The Dempster Highway, a 500-mile gravel road through the Canadian Northwest, provides umparalled views of the wilderness
(This article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
By JOE LaROCCA
THE DEMPSTER HIGHWAY, Canada -- A roadway through the wilderness may seem a contradiction in terms, but at least one road in North America fits that description. It's the Dempster Highway, a relatively obscure roadway in the Canadian Northwest Arctic and sub-Arctic that a companion and I drove last summer.
This narrow, unpaved gravel road stretches for nearly 500 miles from a point near Dawson City in the Yukon Territory to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. Inuvik, a few dozen miles short of the shore of the Arctic Ocean, is an Inuvialuit Eskimo community that includes Dene Indians and whites among its population of some 3,300.
The Dempster, named after a heroic, turn-of-the-century Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer (in those days they were known as the Northwest Mounted Police), snakes through several mountain ranges and major river drainages spanning two time zones and virtually untouched wilderness.
En route, it crosses the Continental Divide three times before ending at Inuvik, a trade and government center about 60 miles south of the Arctic Ocean/Beaufort Sea coast.
My journey, with an Alaska friend, Ivan Thorall of Chisana, began at Forty-Mile Junction, where the Alaska Highway and the Taylor Highway intersect, about 300 miles southeast of Fairbanks.
Back door to Canada
We turned northward onto the Taylor, an unpaved frontier road that leads to a relatively little-known and rarely used backdoor access into Canada. It's a shorter route to our starting destination of Dawson City than if we had followed the Alaska Highway into Canada by way of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory.
The Taylor, itself a unique travel experience, meanders northward for about 100 miles before splitting into two prongs. The trail north leads to another famed Alaska community, Eagle, on the Yukon River, popularized most recently by John McPhee's 1977 best-selling book, "Coming into the Country." About 10 miles short of the forks, the road leads us through yet another colorful and historic Alaska gold mining town, Chicken, the setting for the true-to-life best-seller "Tisha."
Several miles beyond the forks lies Boundary, Alaska, consisting of a barroom, a gift shop and a single, ancient battered gas pump, which is so outdated that the analog price-per-gallon readout maxes out $1.50 per gallon. A scribbled note has been taped to the pump which advises serve-yourself customers to double the purchase price readout to compute the gas bill at the rate of $3 per gallon.
The U.S./Canada border stations are nearby. There, in order to enter Canada, we must stop to report in at Canada Customs.
Proceeding east into Canada from the border, we unravel one of the travel world's most remarkable but best-kept travel secrets, the 100-mile drive over the aptly named "Top of the World Highway." It's a part of this back door route linking Alaska with Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory. This section is a spectacularly scenic waltz along high ridges and over the towering tops of the Ogilvie Mountains where the narrow, rail-guardless road often drops breathtakingly on one or both sides to valley bottoms and river gorges far below.
Legions of surrounding mountaintops level with my eyeballs march in cadence to the distant horizons in every direction, fading into an azure infinity. Incredible vistas surfeit the senses. It's impossible to drink them all in.
After several hours, we leave this exalted mountain splendor, descending gradually to the broad Yukon River plain below, then to the river's edge. There, the government-operated ferry hauls us and vehicle, free of charge, to the opposite bank.
Colorful Dawson City
Strategically situated at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, Dawson was at the very heart of the world-famous gold rush of 1896-98 immortalized by writers like Jack London, Robert Service, Joaquin Miller and others including, in more recent times, noted Canadian author Pierre Berton.
We overnight about 14 miles east of Dawson at the outwardly imposing Klondike River Lodge, a rustic and picturesque log structure. This junction is the jumping-off point for the trip up the Dempster north to its terminus at Inuvik, some 460 miles, distant.
Despite its prominence, we're disappointed with the accommodations, services and food at the generally unclean lodge .
The lodge's only saving grace is that it's handy to the starting point for the Dempster Highway at its junction with the Klondike Highway (Milepost 0). Nevertheless, we won't stay there again, if we can help it.
We get a late start in the morning, planning to travel roughly half the distance to that day's destination. It's some 230 miles to an area called Eagle Plains, where we find the only roadside services and accommodations to that point.
In a couple of hours, traveling at a respectable 35 to 55 mph on the dry, well-maintained gravel road, we reach North Fork Pass Summit, a continental divide about 4,000 feet above sea level, the highest point on the Dempster. From there, most water runoff to the north eventually drains into the Arctic Ocean; south of here, into the Bering Sea to the west.
Where's the Moose?
Half hour or so later, about 100 miles up the Dempster, we reach a small water body called Two Moose Lake, because two moose are often seen there. (We see none, either coming or going. My traveling companion wryly renames it No Moose Lake.)
Continuing on, we're now approaching an area where, in the late fall, up to 40,000 caribou cross the road en route to their wintering grounds, members of the fabled international Porcupine herd, currently numbering some 170,000 animals.
But it's early July, and we see none. (They may have crossed the border into Alaska already, en route to their calving grounds on the arctic plain there.) Nor do we see any of the grizzlies and wolves that prey upon them.
We encounter little wildlife along the way, mostly small birds and mammals like sharptail grouse, squirrel, raven, pika, marmot, gray jays, an occasional hawk or peregrine falcon and grouse-like ptarmigan (Alaska's state bird -- the "p" is silent).
A brochure on the Dempster tells us to look for Dall sheep as we drive along Engineer Creek. Sure enough, on cue, we see a young ewe with half-curl horns busily engaged at a salt lick in the creek bed, close enough to the road for passable photos with a medium-range zoom or telescopic lens. She ignores me as I snap off a few exposures. We spot a small family group further up the mountainside, and I click off a couple more shots.
The traffic along the highway is sparse. I count 25 oncoming vehicles all day until we reach that day's destination, a vast mountaintop plateau known as Eagle Plains. There, a surprisingly luxurious and commodious hotel and road service complex materializes, mirage-like, from the unbroken boreal wilderness like an oasis in the midst of the Sahara.
Legends of the North
The legends are the tragic yarn of "the lost patrol," and the epic pursuit of Albert Johnson, the so-called "mad trapper of Rat River" who was killed in the ensuing shootout after killing two Mounties, and others.
Both true-to-life legends of the north country were popularized by an old writer acquaintance of mine from Whitehorse, Dick North, in his two nonfiction books, "The Lost Patrol" and "The Mad Trapper of Rat River," the definitive retellings of those dramatic episodes. ("Mad Trapper" was made into a Hollywood action movie that barely resembled North's book.) Both events took place along routes of old dogsled trails covering thousands of square miles generally paralleling the Dempster corridor.
The Eagle Plains Hotel's mountaintop aerie offers a spectacular view of the surrounding wilderness. Unlike many remote lodges, the Eagle Plains Hotel, located some 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is open year-round.
The next morning, we resume our trip northward up the Dempster, planning to reach Inuvik by evening. Within a couple hours, we reach the border dividing the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories on a high mountaintop promontory where commemorative plaques and illustrated historical markers trace the archeological and cultural genesis of that immense area, which encompasses nearly half of northern Canada, from the Yukon on the west to Hudson Bay to the east.
Athapasakan Indian Villages
The mountain scenery grows increasingly more picturesque and rugged, while the roller-coaster-like roadway dips, turns, curves, climbs, switches back and descends with dizzying monotony, each succeeding vista seemingly more spectacular than the last.
Soon we reach the next major point of interest, the mostly Athapaskan Indian community of Fort McPherson, on the banks of the Peel River.
We pick up a few token souvenirs there, then continue north, soon reaching, on the bank of the Peel River, the second of two river ferry crossings we must make along the Dempster, this one near the small Athapaskan Indian village of Arctic Red River..
In many respects, the Dempster is the Canadian counterpart of the James W. Dalton Highway, which now serves mainly as a resupply route for the North Slope oilfields, as we well as for the pipeline and road service facilities along the way. Unlike the Dalton, the Dempster had no clear-cut raison d'etre such as construction of an oil pipeline, but mainly reflects Canada's national obsession for building frontier roadways.
The rest of the drive from the Arctic Red River ferry crossing to Inuvik, about 130 miles, covers mostly flat tundra blanketed with scraggly anemic black spruce, a sure sign of the continuous subsurface permafrost that inhibits the growth of their root systems, hence the trees themselves.
Inuvik, the end of the road
The only mountains we see now are the Richardsons, a northern extension of the Rockies, in the far distance, to the north/northeast. We're now within the vast floodplain of the mighty Mackenzie River, the Mississippi of the north. On its sprawling east channel -- larger than most river mainstreams -- the relatively new "model" arctic community of Inuvik was sited. In the Inuvialuit tongue, Inuvik means "the place of the people." It was built by the Canadian government some 42 years ago as a grand experiment for acculturating the indigenous peoples. We've reached the end of the road.
Inuvik's founding was intended to lure the residents of the ancient native village of Aclavik just to the east, perennially wiped out by the thawing Mackenzie River's spring floods, to safer habitat on higher ground. And while many relocated to Inuvik, a handful of diehards remains at the old Aclavik town site, clinging to their aboriginal abodes and culture.
From my perspective, at least, that one's arrival at Inuvik is anti-climactic to the trip up the Dempster itself, which is sufficient reward, although the community does have its interesting points.
Most restaurants in Inuvik and throughout the Northwest offer indigenous fare, such as caribou and musk ox, as a novelty, which is generally palatable. The best dining establishment in town is the Mackenzie Hotel, where superior food and service were provided by the regulars there -- Carrie, the hostess and Rudy, the bartender.
Most of Inuvik's trade and commerce, even in this day of jet aircraft, relies primarily upon riverboat and barge transport up and down the Mackenzie River and its numerous channels, as does its recreation. Most residents own either a boat, a small plane or both, which they use for work and play. One couple we met combined both in a custom-designed log cabin boat with upper and lower sundecks which they built to live on, as well as to charter to groups for river cruise parties and dinners on the Mackenzie.
As a confirmed bookhound, one of my first impulses when traveling is to seek out the local bookshops, particularly those which deal in used books. Didn't have to look far for Boreal Books on the main drag, managed by Bob Rowe, a tall, soft-spoken and articulate bookseller, well-stocked and informed on the literature of the north, including Dick North's books, two of them on Albert Johnson, alluded to earlier.
Johnson is believed to be but has never been definitively proven to be the mad trapper of Rat River. North, among other things, is still assiduously pursuing his investigations into that subject, Rowe told me. Johnson, who was shot and killed after a prolonged chase by Mounties in the early 1900s, is buried in a cemetery at nearby Aclavik. North is trying to get permission from tribal leaders there to exhume Johnson's body so that it can be DNA-tested to establish once and for all whether he was, indeed, the legendary mad trapper.
Throughout our trip in Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, temperatures in July were generally consistent with but somewhat lower than the extreme highs that prevailed throughout most of the United States and Canada at the time, ranging from the low 60s at night to the mid-70s and low 80s during the day, even at Inuvik, some 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.
The weather was superb and the unpaved road conditions generally excellent due, in part, to the absence of rain throughout which would otherwise have rendered the gravel road muddy, unstable, even hazardous. We considered ourselves lucky in that regard, as less hospitable road conditions are more often the rule than the exception.
Widespread forest and brush fires in the upper Yukon around Dawson City produced generally smoky atmospheric conditions in that area for several weeks, which tended to dissipate outside radii of 20 to 30 miles. Long daylight hours in the northern latitudes enhanced our enjoyment of the trip, and the further north we drove, of course, the longer the days waxed. At Inuvik, the sun doesn't set at all between around the May 21 and the July 19.
Driving the Dempster is not a road trip to be taken lightly, and some advance planning is advisable. Accommodations and services along the road are few and far between, and may not be available at times without advance arrangements. Carry at least two spare tires and survival gear, including ample mosquito repellent, drinking water or other beverages and grub in the event of an extended breakdown. No emergency road or medical services are generally available, although ad hoc assistance could conceivably be provided randomly where the Samaritan impulse stirs rare passersby.
Although various official and unofficial informational sources assert that Royal Canadian Mounted Police vehicles patrol the road regularly, we didn't see a single one on our trip, going or coming back, so if you have a roadway problemyou can assume you're pretty much onyour own, (No cell towers out here)! and I suspect that these assertions more reflect glib Department of Tourism affectations than public policy.
A trip up the Dempster Highway is not for those who seek night lights and hot spots, creature comforts and cheap thrills. Rather, it's a rare opportunity to contemplate at leisure a largely unspoiled wilderness environment which, except for this narrow thread of gravel road on which we travel, and a few sparse niches of civilization along the way, looks pretty much as it has for millions of years.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
GOING UP THE "GOODY" WITH JOHN & GRACE BUTROVICH
The single-engine float plane wagged its wings twice, then circled for a landing on the placid surface of the Goodpaster River, a clearwater tributary of the Tanana River teeming with northern grayling and other anadromous and catadromus species. It flowed into the Tanana about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, near Delta Junction, where the Alaska Highway ends and joins the Richardson Highway. Tilting slightly on its horizontal axis as it skimmed over the water, the aircraft’s left float gently kissed the glassy surface a millisecond before the right one, settling into a virtually splashless touch down.
As he powered the plane towards the bank where I awaited him, I immediately recognized through the approaching windshield pilot Dick Wien, member of an internationally famous Alaska family of aviators. Stilling the engine, as the propeller spun slowly to a halt, he slipped out of the cabin, stepped onto the port float and tossed a rope to me to draw the plane into shore.
I sensed this was no social call. It came in late summer of 1978 when a prominent charter bush pilot from Fairbanks would be too busy hauling passengers and cargo to deadhead into this remote river valley for an aimless tete a tete.
UP THE GOODY
Luxuriating in splendid isolation, I was in the first week of a planned month-long sojourn in a rustic cabin on what locals fondly called “The Goody,” about a 2 ½ -hour water jet boat drive from its mouth on the turbulent Tanana. The cabin’s owners, John and Grace Butrovich, and I had come upriver several days earlier from our homes in Fairbanks on one of our regular summer weekend sorties to soak up the pastoral ambiance of this remote riverine setting, brimming with wildlife, both land and waterborne.
John and Grace had been coming “up the Goody” nearly every weekend during Alaska‘s brief hiatus between winters - weather and the politics in which they were usually immersed permitting - for more than four decades to their federally patented homesite, ritually shedding the cosmopolitan personae they affected in town to bask in primal simplicity in this bucolic paradise. We drew our water directly from the crystal clear river, boiling it for drinking and cooking on a classic but simple Klondike wood-burning stove, fed from the woodpile out in the yard which I replenished daily..
John and Grace had gone back to Fairbanks after the weekend, leaving me here alone to work on a writing project undistracted by phone, television or casual drop-ins. The only concession to modernity was a cheap battery-powered am/fm radio connected to a simple wire antenna hooked onto the tip of a skinny black spruce towering above the outhouse over which, if necessary, urgent messages could be wirelessed to me from KFAR Radio in Fairbanks.
Whatever mission on which Dick Wien had been dispatched was obviously too important or private to be broadcast over public airwaves. I had a sinking feeling my cherished solitary stay on the Goody would be short-lived. Before he had said a word, Dick, I was sure, was going to haul a passenger back to Fairbanks, and I was the only available candidate.
Compared to the Butroviches, I was a relative newcomer to these environs. This was in the late 70s, about ten years after I had come into the country from my home in Pennsylvania to work as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I had met John and Grace early on, barely a month after I arrived in Fairbanks. A special session of the legislature had been called by then-Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the aftermath of the destructive August,1967 Fairbanks flood, when the Chena River, which courses through the center of Fairbanks, overflowed its banks up to 12 feet or more.
John had been a territorial legislator, then a state senator after Alaska attained statehood in 1959, for decades one of Alaska’s most respected political leaders. At the apogee of his political career, he was the longest serving state senator in. U.S history, some 30 years. I had been assigned by my editor to cover the special flood session of the Alaska legislature in the state capital of Juneau, which lasted about a week. Upon its completion, I elected to return to Fairbanks via a northbound state ferry along Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Lynn Canal’s end of navigation at the tiny former gold rush town of Skagway.
There I boarded a coach of the historic White Pass and Yukon Railway, built between 1898 and 1900, in the wake of the Klondike gold rush, the oldest and only industrial narrow gauge railroad then operating in the U.S. It would carry me 110 miles from Skagway through the coastal mountains over the White Pass beyond the international boundary to Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory. From there I planned to fly to Fairbanks.
That’s where fate intervened. In Fairbanks, just prior to, then during the Special Session, I had made passing acquaintance with John Butrovich, in my untutored eyes, a virtually mythic presence because of his revered status within the state. But after the legislative session, on the daylong train ride north from Skagway to Whitehorse, in those confined circumstances, he, Grace and I met and were thrown together socially, forming an almost immediate mutual connection, and discovering a rare commonality of sensibilities, among them a shared taste for rum (Latin) Manhattans and Dry Sack sherry.
In Whitehorse, after spending several days sightseeing together, they invited me to drive up the Alaska Highway with them to Fairbanks in their car, which had also made the trip from Juneau to Skagway aboard a state ferry, then lashed to a flatcar aboard the WP&YR. John and Grace had made this trip many times over the years, but this was my virgin jaunt up the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse to the highway’s northern terminus at Delta Junction, thence north on the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Both skilled raconteurs, John and Grace enthralled me with wise and witty anecdotes of landmarks, legends and historical ephemera pertaining to the famed road, once known as the Alcan Highway.
In short order, they, their extended family - their daughter Jan, her children and husband, Hawley Evans, Grace’s mother, Mary Brown - became my surrogate family in Alaska. Rarely, if ever, has a newcomer to Alaska , a “cheechako,” been so lucky and privileged to form such a rewarding bond.
Their salutary friendship and familial affection aside, John and Grace’s social and political connections quickly opened to me doors that would otherwise have remained forever closed, a motherlode of insider access for a newly arrived newsman. Before long, I was sharing their long summer weekends “up the Goody,” a tradition that lasted nearly 20 years.
There we would spend halcyon days exploring the upper reaches of the Goody as far as The Forks, where John and Grace had inherited a homestead established years earlier by a longtime trapper on the river they had befriended, Lawrence Johnson. We would clean weeds from the yard and repair the crumbling cabin and cache, contemplating his elaborate tombstone there, buried by his friends where he lived and died. An irrepressible optimist, Johnson recorded his quotidian activities in a journal which ended each evening with the entry, “Fine Day,” notwithstanding the sometimes life-threatening challenges and travails he overcame.
Lawrence Johnson hadn’t quite died with his boots on, but came close to it. One friend, the late Paul “Doc” Haggland of Fairbanks, an MD and one-time state senator, had flown in on skiis one winter day, landing on the Goodpaster ice in front of Lawrence’s cabin to check on him, a ritual Johnson‘s close circle of pilot friends in Fairbanks regularly observed. He found him slumped over, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the act of donning a boot, frozen in that position. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Rigor mortis had set in. Doc had literally to break a couple of Lawrence’s stiffened limbs in order to get his frozen corpse inside his small plane to take him back to Fairbanks for thawing and embalming.
Among the antiquarian curiosities we found at Lawrence’s homestead at The Forks were artifacts dating back to a bygone era around the turn of the 20th century when a 21-year old army lieutenant by the name of Billy Mitchell led a contingent whose orders were to survey a route for a proposed intercontinental telegraph line through Alaska to Russia. We found military matchbooks still functional, glass electrical insulators, cans of still edible and tasty unhomogenized peanut butter, electrical wiring, and others from that long ago foray.
A couple hours each day on the Goody with the Butroviches were spent fly fishing for grayling, a dinnertime delicacy. While Grace and I waved off clouds of mosquitos, John, covered with the pests, defiantly refused to acknowledge their existence. He would grunt: “What mosquitos?” We gathered wild strawberries, red raspberries and blueberries in the woods, low bush cranberries in the late summer. Evenings after supper were often spent in quiet contemplation of the pastel sunsets suffusing the ivory peaks of the distant Alaska Range
One of our favored evening pastimes was flinging shards of remembered poetry at each other, from Shakespeare to Bryant, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly to Dickenson and Frost, among others. John affected a distaste for classical music, for which Grace and I shared a passion, regaling us with his mock contempt for "Stravinsky Korsakoff."
John learned to fly in his 60s, acquiring a Piper SuperCub. While he amassed many hours of flight time, he never progressed beyond a student license to obtain his pilot’s license, hence was not legally certified to carry passengers on his flights. Nevertheless, he frequently took me upstairs with him without telling Grace, who frowned upon, nay, forbade the illegal practice. One Easter Sunday, snow and ice still covering the Interior, John and I took off for the Goodpaster cabin without telling Grace I was with him.
We landed in front of the cabin on the river ice, which was just beginning to melt along the edges. He taxied too closely to the edge of the stream. One ski broke through the rotting ice, imprisoning the plane. While we worked to free it by building a rough log ramp with cut firewood, I took a series of photos, carelessly tossing a film wrapper into a wastebasket inside the cabin. By the time we freed the plane, darkness was approaching.
Back in Fairbanks, Grace, concerned over John’s failure to return before dark, had sent their son-in-law Hawley Evans, a well-known and accomplished Alaska bush pilot, into the darkening skies to see if he could find John’s plane. Within a few minutes, Hawley passed us airborne from the outgoing direction.
Fast forward to a couple months later. After snow and ice had disappeared from the Interior, John and Grace made their first weekend trip “up the Goody.” As she entered the cabin, Grace, an impeccable house tidier, spotted the film wrapper in the otherwise empty waste basket which she knew had not been there when they had closed down the cabin at the end of the previous season, and instantly divined the situation. She knew, intuitively, that John, who didn’t use a camera, and I had surreptitiously flown to the Goodpaster cabin that Easter Sunday several months earlier. She never said a word, and wouldn’t speak to John for days. Eventually, she forgave him, but never forgot the incident. In later years she could joke about it.
With one harrowing exception, the few days after John and Grace had left me alone on the Goody before Dick Wien appeared were uneventful. Few boats heading up or down river came by; one or two river rats who knew I was there alone stopped to make sure I was okay. One warm afternoon, as I studiously contemplated the bare inner plywood walls of the outhouse, I heard a tremendous ruckus and crashing of brush just outside the door, which I hadn’t closed, as no one was around for miles.
An instant later, a cow moose shot past the door, headed for the river about 20 yards away, followed closely by that year’s calf, barely six months old. They were frantically fleeing from a pursuing grizzly, whose hairy bulk seemed to fill the outhouse door as he too careened past in hot pursuit of the cow and calf. I sat there frozen for uncounted minutes, petrified, incapable of moving. By the time I did, the pursuer and pursued were nowhere to be seen, and I never knew the outcome of that frantic dance of life and death between predator and prey.
* * *
“John asked me to come and get you and bring you back to Fairbanks,” Dick Wien told me as he stepped ashore from his float plane. “He didn’t tell me why, but he said it’s important.” I quickly put the bear-proof shutters up on the cabin windows, locked the door, fastened it with a chain loop, gathered up my typewriter, papers, clothing and other effects and climbed into Dick’s plane for the brief flight back to Fairbanks.
In that year’s Republican primary election, August 22, 1978, former Governor Wally Hickel had challenged the re-nomination of the incumbent, Jay Hammond. It was a tight race, but in the end Hammond appeared to have prevailed by a narrow margin of fewer than 300 votes. But there were obvious discrepancies, even apparent fraud in the counting of the votes, several hundred of which had been lost or temporarily misplaced. It was clear that Hickel would challenge the election in court.
A number of Hickel’s leading supporters, including the Anchorage lawyer who had served as his appointed attorney general during Hickel’s first term as governor back in the late 60s, Edgar Paul Boyko, had formed a group they called “The Honest Election Committee.” It’s goal was to investigate the election’s proven and suspected irregularities and collect data to bolster their impending case in court. In that context, they had sought someone known to be politically independent of both candidates to launch a detailed investigation into the circumstances surrounding the election and the counting of the votes. I was the only prospect in Alaska upon whom the members of the bi-partisan committee could all agree.
They learned I was remotely ensconced in John Butrovich’s Goodpaster River cabin, and asked him if he could contact me to ask me if I’d be interested in undertaking an independent inquiry into the election for them. John asked Dick Wien to fetch me back to Fairbanks. Upon my arrival a day or two later in Anchorage, I told the committee I would agree to do so only if I were guaranteed complete freedom in conducting the investigation without any interference from the committee, and sufficient resources to conduct a creditable investigation. The members agreed. I reluctantly decided to forego my sojourn on the Goodpaster River to undertake the investigation. But that’s another story.
I climbed into the passenger’s seat of Dick Wien’s Cessna 180, we roared down a straight stretch of the river, got up on the step, then rose above the black pines, cottonwoods and alders that laced the river banks, the plane’s shadow flitting below on the serpentine river’s mirror surface, and headed north towards Fairbanks, towards a new adventure that would plunge me into the inner recesses of one of Alaska’s convoluted and storied political battles.
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Joe LaRocca was a newsman in Alaska in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, covering the legislature, state government, politics and the oil industry for various Alaska news media and The New York Times. His book Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil Bought Alaska is an anecdotal political history of Alaska’s modern oil industry. He now resides in his hometown of North East (Erie County), PA and may be contacted at jlar5552@verizon.net or 814.725.8926.
As he powered the plane towards the bank where I awaited him, I immediately recognized through the approaching windshield pilot Dick Wien, member of an internationally famous Alaska family of aviators. Stilling the engine, as the propeller spun slowly to a halt, he slipped out of the cabin, stepped onto the port float and tossed a rope to me to draw the plane into shore.
I sensed this was no social call. It came in late summer of 1978 when a prominent charter bush pilot from Fairbanks would be too busy hauling passengers and cargo to deadhead into this remote river valley for an aimless tete a tete.
UP THE GOODY
Luxuriating in splendid isolation, I was in the first week of a planned month-long sojourn in a rustic cabin on what locals fondly called “The Goody,” about a 2 ½ -hour water jet boat drive from its mouth on the turbulent Tanana. The cabin’s owners, John and Grace Butrovich, and I had come upriver several days earlier from our homes in Fairbanks on one of our regular summer weekend sorties to soak up the pastoral ambiance of this remote riverine setting, brimming with wildlife, both land and waterborne.
John and Grace had been coming “up the Goody” nearly every weekend during Alaska‘s brief hiatus between winters - weather and the politics in which they were usually immersed permitting - for more than four decades to their federally patented homesite, ritually shedding the cosmopolitan personae they affected in town to bask in primal simplicity in this bucolic paradise. We drew our water directly from the crystal clear river, boiling it for drinking and cooking on a classic but simple Klondike wood-burning stove, fed from the woodpile out in the yard which I replenished daily..
John and Grace had gone back to Fairbanks after the weekend, leaving me here alone to work on a writing project undistracted by phone, television or casual drop-ins. The only concession to modernity was a cheap battery-powered am/fm radio connected to a simple wire antenna hooked onto the tip of a skinny black spruce towering above the outhouse over which, if necessary, urgent messages could be wirelessed to me from KFAR Radio in Fairbanks.
Whatever mission on which Dick Wien had been dispatched was obviously too important or private to be broadcast over public airwaves. I had a sinking feeling my cherished solitary stay on the Goody would be short-lived. Before he had said a word, Dick, I was sure, was going to haul a passenger back to Fairbanks, and I was the only available candidate.
Compared to the Butroviches, I was a relative newcomer to these environs. This was in the late 70s, about ten years after I had come into the country from my home in Pennsylvania to work as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I had met John and Grace early on, barely a month after I arrived in Fairbanks. A special session of the legislature had been called by then-Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the aftermath of the destructive August,1967 Fairbanks flood, when the Chena River, which courses through the center of Fairbanks, overflowed its banks up to 12 feet or more.
John had been a territorial legislator, then a state senator after Alaska attained statehood in 1959, for decades one of Alaska’s most respected political leaders. At the apogee of his political career, he was the longest serving state senator in. U.S history, some 30 years. I had been assigned by my editor to cover the special flood session of the Alaska legislature in the state capital of Juneau, which lasted about a week. Upon its completion, I elected to return to Fairbanks via a northbound state ferry along Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Lynn Canal’s end of navigation at the tiny former gold rush town of Skagway.
There I boarded a coach of the historic White Pass and Yukon Railway, built between 1898 and 1900, in the wake of the Klondike gold rush, the oldest and only industrial narrow gauge railroad then operating in the U.S. It would carry me 110 miles from Skagway through the coastal mountains over the White Pass beyond the international boundary to Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory. From there I planned to fly to Fairbanks.
That’s where fate intervened. In Fairbanks, just prior to, then during the Special Session, I had made passing acquaintance with John Butrovich, in my untutored eyes, a virtually mythic presence because of his revered status within the state. But after the legislative session, on the daylong train ride north from Skagway to Whitehorse, in those confined circumstances, he, Grace and I met and were thrown together socially, forming an almost immediate mutual connection, and discovering a rare commonality of sensibilities, among them a shared taste for rum (Latin) Manhattans and Dry Sack sherry.
In Whitehorse, after spending several days sightseeing together, they invited me to drive up the Alaska Highway with them to Fairbanks in their car, which had also made the trip from Juneau to Skagway aboard a state ferry, then lashed to a flatcar aboard the WP&YR. John and Grace had made this trip many times over the years, but this was my virgin jaunt up the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse to the highway’s northern terminus at Delta Junction, thence north on the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Both skilled raconteurs, John and Grace enthralled me with wise and witty anecdotes of landmarks, legends and historical ephemera pertaining to the famed road, once known as the Alcan Highway.
In short order, they, their extended family - their daughter Jan, her children and husband, Hawley Evans, Grace’s mother, Mary Brown - became my surrogate family in Alaska. Rarely, if ever, has a newcomer to Alaska , a “cheechako,” been so lucky and privileged to form such a rewarding bond.
Their salutary friendship and familial affection aside, John and Grace’s social and political connections quickly opened to me doors that would otherwise have remained forever closed, a motherlode of insider access for a newly arrived newsman. Before long, I was sharing their long summer weekends “up the Goody,” a tradition that lasted nearly 20 years.
There we would spend halcyon days exploring the upper reaches of the Goody as far as The Forks, where John and Grace had inherited a homestead established years earlier by a longtime trapper on the river they had befriended, Lawrence Johnson. We would clean weeds from the yard and repair the crumbling cabin and cache, contemplating his elaborate tombstone there, buried by his friends where he lived and died. An irrepressible optimist, Johnson recorded his quotidian activities in a journal which ended each evening with the entry, “Fine Day,” notwithstanding the sometimes life-threatening challenges and travails he overcame.
Lawrence Johnson hadn’t quite died with his boots on, but came close to it. One friend, the late Paul “Doc” Haggland of Fairbanks, an MD and one-time state senator, had flown in on skiis one winter day, landing on the Goodpaster ice in front of Lawrence’s cabin to check on him, a ritual Johnson‘s close circle of pilot friends in Fairbanks regularly observed. He found him slumped over, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the act of donning a boot, frozen in that position. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Rigor mortis had set in. Doc had literally to break a couple of Lawrence’s stiffened limbs in order to get his frozen corpse inside his small plane to take him back to Fairbanks for thawing and embalming.
Among the antiquarian curiosities we found at Lawrence’s homestead at The Forks were artifacts dating back to a bygone era around the turn of the 20th century when a 21-year old army lieutenant by the name of Billy Mitchell led a contingent whose orders were to survey a route for a proposed intercontinental telegraph line through Alaska to Russia. We found military matchbooks still functional, glass electrical insulators, cans of still edible and tasty unhomogenized peanut butter, electrical wiring, and others from that long ago foray.
A couple hours each day on the Goody with the Butroviches were spent fly fishing for grayling, a dinnertime delicacy. While Grace and I waved off clouds of mosquitos, John, covered with the pests, defiantly refused to acknowledge their existence. He would grunt: “What mosquitos?” We gathered wild strawberries, red raspberries and blueberries in the woods, low bush cranberries in the late summer. Evenings after supper were often spent in quiet contemplation of the pastel sunsets suffusing the ivory peaks of the distant Alaska Range
One of our favored evening pastimes was flinging shards of remembered poetry at each other, from Shakespeare to Bryant, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly to Dickenson and Frost, among others. John affected a distaste for classical music, for which Grace and I shared a passion, regaling us with his mock contempt for "Stravinsky Korsakoff."
John learned to fly in his 60s, acquiring a Piper SuperCub. While he amassed many hours of flight time, he never progressed beyond a student license to obtain his pilot’s license, hence was not legally certified to carry passengers on his flights. Nevertheless, he frequently took me upstairs with him without telling Grace, who frowned upon, nay, forbade the illegal practice. One Easter Sunday, snow and ice still covering the Interior, John and I took off for the Goodpaster cabin without telling Grace I was with him.
We landed in front of the cabin on the river ice, which was just beginning to melt along the edges. He taxied too closely to the edge of the stream. One ski broke through the rotting ice, imprisoning the plane. While we worked to free it by building a rough log ramp with cut firewood, I took a series of photos, carelessly tossing a film wrapper into a wastebasket inside the cabin. By the time we freed the plane, darkness was approaching.
Back in Fairbanks, Grace, concerned over John’s failure to return before dark, had sent their son-in-law Hawley Evans, a well-known and accomplished Alaska bush pilot, into the darkening skies to see if he could find John’s plane. Within a few minutes, Hawley passed us airborne from the outgoing direction.
Fast forward to a couple months later. After snow and ice had disappeared from the Interior, John and Grace made their first weekend trip “up the Goody.” As she entered the cabin, Grace, an impeccable house tidier, spotted the film wrapper in the otherwise empty waste basket which she knew had not been there when they had closed down the cabin at the end of the previous season, and instantly divined the situation. She knew, intuitively, that John, who didn’t use a camera, and I had surreptitiously flown to the Goodpaster cabin that Easter Sunday several months earlier. She never said a word, and wouldn’t speak to John for days. Eventually, she forgave him, but never forgot the incident. In later years she could joke about it.
With one harrowing exception, the few days after John and Grace had left me alone on the Goody before Dick Wien appeared were uneventful. Few boats heading up or down river came by; one or two river rats who knew I was there alone stopped to make sure I was okay. One warm afternoon, as I studiously contemplated the bare inner plywood walls of the outhouse, I heard a tremendous ruckus and crashing of brush just outside the door, which I hadn’t closed, as no one was around for miles.
An instant later, a cow moose shot past the door, headed for the river about 20 yards away, followed closely by that year’s calf, barely six months old. They were frantically fleeing from a pursuing grizzly, whose hairy bulk seemed to fill the outhouse door as he too careened past in hot pursuit of the cow and calf. I sat there frozen for uncounted minutes, petrified, incapable of moving. By the time I did, the pursuer and pursued were nowhere to be seen, and I never knew the outcome of that frantic dance of life and death between predator and prey.
* * *
“John asked me to come and get you and bring you back to Fairbanks,” Dick Wien told me as he stepped ashore from his float plane. “He didn’t tell me why, but he said it’s important.” I quickly put the bear-proof shutters up on the cabin windows, locked the door, fastened it with a chain loop, gathered up my typewriter, papers, clothing and other effects and climbed into Dick’s plane for the brief flight back to Fairbanks.
In that year’s Republican primary election, August 22, 1978, former Governor Wally Hickel had challenged the re-nomination of the incumbent, Jay Hammond. It was a tight race, but in the end Hammond appeared to have prevailed by a narrow margin of fewer than 300 votes. But there were obvious discrepancies, even apparent fraud in the counting of the votes, several hundred of which had been lost or temporarily misplaced. It was clear that Hickel would challenge the election in court.
A number of Hickel’s leading supporters, including the Anchorage lawyer who had served as his appointed attorney general during Hickel’s first term as governor back in the late 60s, Edgar Paul Boyko, had formed a group they called “The Honest Election Committee.” It’s goal was to investigate the election’s proven and suspected irregularities and collect data to bolster their impending case in court. In that context, they had sought someone known to be politically independent of both candidates to launch a detailed investigation into the circumstances surrounding the election and the counting of the votes. I was the only prospect in Alaska upon whom the members of the bi-partisan committee could all agree.
They learned I was remotely ensconced in John Butrovich’s Goodpaster River cabin, and asked him if he could contact me to ask me if I’d be interested in undertaking an independent inquiry into the election for them. John asked Dick Wien to fetch me back to Fairbanks. Upon my arrival a day or two later in Anchorage, I told the committee I would agree to do so only if I were guaranteed complete freedom in conducting the investigation without any interference from the committee, and sufficient resources to conduct a creditable investigation. The members agreed. I reluctantly decided to forego my sojourn on the Goodpaster River to undertake the investigation. But that’s another story.
I climbed into the passenger’s seat of Dick Wien’s Cessna 180, we roared down a straight stretch of the river, got up on the step, then rose above the black pines, cottonwoods and alders that laced the river banks, the plane’s shadow flitting below on the serpentine river’s mirror surface, and headed north towards Fairbanks, towards a new adventure that would plunge me into the inner recesses of one of Alaska’s convoluted and storied political battles.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Joe LaRocca was a newsman in Alaska in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, covering the legislature, state government, politics and the oil industry for various Alaska news media and The New York Times. His book Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil Bought Alaska is an anecdotal political history of Alaska’s modern oil industry. He now resides in his hometown of North East (Erie County), PA and may be contacted at jlar5552@verizon.net or 814.725.8926.
CAL LENSINK, WILD MUSKOXEN AND AN AMAZING CONSERVATION SUCCESS STORY
by JOE LaROCCA
Cal Lensink, now deceased, is one of Alaska’s unsung heroes. He died several years ago in his native state of Minnesota after a long career as a wildlife biologist in Alaska for he U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
I first met Cal back in the 1970s when he was manager of the federal Yukon-Kuskokwin National Wildlife Refuge, which included Nunivak Island in the Bering Straits just off Alaska’s western coast near Bethel. He was one of the key figures in the management of the wild muskoxen herds on Nunivak Island in the Bering Strait and one of the nation‘s great conservation success stories.
After the last muskoxen had been extirpated from its mainland Alaska habitat by hunters in the mid-1800s, about 30 muskoxen had been transplanted onto Nunivak Island from Greenland in the 1930s, reproductively increasing to about 700 by the late 1960s.
At that time, the island herd was in danger of crashing from overpopulation by the early 1970s. Cal was one of the leaders, along with the late Ivan Thorall and Glen DeSpain of Fairbanks, who mounted a controversial campaign to remove the long-standing ban on muskox hunting on Nunivak Island.
They and others advocated sport hunting of surplus bulls, while at the same time proposing the transplant of small family groups at various locales on the mainland where it was hoped they would re-establish permanent herds on their historic habitat.
There are more than 3,000 of their descendants on mainland Alaska. Defying his political bosses in the U.S. Interior Dept., including former governor and interior secretary Wally Hickel who opposed the hunts, Cal helped provide the moral authority and biological expertise needed to overcome the wrongheaded political inertia and environmental opposition to the hunts, which were initiated on Nunivak Island in 1975 as the herd faced certain extinction from natural causes.
Today, the hunts, both subsistence and trophy, are a valuable management tool in the maintenance of both the island and mainland herds. I was the first newsman allowed to accompany the first legally permitted muskox hunter (an Anchorage refrigerator salesman) to Nunivak Island in 1975 to report on and photograph his successful hunt for a bull muskox.
After Cal retired from the US F&WS, he returned briefly to Alaska to supervise, pro bono, the cleaning and salvation of thousands of Alaska’s sea mammals and waterfowl in Prince William Sound which had been immersed in the Exxon Valdez’s disastrous oil slick.
Cal Lensink, now deceased, is one of Alaska’s unsung heroes. He died several years ago in his native state of Minnesota after a long career as a wildlife biologist in Alaska for he U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
I first met Cal back in the 1970s when he was manager of the federal Yukon-Kuskokwin National Wildlife Refuge, which included Nunivak Island in the Bering Straits just off Alaska’s western coast near Bethel. He was one of the key figures in the management of the wild muskoxen herds on Nunivak Island in the Bering Strait and one of the nation‘s great conservation success stories.
After the last muskoxen had been extirpated from its mainland Alaska habitat by hunters in the mid-1800s, about 30 muskoxen had been transplanted onto Nunivak Island from Greenland in the 1930s, reproductively increasing to about 700 by the late 1960s.
At that time, the island herd was in danger of crashing from overpopulation by the early 1970s. Cal was one of the leaders, along with the late Ivan Thorall and Glen DeSpain of Fairbanks, who mounted a controversial campaign to remove the long-standing ban on muskox hunting on Nunivak Island.
They and others advocated sport hunting of surplus bulls, while at the same time proposing the transplant of small family groups at various locales on the mainland where it was hoped they would re-establish permanent herds on their historic habitat.
There are more than 3,000 of their descendants on mainland Alaska. Defying his political bosses in the U.S. Interior Dept., including former governor and interior secretary Wally Hickel who opposed the hunts, Cal helped provide the moral authority and biological expertise needed to overcome the wrongheaded political inertia and environmental opposition to the hunts, which were initiated on Nunivak Island in 1975 as the herd faced certain extinction from natural causes.
Today, the hunts, both subsistence and trophy, are a valuable management tool in the maintenance of both the island and mainland herds. I was the first newsman allowed to accompany the first legally permitted muskox hunter (an Anchorage refrigerator salesman) to Nunivak Island in 1975 to report on and photograph his successful hunt for a bull muskox.
After Cal retired from the US F&WS, he returned briefly to Alaska to supervise, pro bono, the cleaning and salvation of thousands of Alaska’s sea mammals and waterfowl in Prince William Sound which had been immersed in the Exxon Valdez’s disastrous oil slick.
RE-VISITING THE HISTORIC 1969 VOYAGE OF THE SS MANHATTAN
Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil: The Epic Voyage of the SS Manhattan through the Northwest Passage, by Ross Coen, 2012, University of Alaska Press, 215 pps, U.S. $24.95
Reviewed by JOE E. LaROCCA
(This review originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News)
A University of Alaska scholar at Fairbanks has plucked a rare gem from the dust bin of Alaska’s relatively brief but colorful petroleum history and endowed it with a fresh voice that speaks to a new generation of adherents largely unaware of its historic genesis.
In his new book, Ross Coen, a university professor, revisits the legendary ice-breaking supership’s remarkable experimental journey more than 40 years ago from New York Harbor through the ice-choked waters of the Canadian arctic archipelago’s mythic Northwest Passage: Its destination, Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska’s then-newly discovered North Slope oilfields.
(Full disclosure: As one of the few survivors who sailed aboard the Manhattan during part of her spectacular trip in 1969 through the dazzling labryrinth of arctic ice, I was interviewed by Professor Coen online during research on his book. He has favorably cited some of my Alaska writings).
The story of the SS Manhattan has been told in various contexts over the years, most notably in a book published in 1970 by New York Times Reporter William D. Smith, “Northwest Passage: The Historic Voyage of the SS Manhattan.” Smith, flaunting the Times’ prestigious clout, was the only reporter allowed to cover the ship’s entire voyage round trip. I was there covering for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Prof. Coen and Smith have penned powerful and nuanced descriptions of the supership’s tumultuous east and west voyages through the Passage from totally different perspectives: Prof. Coen, from exhaustive research into the ship’s voluminous paper trail and insightful interviews of some of the surviving crew members and officers, an exemplar of investigative inquiry; Reporter Smith, from his perceptive, often emotional/aesthetic personal observations aboard ship during his unprecedented experience. Both deserve a full reading.
Prof. Coen readily acknowledges that “Bill Smith’s book is a superb contemporary account of the voyage,” but notes that his own “has the advantage of coming 40 years later when I could place these events in an historical context.”
That’s an understatement. Prof. Coen’s book is arguably the most important book written by an Alaska author on any subject. It’s a must read for anyone dealing with or engaged in the far-reaching implications of the overarching state, national and international issues it explores. These include conflicting claims of governance of the Northwest passage waters and their disputed status, and growing concerns over the creeping pollution of global oceans by petroleum products.
Prof. Coen’s meticulously researched book ventures well beyond the adventurous Manhattan narrative to explore in depth many of the geopolitical public and corporate policy issues it aroused which broadened the context immeasurably.
He observes, for example, that as part of its legacy, the Manhattan’s voyage “provoked intense reaction in Canada with regard to environmental protection, economic security, maritime safety regulation, and ultimately the very question of who owns the Northwest Passage.” These are wrenching geopolitical issues which the passage of time and complicated emerging national and international legalities have intensified.
Prof. Coen notes that “Humble Oil did not request advance permission from the Canadian government before sending its tanker north. Neither did the U.S. Coast Guard in the case of its (cutter) Northwind (to escort the tanker)…nor the U.S State Department.”
For the U.S. “To formally ask for permission,” Prof Coen writes, “would be to acknowledge that the waters of the Northwest Passage indeed fell under Canadian jurisdiction.” While conceding that the scores of archipelagic islands scattered throughout the Canadian portion of the Passage belong to Canada, Prof. Coen notes, “American officials instead believed the route qualified as an international waterway” open to all nations.
According to Prof. Coen, the U.S. has based its position in part on a ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1949 which held that a strait qualifies as international when it connects two high seas (i.e., the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans0, and which falls outside the jurisdiction of adjacent states, although Canada disputes this claim.
When the prospective voyage was first announced in 1968, then-Canada Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau “stated his intent to assert ‘stewardship, if not sovereignty’ over the passage.” His “soft language” Prof. Coen writes, angered some Canadians “who desired a firm stance on the issue and possibly a showdown with what they perceived as the arrogant neighbor to the south.”
But, according to Prof. Coen, Trudeau’s secretary of external affairs, Mitchell Sharp, “advised restraint.” ‘This is not a time for wide-ranging assertions of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic made without regard to the international political and legal considerations (and) there is no necessity for us to make sweeping assertions to reinforce our position,’ Sharp declaimed. ‘That might satisfy our ego but would not add a whit to the international acceptability of our position’.”
Nevertheless, Prof. Coen writes, these comments “belied a firm resolve to assert functional authority over the Canadian Arctic by assuming environmental stewardship of its waters.”
By unilaterally assigning Canada’s Coast Guard ship, the John H. MacDonald to escort the Manhattan, a move the Manhattan’s officers heartily welcomed, Canada “signalled its intent to pursue an overall strategy of cooperation designed to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S.,” Prof. Coen writes, “and allow time to develop an internationally defensible plan for achieving de facto control” over the Northwest Passage within her sovereign sphere.
“While the John A. MacDonald had been assigned to the expedition in part to wave the Canadian flag,” Prof Coen writes, she steadfastly “would guide the supertanker through the passage, repeatedly rescue her from brutal ice conditions and generally prove indispensible to the entire mission” at times even at her own peril.
The Manhattan’s voyage was launched in August, 1969 to test the operational and economic feasibility of shipping North Slope crude oil from Alaska’s Arctic Ocean shore eastward to refineries and markets on the U.S. East Coast and beyond. Another alternative: pumping it through the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline, if and when completed, to the port city of Valdez on Alaska’s south coast for transshipment by ocean tankers to U.S. refineries on the West Coast, Gulf of Mexico coast and the Bahamas.
At the outset, proponents of the ocean-only option prefigured by the Manhattan voyage claimed the oil could be delivered by tankers larger and more powerful than the Manhattan much more cheaply to markets on the East Coast, where it would be needed, than to the West Coast, where it wouldn’t - where, indeed, there would be a projected half-millon barrel per day glut of oil once North Slope crude came onstream.
While that calculation may have been valid at the time it was rendered, the economics of both alternatives changed drastically by the time both projects were completed, even reversing the logistics in favor of the pipeline, whose completion was ultimately delayed nearly a decade after the Manhattan’s voyage.
The $52 million Manhattan project was the brainchild of a Humble Oil/Standard Oil of New Jersey transport executive, Stanley B. Haas, now deceased. Humble was concurrently one of three ranking proponents of the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline. Haas sold the maritime project to his company’s Board, contending that Humble’s share of the then-estimated ten billion barrels-plus of recoverable oil which underlay the Prudhoe Bay oilfields would justify two divergent transport streams serving discrete market venues.
After an extended period of corporate gestation through the 1960s, the decision was taken in late 1968 to proceed with plans for a voyage shove-off by mid-1969. Prof. Coen’s incisive account of the convoluted decisional process is just one of numerous fascinating aspects of his book, remarkable for the vivid color and quality of his writing, as well as the depth, detail and precision of his research.
Haas’ first chore was to find or have built a suitable ship with configurations which would enable her to sail through the Northwest Passage year-round.
Humble, Prof. Coen writes, initially “proposed to build an ice-breaking tanker weighing 250,000 deadweight tons with an engine room capable of 100,000 horsepower…the largest of its kind in history. If this test vessel of an arctic transportation system demonstrated both technical and economic feasibility, Humble would follow with an entire fleet of tankers of comparable size and power,” he writes.
Then reality intruded with the realization that no such ship could possibly be built in time for the scheduled voyage date the following summer, timed to coincide with the first prospective flow of oil from Alaska’s new world-class North Slope oilfields, and a couple years before the then-expected completion of the alternative transport system, the trans Alaska oil pipeline.
The search began for an existing ship “that resembled (the hypothetical ship’s design and could be quickly renovated for the journey.” That led to the Manhattan, constructed in 1962. “Straight off the rack, “ Prof. Coen writes, “the Manhattan already possessed many characteristics of a good icebreaker” - extreme size (longer than three football fields; tonnage (115,000 deadweight tons) and power (100,000 horsepower ahead, 40,000 hp astern).
He tells a fascinating tale of how the Manhattan came to be financed and built - a highly unlikely ship owner’s investment - too lengthy to relate here. The owner, Seatrain, leased her for two years to Humble, which began a unique and all-encompassing whirlwind six-month modification program no single U.S. shipbuilder could handle alone.
Humble docked the ship at Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pa, where she was cut into four sections, with the bow and the stern remaining in Chester; a new ice-breaking bow to be constructed in Maine; the after- bow towed to Newport News in Virginia, and the midship section towed to a Mobile, Alabama shipyard. “Haas joked at the time that the Manhattan was truly the longest ship in the world, stretching from Pennsylvania to Alabama,” Prof. Coen writes.
“The most innovative and visually distinctive renovation to the tanker,” he notes, “was its brand new ice-breaking bow.” Constructed at the Bath, Maine Iron Works, “the bow was made of steel capable of withstanding nine hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, and featured a sharp 18-degree curve calculated to allow the hull to ride atop the ice…the sheer bulk of the vessel” would cause a “tensile failure and a clean split in the ice sheet” and toss small-house-sized chunks of ice cavalierly aside.
Inevitable delays in shipwork led to postponement of completion dates from early June, 1969 to July 15, then end of the month, then August 2, when the ship was at last ready for sea trials. One goal forfeited by the delays was to sail the ship into the arctic ice pack at its peak strength in late Spring and early summer to challenge the Manhattan’s ultimate toughness and her officers’ resolve. But that could be compensated for by running more tests through the ice pack the following Spring of 1970, which ultimately ensued.
Despite serious performance deficiencies at sea trials, the Manhattan was set to begin her illustrious voyage from the Sun Shipworks at Chester, PA on August 26 , with brief celebratory stops at New York and Halifax, Canada.
Eleven weeks later, in the early morning hours of Sept, 15, Humble issued a press release stating that “The most talked-about ship in the world today, the SS Manhattan, slipped quietly into the frigid waters of Amundsen Gulf late last night and became the first commercial vessel in history ever to traverse the Northwest Passage.”
Humble “stated its belief,” Prof, Coen wrote, “that the Manhattan had proven the feasibility of using such tankers in the Arctic, yet the Alaska pipeline now appeared to have an economic edge.” On Oct. 21, 1970, Humble announced “that it was suspending its icebreaking tanker project, Prof. Coen writes. “From this point forward, Humble would focus its efforts only on the design and construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline.”
It’s unlikely anyone under the age of 60 other than historians, select professionals and mariners has ever heard of the Manhattan. But during her arctic voyage in 1969, she was the most famous and largest non-military ship operating in the world. Newspapers, magazines and electronic media around the globe heralded her name on an almost daily basis, endowing her with household familiarity.
Now, some four decades later, the Manhattan has ignominiously ended her checkered existence, far from her glory days, on a scrap heap somewhere near Hong Kong. “What is certain,” Prof. Coen regretfully notes, “is that no part of the first commercial vessel to complete the Northwest Passage was saved for its historical value.
“The ship that had survived the arctic ice pack and was once the most famous vessel in the world finally went the way of countless others that sailed the Northwest Passage - crushed and dismantled and ultimately lost to history.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from North Dakota, Prof. Coen came to Alaska in 1995 where he earned degrees in English and Northern Studies from The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and where he now teaches Sociology and Political Science as an adjunct professor. He‘s a rural Energy Specialist the the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and served as climate change policy analyst for the late U.S. Senator Te d Stevens and the Saenate Commerce Commitee. He is president of the Alaska Historical Society. He may be reached at racoen@alaska.edu.
Reviewed by JOE E. LaROCCA
(This review originally appeared in the Anchorage Daily News)
A University of Alaska scholar at Fairbanks has plucked a rare gem from the dust bin of Alaska’s relatively brief but colorful petroleum history and endowed it with a fresh voice that speaks to a new generation of adherents largely unaware of its historic genesis.
In his new book, Ross Coen, a university professor, revisits the legendary ice-breaking supership’s remarkable experimental journey more than 40 years ago from New York Harbor through the ice-choked waters of the Canadian arctic archipelago’s mythic Northwest Passage: Its destination, Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska’s then-newly discovered North Slope oilfields.
(Full disclosure: As one of the few survivors who sailed aboard the Manhattan during part of her spectacular trip in 1969 through the dazzling labryrinth of arctic ice, I was interviewed by Professor Coen online during research on his book. He has favorably cited some of my Alaska writings).
The story of the SS Manhattan has been told in various contexts over the years, most notably in a book published in 1970 by New York Times Reporter William D. Smith, “Northwest Passage: The Historic Voyage of the SS Manhattan.” Smith, flaunting the Times’ prestigious clout, was the only reporter allowed to cover the ship’s entire voyage round trip. I was there covering for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Prof. Coen and Smith have penned powerful and nuanced descriptions of the supership’s tumultuous east and west voyages through the Passage from totally different perspectives: Prof. Coen, from exhaustive research into the ship’s voluminous paper trail and insightful interviews of some of the surviving crew members and officers, an exemplar of investigative inquiry; Reporter Smith, from his perceptive, often emotional/aesthetic personal observations aboard ship during his unprecedented experience. Both deserve a full reading.
Prof. Coen readily acknowledges that “Bill Smith’s book is a superb contemporary account of the voyage,” but notes that his own “has the advantage of coming 40 years later when I could place these events in an historical context.”
That’s an understatement. Prof. Coen’s book is arguably the most important book written by an Alaska author on any subject. It’s a must read for anyone dealing with or engaged in the far-reaching implications of the overarching state, national and international issues it explores. These include conflicting claims of governance of the Northwest passage waters and their disputed status, and growing concerns over the creeping pollution of global oceans by petroleum products.
Prof. Coen’s meticulously researched book ventures well beyond the adventurous Manhattan narrative to explore in depth many of the geopolitical public and corporate policy issues it aroused which broadened the context immeasurably.
He observes, for example, that as part of its legacy, the Manhattan’s voyage “provoked intense reaction in Canada with regard to environmental protection, economic security, maritime safety regulation, and ultimately the very question of who owns the Northwest Passage.” These are wrenching geopolitical issues which the passage of time and complicated emerging national and international legalities have intensified.
Prof. Coen notes that “Humble Oil did not request advance permission from the Canadian government before sending its tanker north. Neither did the U.S. Coast Guard in the case of its (cutter) Northwind (to escort the tanker)…nor the U.S State Department.”
For the U.S. “To formally ask for permission,” Prof Coen writes, “would be to acknowledge that the waters of the Northwest Passage indeed fell under Canadian jurisdiction.” While conceding that the scores of archipelagic islands scattered throughout the Canadian portion of the Passage belong to Canada, Prof. Coen notes, “American officials instead believed the route qualified as an international waterway” open to all nations.
According to Prof. Coen, the U.S. has based its position in part on a ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1949 which held that a strait qualifies as international when it connects two high seas (i.e., the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans0, and which falls outside the jurisdiction of adjacent states, although Canada disputes this claim.
When the prospective voyage was first announced in 1968, then-Canada Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau “stated his intent to assert ‘stewardship, if not sovereignty’ over the passage.” His “soft language” Prof. Coen writes, angered some Canadians “who desired a firm stance on the issue and possibly a showdown with what they perceived as the arrogant neighbor to the south.”
But, according to Prof. Coen, Trudeau’s secretary of external affairs, Mitchell Sharp, “advised restraint.” ‘This is not a time for wide-ranging assertions of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic made without regard to the international political and legal considerations (and) there is no necessity for us to make sweeping assertions to reinforce our position,’ Sharp declaimed. ‘That might satisfy our ego but would not add a whit to the international acceptability of our position’.”
Nevertheless, Prof. Coen writes, these comments “belied a firm resolve to assert functional authority over the Canadian Arctic by assuming environmental stewardship of its waters.”
By unilaterally assigning Canada’s Coast Guard ship, the John H. MacDonald to escort the Manhattan, a move the Manhattan’s officers heartily welcomed, Canada “signalled its intent to pursue an overall strategy of cooperation designed to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S.,” Prof. Coen writes, “and allow time to develop an internationally defensible plan for achieving de facto control” over the Northwest Passage within her sovereign sphere.
“While the John A. MacDonald had been assigned to the expedition in part to wave the Canadian flag,” Prof Coen writes, she steadfastly “would guide the supertanker through the passage, repeatedly rescue her from brutal ice conditions and generally prove indispensible to the entire mission” at times even at her own peril.
The Manhattan’s voyage was launched in August, 1969 to test the operational and economic feasibility of shipping North Slope crude oil from Alaska’s Arctic Ocean shore eastward to refineries and markets on the U.S. East Coast and beyond. Another alternative: pumping it through the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline, if and when completed, to the port city of Valdez on Alaska’s south coast for transshipment by ocean tankers to U.S. refineries on the West Coast, Gulf of Mexico coast and the Bahamas.
At the outset, proponents of the ocean-only option prefigured by the Manhattan voyage claimed the oil could be delivered by tankers larger and more powerful than the Manhattan much more cheaply to markets on the East Coast, where it would be needed, than to the West Coast, where it wouldn’t - where, indeed, there would be a projected half-millon barrel per day glut of oil once North Slope crude came onstream.
While that calculation may have been valid at the time it was rendered, the economics of both alternatives changed drastically by the time both projects were completed, even reversing the logistics in favor of the pipeline, whose completion was ultimately delayed nearly a decade after the Manhattan’s voyage.
The $52 million Manhattan project was the brainchild of a Humble Oil/Standard Oil of New Jersey transport executive, Stanley B. Haas, now deceased. Humble was concurrently one of three ranking proponents of the proposed trans Alaska oil pipeline. Haas sold the maritime project to his company’s Board, contending that Humble’s share of the then-estimated ten billion barrels-plus of recoverable oil which underlay the Prudhoe Bay oilfields would justify two divergent transport streams serving discrete market venues.
After an extended period of corporate gestation through the 1960s, the decision was taken in late 1968 to proceed with plans for a voyage shove-off by mid-1969. Prof. Coen’s incisive account of the convoluted decisional process is just one of numerous fascinating aspects of his book, remarkable for the vivid color and quality of his writing, as well as the depth, detail and precision of his research.
Haas’ first chore was to find or have built a suitable ship with configurations which would enable her to sail through the Northwest Passage year-round.
Humble, Prof. Coen writes, initially “proposed to build an ice-breaking tanker weighing 250,000 deadweight tons with an engine room capable of 100,000 horsepower…the largest of its kind in history. If this test vessel of an arctic transportation system demonstrated both technical and economic feasibility, Humble would follow with an entire fleet of tankers of comparable size and power,” he writes.
Then reality intruded with the realization that no such ship could possibly be built in time for the scheduled voyage date the following summer, timed to coincide with the first prospective flow of oil from Alaska’s new world-class North Slope oilfields, and a couple years before the then-expected completion of the alternative transport system, the trans Alaska oil pipeline.
The search began for an existing ship “that resembled (the hypothetical ship’s design and could be quickly renovated for the journey.” That led to the Manhattan, constructed in 1962. “Straight off the rack, “ Prof. Coen writes, “the Manhattan already possessed many characteristics of a good icebreaker” - extreme size (longer than three football fields; tonnage (115,000 deadweight tons) and power (100,000 horsepower ahead, 40,000 hp astern).
He tells a fascinating tale of how the Manhattan came to be financed and built - a highly unlikely ship owner’s investment - too lengthy to relate here. The owner, Seatrain, leased her for two years to Humble, which began a unique and all-encompassing whirlwind six-month modification program no single U.S. shipbuilder could handle alone.
Humble docked the ship at Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pa, where she was cut into four sections, with the bow and the stern remaining in Chester; a new ice-breaking bow to be constructed in Maine; the after- bow towed to Newport News in Virginia, and the midship section towed to a Mobile, Alabama shipyard. “Haas joked at the time that the Manhattan was truly the longest ship in the world, stretching from Pennsylvania to Alabama,” Prof. Coen writes.
“The most innovative and visually distinctive renovation to the tanker,” he notes, “was its brand new ice-breaking bow.” Constructed at the Bath, Maine Iron Works, “the bow was made of steel capable of withstanding nine hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, and featured a sharp 18-degree curve calculated to allow the hull to ride atop the ice…the sheer bulk of the vessel” would cause a “tensile failure and a clean split in the ice sheet” and toss small-house-sized chunks of ice cavalierly aside.
Inevitable delays in shipwork led to postponement of completion dates from early June, 1969 to July 15, then end of the month, then August 2, when the ship was at last ready for sea trials. One goal forfeited by the delays was to sail the ship into the arctic ice pack at its peak strength in late Spring and early summer to challenge the Manhattan’s ultimate toughness and her officers’ resolve. But that could be compensated for by running more tests through the ice pack the following Spring of 1970, which ultimately ensued.
Despite serious performance deficiencies at sea trials, the Manhattan was set to begin her illustrious voyage from the Sun Shipworks at Chester, PA on August 26 , with brief celebratory stops at New York and Halifax, Canada.
Eleven weeks later, in the early morning hours of Sept, 15, Humble issued a press release stating that “The most talked-about ship in the world today, the SS Manhattan, slipped quietly into the frigid waters of Amundsen Gulf late last night and became the first commercial vessel in history ever to traverse the Northwest Passage.”
Humble “stated its belief,” Prof, Coen wrote, “that the Manhattan had proven the feasibility of using such tankers in the Arctic, yet the Alaska pipeline now appeared to have an economic edge.” On Oct. 21, 1970, Humble announced “that it was suspending its icebreaking tanker project, Prof. Coen writes. “From this point forward, Humble would focus its efforts only on the design and construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline.”
It’s unlikely anyone under the age of 60 other than historians, select professionals and mariners has ever heard of the Manhattan. But during her arctic voyage in 1969, she was the most famous and largest non-military ship operating in the world. Newspapers, magazines and electronic media around the globe heralded her name on an almost daily basis, endowing her with household familiarity.
Now, some four decades later, the Manhattan has ignominiously ended her checkered existence, far from her glory days, on a scrap heap somewhere near Hong Kong. “What is certain,” Prof. Coen regretfully notes, “is that no part of the first commercial vessel to complete the Northwest Passage was saved for its historical value.
“The ship that had survived the arctic ice pack and was once the most famous vessel in the world finally went the way of countless others that sailed the Northwest Passage - crushed and dismantled and ultimately lost to history.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from North Dakota, Prof. Coen came to Alaska in 1995 where he earned degrees in English and Northern Studies from The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and where he now teaches Sociology and Political Science as an adjunct professor. He‘s a rural Energy Specialist the the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and served as climate change policy analyst for the late U.S. Senator Te d Stevens and the Saenate Commerce Commitee. He is president of the Alaska Historical Society. He may be reached at racoen@alaska.edu.
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