There were a lot of great guys who worked for me. I'll never forget them as long as I live. Like Jim D. an engineer who was training the whole time to climb up Mt. McKinley. He finally quit one day and went with a group he was associated with. They did the climb bid did not make it as the weather turned real bad. I had a lot of fun with him we used to hike all over the roads from camp to camp, but he carried a back pack with 45 pounds of lead weights, he eventually got up to 100 pounds just before he left. A lot of men came for only a short time as they got the itch and went home. The residents left when we got the cold snow so we used to call the snow termination dust as that was when a lot of them drug up and went home for the winter.

      While I was working on the job I did not get a lot of chances to take pictures, as I didn't have that good of a camera. I did get to take a picture of the very first oil well drilled on the North Slope it was on the Arco side of Prudhoe Bay. (Picture to the side is the very first oil well drilled on the North Slope) In the dead of winter it was too cold to have a pocket camera out side, my lens kept breaking or the inside action would snap. I did manage to get some good shots at times. I saw some strange things while working up there, like 2 suns in the sky at the same time. It was reflections off the ice crystals in the air. Another crazy experience was, one day on the docks someone saw a town out in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, and they called a few of us to come and see it. There was a car going down a street and there was smoke coming out of house chimneys. Later on some arctic scientist told us it had come from another country, like Iceland, Greenland, or maybe even Canada. The air was just right to make a projector out of the sky. Another time in the summer months we woke up one day to the amazement of big huge trees all over the costs line. The thing was no trees grew that far north. Come to find out they came from the Mackenzie River in Canada. The Mackenzie River flows north and dumps into the arctic ocean. Seems they had a big storm and the trees got washed away from the logging companies as they were storing them for the mills to be sawed into lumber, and they floated north right out into the Arctic Ocean and the current of the Ocean carried them our direction. The Eskimo's liked the trees as they started dragging them up the beach's to their village. This was free firewood and material to make more shelters. Some of the prettiest scenery I saw was the endless supply of wildlife. Grizzly bears chasing the old, sick, or lame Caribou. Arctic Fox pure black in the summer and pure white in the winter. Birds of about every kind you could think of. The Caribou was a magnificent animal, they were so big and the antlers were just huge. Most of the time when they first arrived to the North Slope the velvet was falling off their antlers. One time everyone got held up at camp at the doorways, as a big Mother Polar Bear and her 2 cubs were looking for food. The fish and game came and tranquilized the mother and the cubs followed her into the big helicopter and they took them out to the polar ice cap. Another time I saw a few different types of seals and a couple walrus. I also watched the migration of lemmings to the sea. I also had the privilege of watching 2 little old Eskimos make an igloo, and I even got to go inside to see how it looked. Amazing how fast they did it and how nice it was inside. It only took them a better part of a day. They were on a journey to barter island to visit with some relative's. The winter was the only time to travel out to the Island, as the water was froze up solid. Once on a trip home for R&R we stopped at Point Barrow and I got to watch the village land a whale and how the cut it up for the whole village, I have never seen anything that big disappear that fast. Once I also got to view the Eskimo Olympics, that must be one of the wonders of the world. I could not believe a person could stand on a disk then jump straight up and kick another disk over their head and land back on the same disk on the floor. The guys turned completely upside down and twisted in all sorts of directions. The blanket toss was another site to behold. They would all gather around a large blanket and begin catching a person in the middle and pull back hard to toss that person into the air a long ways up. I also liked watching the Eskimos etch the ivory from walrus tusks or from some old bone, that was a special treat. I wish I could have afforded to buy a baleen basket, they are made from the straining strands in a whale's throat. When it dries and hardens it get like bone, they are just Beautiful.