Prudhoe Bay

The previous entry is Seward and Fairbanks.

June 6

Prudhoe Bay and the town of Dead Horse are at the far end of the Alaskan road system, some 250 miles of gravel road beyond the last service station at Coldfoot Camp (summer population, about 30) on the Dalton Highway. Until a few years ago, access to Prudhoe Bay was limited to those involved with the area’s sole reason for existence, the oil industry. Tourists and adventure seekers, whose goal is to see the Arctic Ocean, can now drive up the long, lonely stretch of the Dalton Highway to reach Dead Horse, and then take a security-cleared bus to the frozen beach at the far north of the world. Or they can fly in with the oil workers as they rotate in on their two-weeks-on-two-weeks-off schedules. That’s what we did.

Holland America Tour 21 consisted of about forty people and our guides, and we came in on the regularly scheduled 737 from Anchorage. Luggage was limited: the 737 was configured more for cargo, and the abbreviated passenger section didn’t have full-sized overhead bins. Besides the tourists were a dozen or so men in layered clothes; they’d made this trip many times. A few checked in Coleman coolers, presumably filled with food the oil company cafeterias normally didn’t provide. The flight was a couple of hours long, and, at then end of it, we had travelled from the southernmost Ketchikan to the North Slope during the course of the tour.

Dead Horse was about freezing when we got there, with the skies perpetually overcast, the low clouds dimly backlit by the ever-present sun. We took a shuttle bus to our hotel, a few minutes away from the airport: the Arctic Caribou Inn. This was our first experience with ATCO housing: the hotel was built from the old workers quarters that were left over from the development of Prudhoe Bay. ATCO manufactures pre-fabricated housing for this sort of thing, as part of its logistics operation. Join a few wings of ATCO housing units together, add in a kitchen and a gift shop, and you have a rudimentary hotel, all you need in a place like Dead Horse. The rooms were small, enough for a couple of cot-like single beds arranged in an L, plus a small dresser and nightstand. Off at the end of the room was a shower stall, toilet and sink, with a small hanging closet. The room had a single window, with a heavy shade to darken the room during the everlasting Arctic summer day. The hotel was designed for oil workers who didn’t have regular company housing, and not for tourist comfort. The hotel staff was very friendly, though, greeting us as we got off, and noting that we shouldn’t wander that far from the building, as there’s a grizzly bear sow with a cub in the area.

The kitchen they had was marvelous, with hot caribou stew ready for us when we got there for a late lunch. Dinner later would be more stew, with good chicken, halibut, vegetables and so on in a large buffet. Food is expensive to transport there, and the extra cost of better ingredients is relatively minor. And I suppose they’d make sure to hire a good cook, so as not to waste the expensively procured supplies. The next day, at breakfast, we had as much fresh fruit as any day on board the ship, including better pineapple than the Ryndam had. We took an apple at that time for a snack during our long bus ride back down to Fairbanks, but never got around to eating it. That apple unexpectedly travelled back to Cleveland with us; it went on a long journey. It was a good apple when we ate it at home.

A short time after lunch, everyone gathered in a small hotel auditorium to see a video about Prudhoe Bay, its history and what goes on now. On the walls of this room, and, indeed, on the walls of the hotel’s halls, are posters from BP and the other oil majors present on the North Slope, showing the shrinking oil platform footprint on the tundra as drilling and pumping technologies improve, propagandizing the products that come from petrochemicals, and so on. The place exists only because of the discovery of oil, and all the people, facilities and vehicles there are for the purpose of extracting that oil and sending it down through the Great Alaskan Oil Pipeline to Valdez. Yes, there are tourists like us, and braver souls who venture up the Dalton Highway by car, but we would have no place to go to on the North Slope without the oil being there.

After the video, we boarded a special bus contracted to give a sightseeing tour of the oil facilities as we drove to the beach. There’s a security checkpoint partway through its route: no private vehicles past that point as you pass into BP facilities. The bus driver pointed out the various drilling rigs, the emergency cleanup crews, the pumping stations that look like little more than metal sheds, all in a row. (Not what you expected: I suppose the image of dinosaur-like oil pumps, perpetually rising and falling, is too firmly embedded into our minds. I suppose the environmental conditions at Prudhoe Bay makes such pumps impossible.) The only tree within 200 miles is a plastic palm set up outside one of the Haliburton buildings. And over there are the large trucks for wintertime oil exploration and construction. (Trucks are only allowed to go on the tundra during winter, as the ground is frozen and will not be damaged by the traffic. Tire marks left in summertime during the early days of oil exploration still run like scars across the tundra.) The bus driver told us polar bear and grizzly bear stories, about how he once found a grizzly living in a remote Dumpster who almost took his face off when he looked in. (They send out people to check if the Dumpster needs emptying, as it’s expensive to send out trucks on regular garbage pickup routes.) And then we are at the beach.

Dalton Highway and Coldfoot

The Arctic Ocean was still frozen over — the temperature was around freezing here, but with a windchill of around 10F — so there was no chance of tourists joining the Polar Bear Club by taking a dip in the water; the Polar Bear Club mugs and t-shirts in the hotel gift shop would be undeserved. Instead, we briefly walked down the sandy beach, past the driftwood that once floated in from far away (there are no trees on the North Slope), making sure not to venture out on the ice. It was desolate alien world, utterly flat and frozen except for dimly seen oil company buildings and pump stations an indeterminant distance away.

And the terrain between the beach and hotel is almost as desolate, but is a flat, swampy grassland instead of a windswept sandbar. The water from melted snow gives a kind of scrubby brown grass a chance to live during the short, short summer. There are lakes that form from melt water, fed by streams flowing through patterned cracks running through the slightly more elevated grassy patches: melted snow simply pools on the surface, as the permafrost is only a few feet below the surface, and water doesn’t get absorbed into the earth. But there are more buildings away from the shore, connected by a network of gravel roads that rest on beds only a few feet above the melt water. A second network of oil pipes branch between the buldings, connecting the pumps to reservoirs and other facilities before the oil is fed into the Pipeline, a tether that runs from the northern shore to the southern. A few derricks and construction cranes stand as the highest points in this landscape. I think that if there were permanent bases on the moon, it would look a little like this: not the glossy corridors of Moon Base Alpha, but cramped quarters next to stowed construction equipment.

That was the tour: a glimpse into the far-off world of oil companies perched on the edge of the continent. We retired after dinner, though they did have the basketball game on satellite TV in the common room. Early tomorrow morning would begin the long bus ride back to Fairbanks and to Denali, but, today, we can say that we’ve seen the Arctic Ocean.

The next entry is the Dalton Highway and Coldfoot.

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