Just another day in the Gulag

Dobrey Dyinh, ya’ll!

Or rather Good Afternoon! And the southern branch of the family can figure the last word out for themselves.

I have now entering the third and final week of my stay at the exploration camp, and the thought of putting it all behind on the airplane outtahere is sweet. My reason for coming here is more than half over. I have one manager safely returned to camp and the other well into his five-day break in Hawaii. I will be leaving even before he returns, by this coming Thursday in fact, but I am already developing short-timer’s attitude even though it was all new to me when I got here.

This is one extreme place to be. One minute it is sunny and warm and the next it is (literally) blowing and snowing huge flakes. One day we are slogging around the muskeg and slop in high boots and the next we are digging out of the drifts. The camp is situated behind a westerly hill that protects us from much of the wind, but the coast is not far away and beyond it is the Sea of Okhotsk, one of the nastiest patches of water in the world. The guys here say that the Russian government closes the Sea for nearly half the year to vessel traffic because it is so hazardous in the wintertime, and I believe it.

Typically, the crew works from 8 am until 6 pm. Afterward, the managers review the day and revise plans until 9 pm. These guys work in some of the most inhospitable weather in the world day after day for months at a stretch, with nothing more than their clothing to protect them out on the survey line. By the end of the day they are exhausted from the battle to stay warm, and it does get a little old after awhile. Aside from work, the weather and the occasional yelling match, there is not much to break the monotony. Yet camp life is not without its humor. So far I have gone for a “swim” in the local creek, eaten all the hotdogs I can possibly stand, and watched more Russian TV than should be forced on anyone.

We have been sucking our water from a local stream using a gasoline powered pump and a water hose with a set of filter baskets attached. We pump the water up the hill to a set of water storage bladders in a large tent and distributed from there to the kitchen and the wash tent. Along the way, it is passed through a sediment filter and two paper filters, and past a U/V lamp, which sterilizes any bugs in the water. Generally, we don’t drink it, but if we must then we boil it. For drinking water, we depend on cases and cases of 6-liter bottles flown in from the nearby town of Esso. But we still must have stream water for showers, laundry, cooking, and cleaning, and the inflow of sediment really gums up the works. As the rivers and streams begin melt in spring, they carry much more sediment than usual. During the typical pumping session we have to stop and clean out the sediment filter about every five minutes or so, because of the buildup.

My partner Sean is a marvelously inventive Alaskan who never seems to be lacking for a workaround. And with good reason: you can’t get spare parts here without an incredible amount of effort. Just as we learned when we were children, you don’t throw anything away, because one day it might come in handy. So to deal with the sediment problem he came up with a suction device that, in theory, would stop the sediment before it got to our filters.

He cut numerous holes in the sides of an empty 55-gallon drum, and fitted it with a two large water filters and a piping system on top that would connect with our hose. He wrapped each of the filters with a couple pillowcases, and then dressed the outside of the drum with a sewn-up bed sheet. We dragged the contraption down to the stream bank with the help of Pasha, our young Russian worker. He had already cut away the snow that had banked up at the water’s edge, digging down 4 or 5 feet to reach the ground. Sean fastened a rope to the barrel and perched it on the edge of the bank, while I hefted up the sandbag to load the bottom of the barrel. At that moment the snow bank beneath us gave way, dropping us into 3 feet of extremely cold water!

The first shock to reach us was the stupidity of what we had done. But that quickly gave way to the shock of water that was just barely above freezing. Pasha, who was watching us from the shore, immediately hauled Sean out and they passed a line to me. After pulling me out it was all he could do to not fall down and bust out laughing at his bosses.

Thoroughly wet and embarrassed, we drove the Argo up to the tent and changed into dry clothes. We got back to the water hole and fired up the pump, and much to our satisfaction – and vindication - we were pleased to see that Sean’s invention worked like a charm. From that time on we have not had any problems with sediment. Now the problem is getting one of us to be willing to go down to the bank to retrieve the suction drum.

I will have to wait until another time to tell you about hotdogs and Russian TV. It is time to get back to work.

Jed

Kamchatka Exploration Camp

Hello Everyone!

Greetings from the still cold and frozen coastal plains of Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. If you have no idea where that is, then I would suggest getting your atlas out and looking it up. Either that or run your finger on the globe across the water from Alaska until you hit land. That will most likely be the peninsula. I am located in an oil exploration camp about 50 kilometers inland from the west coast, about half way up up the peninsula.

I am here for one month on assignment with my company, to fill in for my two field managers while they rotate out to Hawaii. Some deal, huh? Except that they have been here for more than two months and only have five days apiece in paradise to get their visas renewed and get their ashes hauled. Then they get to come back here for several more weeks. I, on the other hand, get to leave for home at the end of the month via the very same Hawaii. I think I have the better end of the deal.

It is a remarkable experience. The exploration project is being operated by a joint venture of a russian company named Lukincholot from Petropavlovsk, and CEP International, a canadian oil development company based in Calgary. The project is funded by a subsidiary of the Korean National Oil Corporation and various other russian and canadian investors. They have been awarded (now) three mineral leases along the west coast of the peninsula to explore for oil, and apparently are having some success at it. My company is supplying camp management services for the project and has been involved for a couple years.

It has been one of the more unusual experiences of my life. Just getting here involved the longest single journey I have been on. I left Anchorage on April 2nd, flew to Seattle, switched from Alaska Airlines to Asiana Airlines, flew to Seoul, Korea, and spent the night at there at the Hyatt Regency. The next day I flew to Vladivostok and spent a night there. The day after that I flew to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and spent two nights there. Then I got on a mini-bus and drove 530 kilometers north (most of which was a dirt and gravel road), and wound my way through the mountains on a one-lane unimproved road to the very isolated village of Esso. Once there, I was dropped off at the local "restaurant" for a lunch or borscht and pirogis, then boarded a russian helicopter and flew another hour due west just clearing the mountains and dropping down into the hills until finally arriving at the camp on April 7th! That by itself would have been enough of an adventure for me, but that was just the beginning.

I will be here for a month while my guys rotate out of country to get their visas renewed. If they do not leave before their visas expire the russians will not let them leave the country. So my job is to fill in for them and run the camp facilities. The only difficulty is that I don't exactly speak russian. But that is what the translators are for, thankfully. So I am learning a few phrases and in general provide a source of amusement for the locals.

There are 12 women, 103 men, three dogs, and one cat in the camp. There are 12 men with a canadian drilling company, 2 americans (my guys), and the rest are russian nationals from the Kamchatka area. The russians are supplying the professional, technical, and labor personnel for the job.

I have published some more pictures of the camp at my Picasa web album. You can reach it by clicking here: http://picasaweb.google.com/YukonJed/KamchatkaRemoteCamp.

As I get more photos of interest and time I will update this further. Stay warm and dry.

Jed

Meet the new family

Here are the two newest members of our family, Eban and Bear. Eban is a Maltese and Bear (named by his original owner after Bear Bryant) is a Yorkshire Terrier. They are settling in and getting used to each other, though it has been a bit rough at times. Bear is a 7-month old pup, and at 4 years Eban is the old fart. But he is coming to grudgingly accept and appreciate Bear's overly affectionate ways, and we are too.

Mid-Winter stretch

It seems like spring is light-years away, and yet it is officially only a little over four weeks to the spring equinox. Snow has been falling regularly for several weeks, usually 6 - 10 inches at a time, so that now we have several feet of ground cover down in the Anchorage bowl. Up at Alyeska the skiers are having a banner year and in-town cross-country is excellent.

I would like everyone to close their eyes now and imagine me in my snow suit, cross-country skis snapped on, sun shining down on me pushing my way through narrow ski trails winding their way through spruce forests plump with piles of white powder. The air smells clean, fresh, and crisp, and I am eagerly pushing forward to see what adventure lies at the other end of the trail.

Ok, you can open your eyes now. The reality is suburban Anchorage, tense city dwellers on far too much caffiene sick of winter and icy roads and impatient with incompetent driving. I alternate each day between working at my stressful 9-hour a day job, riding herd on various kitchen remodel contractors, wringing my hands over teenage foolishness, and trying to contain the flood of paper that threatens to wash me out of my office. I dream frequently of being hundreds of miles away - 225 to be exact - sipping coffee and eating sticky buns at the two sisters bakery, looking forward to a visit to the Homer Brewery or a ski through the park. Sigh. Will winter ever end?

We had a most exciting morning today, one that left me glad for life and grateful for everything. At 5 am my daughter Megan woke us up screaming something we could not understand. The adrenaline surge brought me out of bed and out the door so fast I forgot that I did not have any clothes on. At first I thought she was yelling at our new puppy, Bear, who is sleeps in her room and is still trying to get used to his new home. He is often awake at all hours of the night, whining, woofing, scratching, and otherwise making a racket that keeps her awake. That wasn't it though.

I stood at the opened door of her room in a confused fog while she continued yelling. The smell of burnt plastic made me realize something was very wrong. I flipped on the light to see smoke coming out of an old power strip on her floor that had burst into flames and was still pumping nasty, gray smoke into the room. I ran into the room, traced the cable back to the wall and jerked the plug out of the receptacle. Fortunately nothing else was burning so I threw the burned strip on the front porch and went back inside to see what had happened.

She said she was awakened by the popping and sparking of the device. Sparks were shooting a good foot or more into the air like minature fireworks. We couldn't figure out what had happened but thinking about it later in the day I had my suspicions that our puppy might know something about it. I finished checking the floor around the spot and found nothing else of concern.

As we were leaving her room to go back to bed I discovered that Bear had left us a brown surprise just inside the door. In my alarm I had pushed the door open right over the top of it and wiped it across the carpet about a foot. After going in and out the door several more times it had gotten thoroughly ground into the carpet leaving a thick brown swath of poop about 4-inches wide. In disgust, I spent another 15 minutes spraying and scrubbing and cussing the damn dog until the carpet was relatively cleaned up.

We finally got the house calmed down and everyone back to bed about 45 minutes later. When I woke up a few hours later I couldn't help but think that we had been spared a much worse ordeal. Somehow it made the day all the more special and winter a little more tolerable. And maybe it was all the adventure I needed, for now anyway.

Hope you are all well.