Alaska's New Strike

This is the law of the Yukon, and

ever she makes it plain: "Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane—Strong for the red rage of battle;

sane, for I harry them sore."

—Robert W. Service, 1907

Modern technology is writing amendments to Service's Law of the Yukon, and strong, sane, shrewd men are putting them into practice. With winter settling harshly over Alaska, an assault is being mounted by air and land on an area north of the U.S. share of the old Yukon. In the air, so many planes are aloft that the Federal Aviation Administration next month will impose the first air-space controls over the barren territory. On the ground, road-building equipment rolled out of Fairbanks to begin the two-month job of scraping a 429-mile-long "winter road" over the frozen tundra, lakes and rivers along which trucks can manage 15 to 20 m.p.h. A boomtown atmosphere pervades some usually sleepy communities, where all the talk now is about how to get a piece of the tundra and get rich quick—and then move to Hawaii.

The cause of all the activity is not the gold of Service's day but another resource that may eventually make Alaska far richer. Under the ice, by expert estimates, are pools of at least 5 billion to 10 billion bbl. of oil. If so, this would be the biggest U.S. oil find since the East Texas strike in 1930, and perhaps even greater than that. Some enthusiasts make blue-sky estimates of 40 billion bbl. That would more than double American reserves (currently 31 billion bbl.) and rank the U.S. alongside Kuwait (70 billion bbl.) as the world's greatest source of oil.

Gently to the Sea. The Yukon law still holds in one sense: the oil, like the gold, is remote and difficult to recover. It lies under the 89,000-sq.-mi. North Slope, an area that drops gently from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Sea. Temperatures there fall to 65° below zero and fierce winds howl; consequently, the slope so far has been populated largely by lemming, hare, fox and caribou. Oilmen have had to bring in by air or snow tractor all the gear needed for drilling. Alaska Airlines and Interior Airways, using C-130 Hercules transports, which haul an average 22 tons a load, carry cargoes including food, hardwood logs for pilings and the pile drivers to sink them.

Half a dozen airstrips have been cleared for the "Herky birds," but in a pinch, says one pilot, they can land on "anything flat and a mile long."

Transportation costs and weather conditions—which snap metal wrenches or freeze the drilling equipment—make oil prospecting expensive. To haul in a rig and drill one hole may cost $15 million, compared with about $55,000 in Texas. Thus the slope is a place where only big companies can survive, and even they prefer to work in consortiums.