In this episode of Colville Unscripted, Jason sits down with Colville Inc. owner Mark Helmericks to talk about life growing up on the North Slope, flying bush planes with his father, and helping pioneer the logistics that now power Alaska’s oil industry.
Show Notes:
Colville River Name Correction:
“The Colville River was named by the Franklin Expedition.” Mostly correct, but it was named by Captain Frederick Beechey, sailing in support of Franklin. Beechey came by ship from the West, while Franklin journeyed along the north coast from Canada to the East. Beechey's ship could not get past Point Barrow, so he sent a small boat further east under the command of Lt Thomas Elson, who discovered the Colville River (named for a Hudson's Bay governor) and continued past, but was forced to turn back with the onset of freeze up without finding Franklin. Franklin made it past Prudhoe Bay and sent a small scouting party west before turning back at Return Reef, which coincidently was just offshore from where my dad built his sod house in 1945. Beechey and Franklin missed each other by only days, some think less than 24 hours, in what is considered one of the great coincidences in Arctic exploration, considering the overall expedition took 3 years (1825-27).
Nuke Story:
One note on the plan to use nukes to create a harbor in western Alaska: The government name was Project Chariot, and the book, by Dan O'Neill, is titled "The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement". I also got the number of bombs a bit exaggerated: it was 5, not 7, with three smaller ones to blow the channel, and two big ones for the harbor. The location is about 50 miles south of the Corwin Mine.
