Dances with wolves
Immediately after graduating from the University of Alaska, I was recruited to work on the then $ 10 billion Alaskan pipeline. My friend Don Parker had briefly trained me in a form of surveying and I was now in the Operating Engineers Union, local 302. Because I had a university degree, the union gave me more cerebral jobs than driving a bull-dozer or scraper. So they flew me to a remote place in the North Slope Borough called the Brooks Range that is about 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The company that was building the Alaskan Pipeline was constructing a 400 mile road from Livengood to the Arctic Ocean now called the Dalton Highway. I was flown into a construction camp at Atigun Pass, which is a 4,739 feet mountain pass across the Brooks Range. The current television program, Road Truckers, focuses on the challenges of driving on this highway and in particular, Atigun Pass.
Photo courtesy of Google
After landing in the camp in a bush plane, I was soon in a helicopter heading for the pass. It was the middle of summer and it was probably around 80 degrees and quite sunny. I had not previously flown in a helicopter and it was amazing to look down through the glass at my feet to see the earth moving away from me. We were soon on top of the mountain and there were many other helicopters and a good deal of activity with hard core construction workers, drilling equipment and dynamite. As I walked around, my naiveté was clear to the construction
Pipeline Worker, Alaska, circa 1972 Photo by Barry Epstein
workers. I then met my boss and he informed me that my job was to determine depth of the drilling for each of the 10 rigs that will result in building the road. Well I must say that my couple of hours of training by my friend Don did not cover this level of complexity. I had not really seen engineering drawings before and had no experience at cutting out a slope with a ratio of ½ to 1 over a mountain pass. I liaised with the state engineers that were on-site and with their help I gave instructions to the drill teams accordingly. One group of these beer bellied, rough looking guys who were usually smoking as they sat on stacks of dynamite kidded me about my apparent fear of explosives. Several of them would toss a stick of dynamite at me in a friendly manner! Near mid-morning, we were all taken towards a safe area of the mountain and we blasted 40,000 pounds of dynamite at one time. It was awesome to say the least. I watched boulders the size of a house roll down the mountain as it got smaller and smaller the further it
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 30 of 156