The North Slope
There are places in this big world that are just undesirably bad
I think the North Slope of Alaska may just top the list that I have.
This poem relates some of my experiences way up there north,
When I got an engineering assignment on that harsh course.
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The North Slope
Late in my career with ConocoPhillips, I was sent to the North Slope
Of Alaska in the winter time when it was just too cold to mope,
I flew into Anchorage and then caught a work shift plane from there,
When we landed, there was snow on the landing strip everywhere.
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A plane shared by companies to haul workers and visitors to and from the North Slope on a daily basis.
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They picked us up in a bus and hauled us to the central facility,
We checked in and they assigned us a room with such fidelity.
The main building had long legs going in different directions.
With offices and facilities in the middle for everyone to converge on.
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We lived way out on one of the building legs in very small cozy rooms.
They cooked all our meals in a fine cafeteria style dining-room.
Sunday they had steak day with large cooked to order T-bone steaks,
The food was superb and you could eat all you wanted, it was great.
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We headed out to the oil processing facility in the early morning,
Dressed very warm because of all the frequent frost bite warnings.
It was 15 degrees below zero on that day we went outside on the run,
The trucks were parked in a row with dip stick heaters in each one.
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A huge oil processing facility on the North Slope of Alaska..
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The oil unit was huge with everything inside a heated building,
I had never seen anything like this before with winter shielding.
We did our engineering reviews and completed them there on site.
Being careful to heed the cold exposure rules to do things just right.
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They took us on a tour to the North Slope Coast on roads of solid ice.
The enormity of everything up there did our tour group entice.
It was like a whole other world with everything housed inside.
The area up there was baron with no place at all from the cold to hide.
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Everywhere we went on the tour, they had polar bear warning lights,
They were all hungry up there in the cold and ready to fight.
If a bear was seen in the vicinity, the blue lights would flash,
And everyone outside for cover would make a very fast dash.
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One of the huge polar bears that hung around on the North Slope..
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When we finished our work up there, we got a flight to take us
To Anchorage to check back in there at the Regional Office.
The weather was much nicer there and our hotel hosted the Iditarod.
So there were many sledders there getting ready to start the race.
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The long path of the Iditarod sled race across Alaska starting at Anchorage..
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This was an exciting trip and it was great to see the things we do
To recover oil from places with a harsh environment to work through.
Where there is a will, there are engineers that will always find a way.
Hey, that sounds like a quote that may be famous some day.
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.I think that of all the places I worked as an engineer in my career,
I would put the unfriendly North Slope of Alaska at the very rear.
I have no desire to ever see that place again as long as I do live,
Because there is absolutely nothing to me that place can give.
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By Bill
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Thanks for reading The North Slope,
Bill