Ned's Pipeline Trek Page

It's tough to walk away from Valdez. Three days after I started my trek along the pipeline corridor, I found myself with wet feet and slippery raingear, standing at the road sign that alerted incoming drivers they were entering Valdez. Walking next to the buried trans-Alaska pipeline, I had hiked more than 20 miles with a shoulder-biting backpack just to reach the Valdez city limits.

After two days of glorious weather, Valdez had rapidly reverted to the city I remembered from the oil spill days of 1989, when steady rain lulled me to sleep in the back of my camper shell every night as I waited for an eventual opportunity to become an oil recovery technician.

This time, Valdez lured me to another crude-oil related opportunity--a hike across Alaska using the pipeline right-of-way as my disjointed path. After months of permission-gathering from Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Natural Resources, and Native corporations (Ahtna and Chugach), the time came.

As I officially departed Valdez, home of the "northernmost ice-free port," I hiked the Richardson Highway with the leash of my dog Jane in one hand and a stainless-steel barreled shotgun in the other. Water was dripping from both. I walked the highway because it featured a bridge over the Lowe River, which the pipeline dove under.

Just then, I heard a shout.

"Ned!"

I looked down the road to see Mike Mathers, a Fairbanks Daily News-Miner photographer, carrying an umbrella large enough to keep an elephant dry. Mathers was on assignment to follow me for a few days. Jane was happy to see him. So was I.

Mike hiked with me back to a pipeline access road. Once on the pipeline right-of-way, I found a dry rectangle of ground beneath a cottonwood tree and pitched my tent. Mike gave me a banana and Jane some bread before he returned to Valdez. He would join me in the morning as I attempted to cross Thompson Pass, the 2,678-foot gateway through the Chugach Range.

My trip had started at sea level two days before. While my friend John Arntz and my girlfriend Clara Jodwalis stashed Clara's car at a pipeline access road, I had a moment alone to contemplate the walk I was about to attempt. Sitting on Allison Point, below which I've felt the pull of a few silver salmon, I looked out to Port Valdez. On a cloudless day, an oil tanker slowly sunk deeper into salt water with the weight of Prudhoe Bay crude oil. I whiffed the odor of hydrocarbons extracted from the earth 800 miles away. While it took the oil about 5.6 days to reach the Valdez terminal, I expected a walking journey against the flow of oil to use 125 of my days, an entire summer. With Jane wagging beside me, I walked down to a triangular rock that sat in the salt water of Port Valdez. I dipped my hand and tasted a tiny pool of Pacific Ocean.

At about noon of that day, May 4, Clara, Jane, and I took a step away from the fence surrounding the marine oil terminal. Buried below us, under yellow grass and swelled-bud whips of alder, was mile 800 of the trans-Alaska pipeline.

John preserved the moment with an old camera. He then left Clara, Jane, and I to continue alone. Clara shared about the first 15 miles with me, then headed back to Fairbanks to slay the dragon of her doctoral thesis.

After walking three rolling, spectacular miles, we had our first bear encounter. Clara and I were walking along silently avoiding snow patches and drinking in the sharp peaks of the Chugach Mountains against blue sky, when I noticed Jane wasn't moving. A motionless Jane on a walk is almost as unusual as an appetite-less Jane at lunch time--it just doesn't happen. After a few seconds, a black bear busted out of the alders 50 feet ahead of Jane and ran for the deep darkness of Sitka spruce forest.

I chambered a shotgun shell as we walked past, both relieved the bear wanted no more from us than we did from it. "You know, it was really quite beautiful," Clara said of the ink-black ball of bear. Then she added a qualifier, "from a distance."

After a few more miles, we saw another black bear. It was munching the greenery that sprouted on the pipeline about one-half mile ahead of us. We watched the bear approach despite our yells, hand motions, and a stiff breeze carrying the scent of our second-day polypropylene toward the bear.

At perhaps 300 yards from the bear, we stopped. The black ball moved closer.

"Hey!" I yelled, as loud as I ever have.

In a few seconds, as my sound waves reached the bear, its head popped up as if it had been stung by a bee. The bear retreated to the woods. Clara and I walked through the bear zone with fingers on safeties--mine on the shotgun and hers on the plastic clip of her pepper spray. Jane was oblivious but obedient.

Black bears weren't the only wildlife Clara and I encountered. As we camped on the peak of a hill near pipeline mile 792, Clara was visited by a hummingbird. Thumb-sized and ruby red, we soon heard the tiny creatures zooming through the undergrowth of mountain hemlocks where we camped. Like little torpedoes, the hummingbirds zipped around the forest, occasionally pausing on a branch to belt out a four-note song that could only be duplicated on a kazoo.

The steep climb into Keystone Canyon was where Clara and I said goodbye, for virtually the whole summer. In walking away from her, I was walking away from my favorite hiking companion, one who knows what little shoots of vegetation are good to eat, one who knows it's OK to be silent. I was also walking away from the known, into the unpredictability of Alaska.

As we said goodbye, I did something I wouldn't have predicted. I cried into Clara's pile-coated shoulder.

With Jane following, I turned and walked up a steep hill that took half an hour to summit. When I reached the top of Keystone Canyon, I looked back to see Clara, now a tiny stick figure walking back to her car.

Hiking on the narrow lip of Keystone Canyon, I punched through knee-deep snow and marveled at the view from above Horsetail Falls.

On the north side of the canyon, I descended the steep, snowy switchback of the pipeline access road rather than follow the pipeline's playground-slide plunge to the Lowe River. Looking ahead, I also caught a glimpse of the pipeline's near-vertical path to Thompson Pass.

Harlow Robinson, my friend who formerly worked for Alyeska, once hiked up Thompson Pass via the pipeline's path. He warned me about it days ago when I called him from Valdez: "We were wondering if we'd need to hire rock climbers to survey the pass," he said, adding that he succeeded without roping up. "It was do-able, but it was pretty hairy."

From a distance of four miles, I saw that the pipeline's Thompson Pass ascent had three distinct sections--a steep ramp of grass, a wall of what looked to be solid rock, and the snow-covered top portion, which reminded me of the 99-meter ski jump platform at Lake Placid.

"No way," I thought. Jane and I would hike the highway, even though that crooked-finger shaped route added about four miles to our day. Decision made.

As we approached the base of the pass, a black truck came toward Jane and I. We stepped aside so it could pass, but the driver pulled over the side of the pipeline work road and stepped out.

"You the guy hiking the pipeline?" he said.

Mike Maze shook my hand. He lives right off the pipeline a quarter mile back, he said. He was one of the people who used to feel strange seismic booms in the area caused by oil in the pipeline racing down from the pass and slamming into oil at the bottom, a problem Alyeska corrected by increasing the amount of oil in the pipeline.

Maze smoked a cigarette while we discussed Thompson Pass. He said the pipeline route was hikable. I headed on, now seriously thinking of hiking straight up despite my earlier decision.

Mike Mathers, the photographer, tempted me further. He would drive to the top, stand by a giant power-line tripod, and wave his arms to signal if the snow up top was spotty enough to walk around.

As Mathers drove around the hairpin highway route, I tightened my boot laces and patted Jane's head. We headed up the bottom third of the pass, the grassy section.

After puffing to the first bench, I looked up and saw a tiny Mike Mathers waving his arms. Jane and I climbed to the rocky section, where the pipeline was covered by loose shale. I tried to dig my foot in the slope and sent a mini avalanche toward Jane. This wouldn't work. I retreated.

Back at the first bench I had seen a path cut through the alders, heading east. I followed it. Jane followed me. Mathers descended to the second ridge, and I eventually found a path through the snow to join him.

From there, we picked our way through alpine, treeless tundra to the summit of the pass. Jane was all over the place, looking for the source of every marmot's whistle. She was smiling. Soon, Mathers and I reached the pipeline access road where he parked. We exchanged a high five. With a clear, panoramic view of sunlit Chugach peaks that glowed like polished chrome, I looked back to where I started the day. It took me six hours to travel two miles.

With the sky amazingly cloudless, I quickly found a camping spot. I pulled my tarp over a glacier-scarred rock and tacked the tarp down with more rocks, making a cubby for Jane and I to sleep in. Then I pulled out every item of clothing from my backpack and put it on.

After a night so still the tarp never flapped, Mathers joined me on a snowshoe hike the next morning. A brilliant sun made walking the pipeline like traversing a glacier.

A deep, slushy creek at Worthington Glacier forced us to the highway, where Jane and I walked a few miles before dropping to a river bed that led to our destination, Tsaina Lodge, which is a high-energy base for skiers and snowboarders who use helicopters as chairlifts to Chugach peaks.

I am now in my sleeping bag, camped one-half mile north of Tsaina Lodge. Rain sprinkles my tarp. Jane is curled into a sleeping ball at my knee. Soon, I'll crawl out of my warm sack, pull out my raingear, and hike down to the lodge, where I'll send my first fax with this Hewlett Packard palmtop computer, a generous loan from Computerland in Fairbanks.

After the fax, I'll rearrange my food drop, try to straighten the supporting pins on my backpack, and wait for my friend John Arntz to arrive. After his Subaru clicks its sewing-machine rhythm from Fairbanks to Tsaina Lodge, John will join me for the next 40 miles.

I'm hoping to make good time with John, but I don't want to become obsessed with mileage on this journey. This isn't a race. It's an opportunity.

Go on to Week 2

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