A Different Perspective: 3/13/2024

In the early 1980s, I ran the farthest-north underground mine in the United States, halfway between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, in the Brooks Range, eighty miles north of the Arctic Circle. The haul road to the North Slope oil fields was over thirty miles away, so our operation depended on air transportation.

Everyone who came to work on the project, including me, was new to Alaska and couldn’t wait to fly over the mighty Yukon, with images of crystal-clear water surging through rocky canyons. We all arrived at Fairbanks via commercial airlines and flew in light aircraft north over a seemingly...