I was 10 when the pipeline was finished and I remember vividly hearing about it as a kid and having no idea what all the hoopla was about (and if you are still calculating how old I am, just stop- you don’t have that many fingers). Snippets of news clips, bits of adult conversations, the occasional reference in school….all just a bunch of fragments rattling around in my memory. I had no idea today would be the day when it all pieced itself together in a few dramatic steps toward a huge silver tube that was raised 8 feet off the ground.

During our 10 short days in Alaska, we have walked the same ground as gold prospectors, climbed the same steps as copper mill workers, and it seems only fitting that we would stand on the same ground as those industrious people that built 800 miles of pipeline to move oil. It’s an understatement to say that Alaska is rich in natural resources.

There is nothing like learning about something related to our planet earth with two “geo” people standing next to you (Mark and Cat have three geo related degrees between them: geophysicist, geologist, geophysicist). Mark stood at the informational sign, that was beautifully simple, with well done illustrations, and felt it necessary to burst my “I think I get it” bubble, by pointing out the phrases, “sacrificial anodes” and “telluric currents”. After I took a long exhale and watched my bubble burst, I asked him what on earth he was talking about. I will spare you for the sake of brevity, which we all know is what I strive for in these posts (my dad can now stop hitting his forehead with his hand). But I will share the mind boggling fact that this 800 mile pipeline crosses 3 mountain ranges and over 500 rivers and streams. We even got to drive over 1 of the 44 buried road crossings, to ensure traffic flow was not disrupted.

I had no idea the pipeline varies between being above ground and below ground; I thought it was all above ground. In areas where there is permafrost, it is raised above ground to keep the warmer oil from thawing the ground. We were standing in one of those areas today. And while it was a warm-ish sunny day, it was hard to imagine the ground under my feet being frozen.

Another fascinating bit of engineering was the construction of orange brackets, that look almost like massive car jacks, underneath the pipeline at regular intervals. They sit on a metal cross beam, but are not bolted into it. This allows them, and the pipe it supports, to slide on the cross beam during an earthquake. Imagine large sections of this pipeline sliding back and forth during a 9.2 earthquake (this happened in 1964 just 13 years before the pipeline was finished – it was the Good Friday Earthquake). I sure hope this pipeline never has to endure the bouncing kind of earthquakes (technically called P-waves for the curious people still trying to calculate my age).

If you like facts, I thought this sign did a nice job of stating them clearly. If you just want to know about the money, the pipeline cost almost $44 billion dollars in today’s money and has moved more than 19 billion barrels of crude oil. The pipeline systems (Officially called: Trans Alaska Pipeline System or TAPS for short) has generated an estimated $180 billion in total revenue for the state of Alaska. Alaska seems like a place that requires large investments to make orders of magnitude larger profits….if you’re willing to take the risk.

This has been a light blog in terms of photos, so I thought I would indulge in a completely unrelated tangent. As we were trucking down the McCarthy road at a decent speed, we passed by a unique subject. Mark did a three-point turn with some impressive reversing techniques so we could go back and check it out. It wasn’t the moose or bear we had been trying to spot, but an abandoned van. Mark kicked the tires, checked under the hood, and Cat inspected the roomy interior. They seriously thought about swapping out their swank mini-van for something that more appropriately captured their spirit.

And then…..Cat had to get her new bestie involved, and take it to a whole new level.

You should have seen the version where AI made me look like Sarah Palin.