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TAR 18 Pre-Race Speculation

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DrRox:
You had to be extremely careful when you went outside in the dark. The polar bears really wandered around a lot. They were looking for food in garbage dumps. The places I worked, we had very large incinerators to burn up everything that would burn to try to keep them away. Also we had arctic foxes. You had to be careful of them for the rabies potential.

In the summer, we had barren ground grizzlies wandering around. One summer we were drilling a well about 100 miles south of Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay in the foothills of the Brooks Range. One grizzly tried to climb the V-door (pipe ramp) up to the drill floor of the rig. That was about 30 feet off the ground. The angle of the ramp was too steep and he never figured out how to use the stairs. But two guys were standing there with a couple of high powered rifles at the ready in case he did......lol   He finally wandered off across the tundra. The last day I remembered it snowing was July 10th about 2 am. By 6am the snow was all melted and by noon the mosquitos had arrived....clouds of them. Really a pest for about a month and then they disappeared.

One of the reasons they such a problem with alcoholism is that "staying indoors." I was there from 73-75. The runway at Deadhorse was gravel. Wien Air Alaska pioneered the use of 737s on gravel strips. Scared the hell of me the first time. I got on the 737 in Anchorage and figured it was an okay place......lol Then they landed on a gravel strip.

Deadhorse was/is not the end of the world....but you could/can see it from there...

Plaidmoon:
My friend that worked in Barrow mentioned the alcoholism problem more than a few times. He said it wasn't too unusual to find one of the native americans (sometimes even children) wandering about dead drunk in the cold. For their own safety, they would bring them into his work place and let them sleep it off. He said there were quite a few times when he had 2 or 3 people snoring away in the corner of the room while he was doing his work. 

He worked for the US Government and to get people to work up there, the government gave them a number of perks, one of which was to pay for shipping of his belongings up there. That included his car, which was shipped on a cargo plane from Anchorage. He said there wasn't much in the way of roads up there, but he at least had it to drive around town. They also shipped it back when he left.

He apparently didn't see polar bears too often because the local police worked to keep them chased out of town. That was where the dump was and that probably was more attractive to the bears anyway. He had his cat up there and said the cat liked to go outside when it wasn't too cold and catch lemmings and other rodents, which were abundant.

DrRox:
When I was up there, Prudhoe Bay was basically a two company town.......BP (Sinclair) and Arco/Exxon. They both had permanent camps. Everyone else up there basically lived in temporairy camps. I dont know who was in charge of bear patrol, but every once in a while, you would see a helicopter moving around pretty slow. You could tell they were looking or tracking something. We always had a few guys that would trap the foxes and take the pelts to fur buyers in Anchoage. Everytime I see a woman wearing a white fox coat/jacket...I always wonder if I knew the fox....lol

All the camps had incinerators and the remains of them were all shipped back to Fairbanks and disposed of there. Ours was shipped back on backhauls of C-130 charters we used to fly in equipment/supplies for the drilling operation. The haul road was not finished till late in 74.......but my employer never used it. It was basically reserved for BP/Arco-Exxon/Aleska Pipeline Company. I see today it is a state highway and open to public.....one mean road. Dalton Highway is what they call it now to the newbies.....it will always be the haul road to me.

If we were drilling in a remote location ( ie no road contact with Prudhoe Bay) we used charter flights to resupply our camp/drill site. If we were connected by road to Prudhoe Bay.....the flights landed at Deadhorse. It was much easier to drill in winter time....we just would make ice roads to connect with gravel roads at Prudhoe.

Well enough of ancient Alaska history....this is probably making people mad.

mswood:
Oh to he'll with them!

Plaidmoon:
I was agreeing with the Doctor that we had probably gone off on this tangent long enough. I'm glad we were interesting to somebody. Unfortunately, I've pretty much exhausted my second hand knowledge of Barrow and Northern Alaska. My friend did mention one interesting thing you could do up there (although it's hard to see how you could use it in a task). He said on the coldest days, you could take a bucket of steaming hot water outside and toss it from the bucket into the air. The water would freeze before it hit the ground and create a fairly large cloud of ice crystals in the process.

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