July 1974-1975

By the beginning of my second summer in Alaska I had moved back to Fairview Manor and my apartment was about 25 steps from the front door of my office. I still couldn’t do without my van, but in the summer there wasn’t an issue.

Life was really grand. The pipeline was in full construction and people were pouring into Fairbanks, something like a base camp, by the thousands. Many of our friends were hired in to the pipeline frenzy. You could make more money in 12 weeks than many people made in a year. And that was the cycle, 12 weeks in the camps and then 2 weeks off.

Neither Karen nor I chose to get involved. Karen because she had Gretchen and I because I had 1 dog and 2 cats and they were more important to me than making tons of money. Karen did come up with a rather creative way to take advantage of the pipeline though. During the first wave of hiring, many of our friends went out to the camps. It didn’t make sense to keep an apartment in town, not when you were gone for 12 weeks at a time and most people went to Hawaii or Mexico during their 2 weeks off. So Karen rented a 3 bedroom apartment that was rather large. The initial group of people was invited to pay by the night to stay over at the ‘Willow Street’ apartment on their way in to or out of Fairbanks.

The arrangement worked well at first. The problem was that the circle of friends began growing exponentially. Friends made friends in the camps, invited them to Willow Street and soon there was 60-80 people revolving through on different cycles. Some nights all floor space was taken with sleeping bodies. I was thankful for my little efficiency apartment.

Summer was filled with adventures. By now I was good friends with Jack and Karen and they were living full time on the Tozitna River. They started a business of offering a bush camp experience for a price. Guests could fly in and Jack provided guided photography tours and fishing. No hunting was allowed since theirs was subsistence living and hunting would be killing off their source of protein. They asked me to be their in-town agent. I met the guests when they arrived in Fairbanks. Got them to their motel. Got them to their plane the next morning for their flight to the Tozitna and purchased Tozi’s supplies whenever restocking was needed.

By this time I had also made good friends on the Chatinika River. Bob Batley was the first to take me down the river. The river front had been opened to homesteading by the state and many of my circle of friends had land there. Diane Stolpe, John Murphy, Ray Bridges and then Karen got a piece of the land and began building a cabin there for her and Gretchen. Diane is above and Bob is to the right.

For access to the Chatinika where we went, you drove outside of Fairbanks to Murphy’s Dome, an Air Force DEW Line station. A trail led down the dome and part way split. The 7-mile trail led to Ray and Karen’s camp sites and the 15-mile trail led to Diane and John’s, Bob’s place was in between the two and we usually got there by air boat. Just remembering the trail brings back more memories than I have time to write about.

That was also the summer I got to travel to Nome. Fish & Wildlife service had decided to open another office and had selected Nome for the site. A new agent was hired and Red and I flew up to set up his office and train him on procedures. Red and he spent the days together going over procedures while I set up his office. It was an experience I never expected to have. On a clear day you can see Big Diomede Island from Nome, and that is Russian land. Unfortunately it was never clear enough so I can’t make that claim! There isn’t much to say about Nome. Only very short roads roam around the area, nothing that connects Nome to Fairbanks or anywhere else, so there were very few cars. To my eye it was a very depressing place. All the buildings were wood frame and in poor repair. The north side of the main street of town was only a few feet from the banks of the Bearing Sea. It’s hard to imagine that it was once a boom town with thousands seeking gold on the shores. The photo above is a typical residential street of Nome.

As another winter approached I sort of dreaded it. While life there was really fun, the idea of those long winter nights was a depressing thought to me. It was that winter that I experienced my first -60 temperatures. The temperature dropped to -60 and held there for about 6 hours and then went up to -40 and held there for another 4 days. Nothing works at -60 or -40. I was lucky since I could walk to work. I was also lucky that I was living in Fairview Manor, because everyone else I knew had frozen pipes; no running water, no toilet, no showers!! Pretty miserable.

On the Friday night of that week phone calls started flying around. Another friend, Heather, also lived in Fairview Manor and had running water. So everyone who was in town that night made a bee line to our places. We split them in half and half took showers at my place and half at Heather’s. Then we called taxi cabs, 4 I think, and all of us piled in and headed to downtown to party the night away. Back then the bars in Fairbanks opened at 5 AM and closed at 4 AM, shut down for 1 hour to clean. That night we hit our favorite bars and stayed until we closed them down. Thankfully we eventually got back to the normal -20 and that felt like a heat wave after the previous 4 days.

In March Jerry came from Guam for a visit. He had spent his first year working for Bendix Field Engineering on the NASA Tracking Station there. They paid for his flight home, however he wanted to route it, so he routed himself through Fairbanks and spent a week visiting with me. He asked one more time for me to come to Guam with him. No marriage offers, but I was ready to leave Alaska. It had been fun and I met some really wonderful people there, but I definitely did not want to go through another winter. Jerry is to the right.

So I made my plans and started saving money. The plan was to leave Fairbanks the following July, two years to the month of when I originally arrived. It had been quite an adventure!