Crude Reality - Drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

You Are Here:

Home >> Crude Reality

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine February 2004

Page:

Crude Reality
As the brutal battle over proposed drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge grinds on, a former oil worker returns to the North Slope in search of the truth about the pro-exploration argument. His conclusion? (Brace yourself.) The unthinkable is the right thing to do.

By David Masiel


	Illustration by Guy Billout

AT TWO A.M. ON A FALL NIGHT IN 1985, I STOOD on the wide gravel beach at Barter Island, Alaska, facing the Arctic Ocean. Behind me, across Barter Lagoon, hung the dim lights of the Inupiat village of Kaktovik. Overhead, the aurora borealis was going off the scale, pulsing and waving over half the night sky. To my right, a white dog trotted up the beach, making Z turns in my direction.

I had just finished working a 34-hour shift off-loading a drill rig for shipment inland, so by the time my bleary mind registered that this was not a dog at all, but a polar bear, the creature had come closer to me than I was to the ladder of our cargo barge. It would make a good story if the bear had shredded my Carhartts before I climbed to safety, but this one was more interested in a whale kill dragged ashore by Inupiat hunters the week before. The bear didn't notice me until I was on the bow of our 200-foot icebreaker barge, exhilarated by my close encounter.

All About ANWR

To join the debate on oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to read Peter Matthiessen's February 2003 article opposing drilling in ANWR ("Footprints in the Last Wild Place") and see photographs by Subhankar Banerjee that accompany it, CLICK HERE.

A minute later, two Inupiat on Honda three-wheelers came barreling down from Kaktovik to run the bear off. From the wheelhouse of our tugboat, the mate swung a spotlight, illuminating the animal as it ran over packed floes and swam in the black water between them, glaring back with eyes the color of ink and wide with fear and irritation. I felt insulated, and powerful in a way, and glad for our machines. But there was something haunting about the bear—something haunting about the entire job.

It would be years before I learned that the cargo we carried was a British Petroleum/Chevron exploratory rig, which that winter was assembled near the mouth of the Jago River, where it drilled the now-infamous KIC#1—the "Kick" well—named for the Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation, the native company that owns the coastal tundra surrounding it. Even now, what the KIC well found under the ice remains a closely guarded secret, a mystery heightened by the fact that it is not just the first; it is the only oil well ever drilled in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Page:

DAVID MASIEL is the author of 2182 Kilohertz (Random House), a 2002 novel set on Alaska's North Slope.

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.