Ned's Pipeline Trek Page

I need a statistician, a math major, someone who knows numbers.

You might think the only numbers I think of out here are the big black ones on the orange signs that tell me how many miles are left to Prudhoe Bay, but I've experienced some things that have made me wonder about probability. I've bumped into four people along the trail that have made me think I've had way more than my share of coincidence.

It started almost a month ago, after I hacked through the brush to make it to the entrance of Pump Station 12. There, I tethered Jane to a chain-link fence and wondered if there would be someone in the security station who might let me use a phone. Pungent and self-conscious, I opened the door to the security station to see a tanned, mustached man in the blue uniform of Ahtna AGA, a company that contracts to Alyeska.

My eye darted to his name tag. I saw "Wymore."

"Are you Dallas?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

Dallas Wymore is the only Alyeska security guard I knew by name. Months earlier, when I was trying to make the trip a reality, Wymore's name was mentioned as someone who had walked much of the above-ground portions of the pipe as part of his security duties. I called the Alyeska switchboard and they patched me to Dallas Wymore.

He talked with me for 45 minutes, telling me what he had encountered on the trail, how he dealt with bears (tossing M-80 firecrackers their way seemed to work), and what part of the trail he liked most (Top of the World, in the Alaska Range). His was an encouraging voice, a rarity at the time.

At Pump Station 12, Dallas let me use his office to get my columns back to the Geophysical Institute. Because I had computer problems, I was there two hours. No sweat. When Dallas finally had to leave, he shook my hand and wished me a safe trip.

Cosmic meeting number two happened at Paxson Lodge. There, my brother Drew, my friend John Arntz, and I had just sat down in front of the picture windows for dinner. Drew was to hike with me the next few weeks and John was there to get Drew launched.

Just as we tackled our meals, we noticed a white Mercedes sedan pull up. Out stepped Karen Kolivosky, Sheila Romero, and Liisa (no typo here it's Fiinish) Penrose.

Other than my girlfriend Clara, who visited New York last year, Drew knows just one person in Alaska: Karen Kolivosky. Karen was my partner for five years, and she knows Drew quite well from several trips she took with me to visit my family in New York.

I couldn't believe she was walking into the lodge. She and the other two women had just been halibut fishing in Valdez and had debated whether to stop in Paxson Lodge for a soda on the drive back to Fairbanks.

Drew, who was facing the women, finally caught Karen's eye.

"Aren't you going to say hi, Karen?"

She was shocked and pleased to recognize Drew, who now shaves his head bald but was a redhead the last time Karen saw him. We had a quick reunion, took some pictures, and the women gave us a few chunks of Sheila's 70-pound halibut.

As they pulled away and we got back to sorting gear, I asked Drew and John what they thought the odds of meeting Karen were.

"Fifty-fifty," Drew joked.

Incredible meeting number three took place on the trail. Drew, Jane and I had just crossed a creek in Isabel Valley in the Alaska Range, very close to the Richardson monument pulloff on the Richardson Highway. As Drew and I sat there waiting for our feet to dry, a truck pulled up on the road that leads to the Gulkana Glacier.

Out stepped a small man in leather boots, wearing a Bureau of Land Management baseball cap and uniform.

"Hello, Ned. I'm Stan Bronczyk."

Wow. Before I could do this hike, I needed to get a permit from BLM and the State Department of Natural Resources. Stan was the helpful person at the Joint Pipeline Office in Anchorage who quickly issued it to me. He just happened to be working in Isabel Valley as we were hiking through. Stan waded through the knee-deep creek to reach us, not even wincing as cold water topped his boots and soaked his socks. He shook my hand and took a picture of Jane and I. I snapped his picture using the glacier as a background. He stepped through the creek again and drove away. As he did, I thought of the letter in my backpack from the Joint Pipeline Office, the letter in which Stan and his coworkers wished me "a very successful trip."

The most recent unlikely encounter happened a few days ago. Drew and I hiked to a pipeline access road where he and John stashed my truck 10 days earlier. Drew drove my truck down from Fairbanks, and in a few days, when he was done hiking with me, he would drive it back.

At that moment, we hung out at the truck, which was parked behind an access gate near the pipeline. Drew listened to King's X on his Discman as I read old copies of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that were on the floor. Suddenly, Drew spoke.

"Ned, Don's here."

Don Cole lives and works at the Trims Department of Transportation Maintenance Station in the Alaska Range. There, Drew and I picked up a food drop, showered, did laundry, and enjoyed dinner with Cole and his wife, Donna, and daughters Violet and Flower.

Don had driven the pipeline access road to leave me a note from the women at the Geophysical Institute Information Office in Fairbanks. They thought part of a column I sent from Trims got chopped off, and wanted me to fax the column again.

Don didn't know Drew had parked the truck there. He certainly didn't expect to see us.

I used Don's cellular phone to call Fairbanks and confirm that my column wasn't chopped, it was just short and ended abruptly. I promised to insert "-30-," the journalistic equivalent of "the end," at the close of future columns. After I hung up, Don gazed over at me with his expose-every-tooth smile. We talked for a while, until the digital clock on his dashboard read "5:30." It was time for him to get back to Trims.

I mused at the miniscule chance of him finding us. He'd thought about it too, and his statement summed up my thoughts on all these unlikely appearances of people I know.

"The odds are just damn-near zero," he said.

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