“In the past 30 years, the most obvious change are the effects of global warming,” said Helmericks, president and chief executive officer of Colville Inc. “But this field has also grown by an order of magnitude, produced far more oil, for far longer than anticipated in the 1970s.”

Helmericks grew up among the polar bear, seal, wolf, fox, waterfowl and whales along the coast of the North Slope. Where once the summer ice pack sat grounded five to 10 miles offshore, there is now open water, he said.

“I remember as a kid flying on floats with my dad along the coast and looking at the ice pack on the near horizon,” he said. “The fetch (water between the grounded ice) was anywhere from three to 10 miles from the shore to the edge of the ice pack.”

Thirty years ago, Helmericks, who grew up on the Colville Delta at the family homestead, then called Nuiqsut by the Inupiat, was driving a forklift working on a Union Oil ice island.

“That marked the beginning of the use of ice as a construction and transportation material,” Helmericks said. “I can also remember the first ice road between the Colville Delta and Prudhoe Bay.”

Later, much like Alaska's Canadian neighbors and Russians in the Far East, the industrial use of ice roads in the winter months came into play.

“You can build hundreds of miles of roads in the winter, and remarkably enough, there is no trace of them after breakup,” Helmericks said.

The use of ice and building of ice roads, however, is temporary and expensive.

“The routine up here is to use ice roads for industrial purposes in the winter, and fly things to remote locations in the summer. But with the increased warming, the window for ice road use has been reduced.”

The use of rollagons, large multi-wheeled vehicles with oversized tires that roll over the frozen tundra has recently also become popular.

Helmericks commented that the one thing that has not changed much in past 30 years is the dependence on aircraft.

“You still see the same high-wing workhorse aircraft up here, Cessna 206, 207, the Hercs (Lockheed Hercules) and, of course, the Boeing 737,” Helmericks said.

The warming Arctic conditions have prompted Helmericks to purchase a 32-foot boat with long-range tanks called the White Knight.

The White Knight will support operations in the Beaufort Sea. The craft will have a fully heated cabin and will be used to ferry parts, equipment or food for exploration crews in the Arctic.

The Helmericks family is responsible for helping build the Prudhoe Bay infrastructure to what it is today.

Colville Inc., Brooks Range Supply and the Prudhoe Bay General Store, all now owned and managed by Helmericks, grew out of the Arctic Tern Fish and Freight Co., started by Bud Helmericks in the 1960s.

“The most remarkable thing about Prudhoe is its size,” Helmericks said. “At first we could see a few lights on the horizon at night (from the Colville River), now there is a glow in the sky like much like a city.”

Alaska's North Slope in the 1960s and '70s was just about as remote a place as could be found anywhere on the face of the earth. Helmericks describes driving cat trains in the winter.

“The good thing about the North Slope is that it is relatively flat,” Helmericks said. “You would routinely drive for several hours, stop, get out and stand on the cab of your cat and look for the lights of camp, or a village off on the horizon.”

Sometimes they would end up miles off course.

“If you got within 10 miles you were doing good,” he said. “Now with the advent of GPS (global positioning system) you can hit it dead on.”

Eventual steady growth required utility services, electricity, sewer, water and telecommunications. Helmericks and family members made their living supporting operations from year to year.

The expansion has made its way from east of Prudhoe Bay westward, far into the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, Teshekpuk Lake, Point Thomson, and now just a few miles east of Point Barrow. Where once the barren coastline featured shore-fast ice and snowdrifts in the winter, and driftwood and sand in the summer, is now home to new onshore exploration.

“The most striking thing about the growth is the size of the footprint,” Helmericks said. “In the old days it was find an elephant, develop it, and abandon it all within 13 years. Here we are 30 years later, and still oil is being pumped from the same find.”

A social change

Many early travelers returned from the Arctic reporting oil. A Hudson's Bay Co. employee was one of the first. He noted seepages in the Canadian Arctic in the winter of 1837-1838. A member of Stoney's expedition brought back a small bottle of oil from the upper Colville River vicinity in 1885.

Noting the impact on the Inupiat who inhabited fishing and hunting camps in Atqasak, and the new village of Nuiqsut, Helmericks feels that the corporation structure and regionalization of Alaska Natives through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 has been positive.

“This was an audacious experiment, no one ever forecast that Alaska Natives would be a driving force in the Alaska economy,” Helmericks said. “This was an act of termination by Uncle Sam, and has turned out to be a remarkable success story.”

This success was not immediate, and before ANCSA passed — and even after — the climate among the Inupiat was sometimes not too inviting to the non-Inupiat, according to Helmericks.

“Some Natives were quite radical in the '70s, it was them versus us,” Helmericks said. “It verged on being dangerous. Barrow was a hazardous place to be for a white person, especially if you ran into Charlie Edwardson.”

According to Alaska History and Cultural Studies, in 1966 Charlie Edwardson, Jr., who was then chairman of a community education program in Barrow, called a meeting to discuss Eskimo land rights.

The conference led to the formation of the Arctic Slope Native Association whose goal was to receive title to 58 million acres of land north of the Brooks Range. Members of the Arctic Slope group, the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), and the recently organized Seward Peninsula Native Association filed protests against state land selections in Northwest and Arctic Alaska. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall halted all federal land transactions in Alaska until Congress settled the issue of Alaska Native land claims.

Oil at Prudhoe Bay lands already acquired by the state of Alaska were not affected by Udall's freeze. Several oil companies had leased state land in Northwest and Arctic Alaska to explore for oil. In 1968 oil gushed from a wildcat well drilled by the Atlantic Richfield Co. at Prudhoe Bay.

A book about Edwardson, “Etok: A Story of Eskimo Power,” written from the Inupiat perspective by Hugh Gregory Gallagher, catapulted him into fame as a radical.

Helmericks knew the Inupiat of the North Slope far differently growing up in the Colville Delta, west of Prudhoe Bay.

“Natives had a point, but didn't have the political or financial power then,” Helmericks said. “It took a radical like Edwardson to make their point, now things are far different.”

An offshore vision

Helmericks feels one aspect that also may have helped was that the oil companies, until recently, were held to developing oil onshore. This helped the North Slope Borough and the state of Alaska by the taxation of oil through the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, leases, permitting and mitigation efforts to aid in local hire.

Today this may change, he said.

“With the sea ice pack hundreds of miles north of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, more open water and new technology, there is no logical reason why oil could not be extracted from areas like the 1002 area (in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) from offshore,” Helmericks said. “This was not possible 30 years ago. It looks like offshore is the way to go for numerous reasons.”

Helmericks projects that if warming continues, onshore exploration will suffer setbacks, forcing and necessitating offshore development.

“The thaw zone has gotten so big, that what used to work won't anymore,” he said. “Once the surface melts and thaws to a farther level below the surface of the tundra, and with later freezes, only the top level of the tundra will freeze, much like a sandwich with a sloppy wet layer between the permafrost and the frozen crust at ground level. This will make industrial use impossible, and thus force exploration offshore, with no impact to the tundra.”

No matter how the climate affects the Arctic, Helmericks is positioned and experienced at life and business there.

“I've been involved up here for most of the past three decades, and although some say we are operating on the far fringes, we are only just beginning to know what the Arctic holds for all of us.”

Despite the ups and downs of the economy, Helmericks' companies have continued to grow. Starting out in 1981, Colville Inc. grew from a family-owned business to several corporations that employ 100 people and grosses more than $60 million yearly.

Rob Stapleton can be reached at