&PF Winter Operations mapThe department's public map of its road-weather stations, cameras and plough trucks — the same data this page reads, statewide.

Worth knowing

What these instruments cannot see

There is no sensor inside the tunnel and none on the road between the two gates. An avalanche, a rockfall, standing water or a crash somewhere in between is invisible here. This page carries the weather at three points on the road; Alaska 511 carries what is happening on it.

Why a road-surface reading and not a forecast

A forecast is a model average over a grid cell several miles across, and it has no idea what the tarmac is doing. These are thermometers set in the road itself, reading roughly every ten minutes. Whittier's wind and rain outlook is still worth reading beside them: /whittier-alaska-us/passage-canal-wind.

A camera that shows nothing is a camera that is off

Each gate carries up to eight camera views and the page shows the department's preferred one. When a site publishes no frame, this page says so rather than showing you an old picture — the Bear Valley camera was publishing nothing at all in the days this page was built.