Christmas In The Bush
10:00PM; December 25, 2013. Bush camp - North West Territories, Canada. -24C; heavy cloud cover; snowing; no starlight or moonlight. Sitting in the office shack crunching numbers.
The crews that did the dayshift 12s on the rigs are sleeping off the turkey dinner and the nightshift crews are three hours into their 12 hour shifts on the rigs, packing turkey sandwiches for their lunches.
The cook did yeoman service providing us with a solid traditional turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts, carrots, and parsnips. He made old fashioned Christmas pudding with a great hard sauce (I relented and let him add rum to the hard sauce). Cook talked me into rigging deep friers for these turkeys. I was puzzled about this when he asked me but I quickly devised a couple of deep friers from wide diameter pipe, propane bottles and burners 'borrowed' from hot air blowers on one of the rigs. Deep fried turkey was new to me. I recommend it if you haven't tried it. Lovely moist turkey meat.
Christmas at an exploration camp in the bush - no family, no gifts, no booze, no entertainment; just work, sleep, food, and the same f-bomb laced conversations with my guys.
I hope that my fellow tusclers did much better than this for their Christmases.
Merry Christmas. Joyeux Noel.
The crews that did the dayshift 12s on the rigs are sleeping off the turkey dinner and the nightshift crews are three hours into their 12 hour shifts on the rigs, packing turkey sandwiches for their lunches.
The cook did yeoman service providing us with a solid traditional turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts, carrots, and parsnips. He made old fashioned Christmas pudding with a great hard sauce (I relented and let him add rum to the hard sauce). Cook talked me into rigging deep friers for these turkeys. I was puzzled about this when he asked me but I quickly devised a couple of deep friers from wide diameter pipe, propane bottles and burners 'borrowed' from hot air blowers on one of the rigs. Deep fried turkey was new to me. I recommend it if you haven't tried it. Lovely moist turkey meat.
Christmas at an exploration camp in the bush - no family, no gifts, no booze, no entertainment; just work, sleep, food, and the same f-bomb laced conversations with my guys.
I hope that my fellow tusclers did much better than this for their Christmases.
Merry Christmas. Joyeux Noel.
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18 comments
I've had the deep fried turkey injected with Cajun spices. I prefer the traditional oven roasted. I did a 6lb prime rib for my family. Nice family get together.
On Saturday it's back to the business of strip clubbing. :)
Are you getting Internet service via satellite?
I know someone who's an administrator for a mining company in Nunavut. She doesn't use her real name on facebook to stay under the radar of the extremist tree huggers. Do you have problems like that?
This is an exploration play for nat gas and the nat gas condensates via conventional drilling with no fracing. No indications of oil found yet and none expected to be found. Winter is the prime drilling season because of the muskeg. Muskeg is frozen solid and materiel can be trucked to the site. In summer this area is a swamp floating on the perma frost. Supplies must be flown into camp at horrendous cost. That is why the rigs go hell-bent-for-leather 24/7 from freeze-up to break-up. Darkness is no problem. There are generators for each individual rig and several for the services needed in camp. Yes, internet service is via satellite. My company is responsible for all infrastructure to support the camp - road, air strip, water, power, sewage. There is no problem with environmental wackos up here. Most all of the indigenous peoples in NWT live along the rivers or along the coasts. The nearest population centre is approx. 100km away - on an island where the Liard runs into the Mackenzie. The area around the exploration camp is not prime wild life country for traditional trappers. Muskeg does not support large populations of fur bearing animals. Bird life and water fowl exist in the millions, perhaps billions. This is gourmet central for insectivores - summer finds the muskeg abuzz with trillions of mosquitos, horse flies, black flies, gnats, and the dreaded noseeums. Not so many 100s of kilometres from here is the summer breeding site for the world's largest (and only) wild breeding population of whooping cranes.
Smug remarks aside: May your socks stay warm and dry, may your heat stay on, may your work produce joy and profit and may the new year bring warm dances, hot ladies and joy filled evenings.
An aunt of mine married this dude from a freako family. He was a dick and his sister was a tree hugger from a very extremist greenpeace offshoot. I had the unfortunate experience of meeting her once at a family dinner. Her father had retired from the Navy, and at that time I was home on leave from the Navy so we were talking shop. She butt into the convo and said how can I live with myself killing babies and innocent whales, dolphins, plankton and anything else she could think of. I told her I don't kill anything but I'd have no problem pushing the button that launched a torpedo into her boat full of treehuggers and letting Davey Jones deal with her. Her dad actually laughed at that. She went away. lol
Thanks for the interesting look into Christmas at an exploration site. As I write this [about 4PM CST] it is a sunny,'balmy' +7C outside and the snow + ice from last weekend's storm is melting. Far better than your -11F [according to my trusty 'droid app] yesterday.
You asked if I have ever been confronted by militant environmentalists.
The answer is no. The truth is.....my operation has a relatively light impact on the environment compared to the off shore deep water drillers or the tar sands operators or even the fracers ripping up the Bakken in Saskatchewan and North Dakota.
I am drilling on federal government land and I must abide with rather rigourous regulations set by the feds. The worst environmental damage that I create is the mess of cuts through the bush for roads, air strips campsites, and drilling pads. Trees take decades to grow in the muskeg areas of northern Canada. Overflying this area you can see cut lines remaining unregenerated from the seismic guys who did work up here in the 1930s.
When I go to the club, I always get at least 10 dances, normally more like 20. If I only get one dance from a dancer, it's because I'm never getting another dance from her. I'm fine with it if they don't have time (or don't want) to hang out with me. If every customer spent as much as I did, the average nightly stripper take-home money would be in 4 figures. So I feel like I'm holding up my end, without tipping dancers for LDs.
If a dancer told me upfront, I expect a tip of $$$, I would not get pissed about it. Since the club is charging rather than paying her to work there, she has every right to set her own prices as she sees fit. But I would probably say no to her. Because, so far, I'm able to find dancers I find very beautiful who are OK with the club's standard dance price, sans tip.
Yeah, it is cold as fuck right now. I just came back to the office shack from one of the rigs. Temperature at that particular rig was -43C. Here at the office shack - much balmier, a mere -41C. Gratefully there is no wind so the ridiculous temperatures are easily bearable. I have Environment Canada's satellite photos on an adjacent computer - showing an immense Arctic high right on top of the Liard/Mackenzie area. Looks like these juicy temperatures will be with us for a week or so.
Thanks for answering that's interesting and glad you've never run up against those people!