I arrived in Deadhorse on April 22nd 2017, over the next week or so I did my best to settle in. I was assigned to my permanent room in West Wing which was a separate building from where the crew stayed and where the kitchen was. It would be just the staff until the end of May when the tours began, so it was pretty quiet in that building.
My room was nothing fancy, there were 2 twin sized beds with a couple of drawers underneath, 2 small closets and a desk in front of the window. Just enough to feel at home, it was nice to have my own little corner to escape.
The bathroom was down the hall, it had 1 tiny shower and 2 toilets, I guess they didn’t get a lot of female guests. The bathroom was a little run down and outdated not to mention that it constantly smelled.
The amenities were humble to say the least, but it was a work camp after all not a luxury resort. Hell it wasn’t even a vacation spot!
May
Even though it was the beginning of May you would never know it by looking outside. To me May was warm and sunny, the end of spring and the beginning of summer. That’s not the case in Deadhorse. It was very much winter in May.
Everywhere I looked there were mounds of snow and storms were fairly regular. The arctic ocean was completely frozen over making the ice roads a viable option for travel. The ice roads are still commonly used to get to isolated villages like Barrow.
May 4th
On may 4th we had our first “celebrity” staying with us. Ketil Reitan and his son, Martin spent 2 nights with us. Ketil is a Norwegian dog musher who now calls Kaktovik, Alaska home. He has participated in races all over the world including the Iditarod. He came in 14th in the 2018 Iditarod. Both of them were very nice but not overly friendly. They did however let us pet and hang out with the dogs who were incredibly friendly.
When they were getting ready to leave they let us come watch them, to see them interacting with the dogs you could tell they loved and cared for each other. You could sense a very high level of respect on both ends, he was their master but those dogs were his life. He gave each dog affection as he dressed and readied them.
The dogs could barely contain their excitement, this is what they were trained for and it was evident that they were chomping at the bit to get back to their jobs.
Ketil and Martin lived in a very small village, Kaktovick, with the rest of their family. They were going to mush across the frozen Arctic Ocean to get there, they said it would take a couple of days, 2 or 3 depending on the weather. I know they had a lot of gear but I couldn’t imagine spending one night out in the Arctic let alone several. With temperatures in the single digits on a good day, it’s unbearable to think how cold a night on the ice would be.
May 17th
After my first sighting of the Muskox I had talked to the crew guys at work about it, they of course had seen them plenty of times before and weren’t very impressed with my sighting. A few weeks later on the 17th when RJ, a man in his 50s with the thickest gruffest Montana accent that I have ever heard, came back from work he told me there was a whole heard of Muskox right down the road!
I was practically jumping for joy I was so excited. That night I hopped in a van and headed down the road, and just like RJ said there was a huge heard of 30 or so Muskox in the middle of the road! They even had tiny little baby Muskox with them!! They were so impossibly cute. They were pretty much always underfoot of momma so it was hard to get a photo of them but they basically looked like small calves covered in fur.
While watching the roadblock of Muskox a Grizzly Bear came poking around! My first Grizzly Bear sighting!! The Grizzly was stalking the heard like a cat would stalk a mouse. I didn’t entirely want to see the Grizzly kill one but it was fascinating to watch the interaction.
When the bear got close enough the Muskox formed a circle with the babies in the middle. Their powerful horns rimming the outside of the circle. When the bear got too close for comfort one of the males would charge just enough to scare the bear off. It was pretty crazy to see the Grizzly Bear a foot away from them but making no attempts to take one down. The odds were not in the bears favor and he knew it. The grizzly hung around for close to an hour watching and waiting but making no moves.
May 21st
The sun has officially stopped setting which is making it more and more challenging for me to sleep. The tours are starting any day now which is exciting. It’ll be great to see some new faces. The rest of the summer crew has also arrived. Maurice is camp support, Jamie is the dinner cook, Charlie is the lunch cook and Courtney is the housekeeper. Yay another girl!
Everyone has their own quirks and I anticipated some personality conflicts but hopefully we can keep the drama to a minimum.
Dating
As you already know I broke my no dating rule pretty quickly. Since then I had been seeing this guy named Tyler. He was super sweet and ridiculously cute. We were both a little bored with working day in and day out so once or twice a week we would meet up and drive around. We always saw a lot of wildlife on those drives.
We slept together a few dates in and thankfully we were quite compatible in the bedroom as well. The more I got to know him the closer I became to having feelings for him like the idiot that I am. It didn’t help that he was the one person I felt like I could really talk to up there.
One night we got to talking and as it turns out he was just divorced as in weeks ago, paperwork hadn’t even officially gone through. Oh fuck my life, of course, this is the guy I started to catch feelings for. If he’s emotionally unavailable it’s just about guaranteed that I’ll be into him!
