I ended up staying in the crazyhorse camp the most because that was the one I liked best, as it had its own sauna in it. The biggest camp was the Parsons Prime camp, which is where most of the ARCO workers stayed. (Picture of the back door to Deadhorse camp and that's my company truck parked there) Our camps were CC1, CC2, and Crazyhorse. Some other camps we used were Mukluk, Mukluk 2, and the small Haliburton camp. Haliburton camp was also called deadhorse camp. This is where the oil well technicians stayed when they came up. The oil field fire fighters stayed there too. The nice part about all the camps was they had staff people call bull cooks who changed your beds and washed the sheets. They cleaned the room's everyday and kept the camp in shape. I used to give one 20 dollars to do my laundry for me as they were washing the sheets in my wing. The cooks at all the man camps were some of the best around as all the food was real good, it had to be otherwise the men would most likely burn the place down. Some of these guys were the most crude and wild people you ever saw.

     One of the fun things I did one day after work that first summer was a couple of us got a rubber raft and paddled out to a plane that had crashed up there when they first started drilling. The name on it was the Colorado athletic club, and some one who got caught was trying to steal the drill heads and get the diamonds out of them. But it seems the load shifted and the plane crashed into the tundra and got stuck in the middle of a large pond. We got to check out everything from the propeller to the tail section. Some even took gauges as a souvenir. One guy Henry took a seat and put it in his room as a smoking chair.

     In the summer months it does not get dark as the sun never sets from May 11th till August 2nd. This is when people came on tours to see how the pipeline was developing. One summer day a few of my crew was putting the siding on a new storage building with some ironworkers, when a bus load of site seers came by and stopped to take pictures of them installing siding the building. Three of men on the highest perlin dropped their pants and mooned them. I don't think they liked it to well as they all climbed in fast and left. That created a big laugh all around camp as everyone heard about it as the Tour Company complained to the officials of the camp about the lewd behavior of the workers. I loved the summer months both of them, as the whole county up here was unbelievable. Caribou, birds, Grizzly bear, fox, and so many other things. One day a few of us was on the dock and we spotted 2 huge whale's surface and play around gray whales I think they were. Another time we saw a few killer whales chasing some seals on the ice burgs floating around as the ice pack was starting to come back in. We even had a couple of wolfs show up for a few days. Once I managed to get a picture of a bald eagle on the docks. The first summer I was there I saw what was left of      some barges and a couple tugs that got trapped in the ice flow and crushed like aluminum cans. I got to talk to some of the drillers from the oil wells, and a couple of testers who ran sound tests to make sure the drill pipe was going straight and not curving sideways. Those guys really had to work hard for their money and for many hours on end. (Picture of a North Slope Oil Well rig smoke in the back was a little oil fire) The drill rigs where all insulated and they worked inside too, so they could avoid the extreme cold and continue drilling. Once one of the wells blew up and caught fire and it lasted for a few days until they got the crew who put those type of fires out up there to snuff it out. We could see it for miles and miles, as the North Slope to the Arctic Ocean is very, very flat. I believe it was Red Adair's crew that came up.


     During the summer months they moved the big buildings off the barges and put them on the docks and storage areas close by. The first priority was to unload fast so the tugs and barges could get back around through the Bering straight before the ice pack came back in. Once they got the equipment and buildings unloaded they started moving everything to their final resting spot on the slope. Like I said earlier they use what we called creepy crawlers. The top speed for one of them was about 1 to 2 mile and hour. It was a hard task to get them down a make shift road to a site and up the pad and set them on some pilings with a bolt pattern and make sure it fit. It was slow going but it always went well. It was just amazing to see what they developed to do this type of job in this type of country. There was one big rig that had tires across the entire frame of the cab about 8 feet wide and 8 rollers one after the other. They was made out of material just like a nerf ball you could stick your finger into them a long ways. But they would not cut the tundra surface and sink in; they would glide and float on the top. If they cut the tundra surface it would fill with water and freeze and thaw year after year and form lakes that keep getting bigger and bigger. What drew my attention to these were men sticking their arms under the tires as they rolled over them. They had to do that to protect the survey markings. Another thing I liked to do was watch the big semi trucks come up the haul road. They were so muddy you could not even tell what names were on them. They only came up in the summer and the roads were dusty or muddy and it was a very hard trip. In fact on some hills through the brooks range to the south of us, the hills were so steep they needed huge wenches on the mountain tops to pull the trucks up and let them back down. The haul road was built to bring the 48" pipe to its location to be set for the pipeline and for bringing materials to the pump stations along the way.