Ned's Pipeline Trek Page

The ravens seemed surprised this morning. A pair of the ruffled black birds croaked and paced for an hour after seeing a human in the Sagwon flight control tower.

I slept in here---a box of a room littered with fiberglass insulation, old soda cans, and a lone sweat sock---in a failed attempt to dry my wet things. The two-story control tower overlooks the ruins of Sagwon, an old oil exploration camp. From poking around, I gather that Interior Airways used to do business here; the room is big enough to a lot of people at once, and the buildings were once comfortable---the living quarters had forced-air heating and a different color paint scheme for each room.

The history is there for me to dig up later. Sagwon is now a cold, musty, dead place, a handful of ragged buildings surrounded by a shotgun pattern of 55-gallon drums on tundra.

Now, I sit in a rusted chair, with chilled feet and hands, to tap out my last column before arriving at Prudhoe Bay. It's a melancholy occasion. Even though the weather has kept Jane and I wet and cold ever since we topped Atigun Pass about 100 miles ago, I will surely miss a life where each turn delivers something unexpected, often beautiful. Right now, for example, I hear a peregrine falcon's worrisome sceetch through an open control tower window. The falcon, perched on the Sagwon Bluffs across the Sagavanirktok River, hasn't yet flown to its winter home in South America or wherever. That's somehow comforting.

I'll also miss all this great time with Jane, who is sleeping on her mat beside me after getting up to whine at the call of a ground squirrel a few minutes ago. Last night, I took her picture at pipeline milepost 66. I also took her picture a few months ago at mile 666. She's still enjoying this collarless world of following every squirrel, ptarmigan, or duck smell that intersects her brown bear nose. I still enjoy watching her. She never understood what I was walking her into on May 4, but she has adapted beautifully, with not so much as a sore pad.

Jane's health is one of the many things I've been thankful for during the past four months. I've met many Alaskans and others who have enriched this journey. Just yesterday afternoon, Mike Owens and Rich Klinnert of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. met me at the river with an airboat. They gave Jane and me a noisy ride over the Sagavanirktok River so we could spend the night here. They also brought along five brown paper bags of food---including a raw steak---for me, and some left-over prime rib for Jane. Although I was only able to pack some chocolate chip cookies and a roast beef sandwich, Jane erased the prime rib chunks as fast as I could hand them to her.

Mike and Rich will again ferry me across the river in a few hours as I continue to follow the pipeline's finite path. Before then, I'll make breakfast here in the control tower and then say goodbye to Sagwon, one of the hundreds of new images residing in my brain because of this trip. The home stretch beckons, with the promise of headwind.

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