A good field biologist will do damn near anything to get back in the field again.
—William O. Pruitt, Jr., biology professor, University of Alaska
If you put your finger on a map at the Rocky Mountains near Denver and trace the keel of the North American continent through Wyoming and Montana, taking in the Bighorns and the Bitterroot; if you continue along the Canadian Rockies in Alberta and British Columbia, picking up the Selkirk and Cassiar mountains; if you reach up and track the McKenzies through the Yukon and Northwest Territories all the way to Alaska, you find that the northernmost and westernmost extension of the Continental Divide is the Brooks Range of Arctic Alaska. And if your finger follows the Brooks Range west until it runs into the sea, you end up descending the De Long Mountains and pointing to a spot on the Chukchi Sea coast very near Ogotoruk Creek.
The Inupiaq word ogotoruk is said to mean “poke,” a bag in which game might be carried, and is thought to refer to the area’s productivity. For centuries the Inupiaq people have hunted caribou in the uplands here and climbed the towering limestone cliffs to gather the eggs of nesting seabirds.
Ogotoruk Creek heads at 800 feet above sea level, six and a half miles up a southwest-trending valley two to three miles wide. With its several tributary rivulets, it drains some thirty-eight square miles, sliding undramatically into the sea at a two-mile-wide gap between 800-foot-high bluffs. Like many of the smaller streams in this region, the creek’s outflow is periodically blocked. A big offshore storm will pile up beach gravel into a barrier bar across the creek mouth. For months or years, the stream fills a lake formed behind the bar, the fresh water slowly percolating through the gravel to the sea. But eventually, a big inland storm will come along, soaking the hills, swelling the creek with runoff, and filling the lake faster than the water can transfuse. When the impounded water finally spills over the bar, the gravel rapidly erodes away and the stream runs freely into the sea again, until the next big offshore storm reestablishes the gravel bar, and the cycle repeats.
There are no trees along Ogotoruk Creek, none on the hillsides. There are no trees at all along the Arctic coast here. Broad meadows on the valley floor look inviting from a distance but prove to be cotton grass tussocks with a foot of standing water and muck in between. Other tundra plants climb the gentler hillsides to talus slopes and rock outcrops—wildflowers, grasses, sedges, and shrubs: Arctic lupine and dock, dwarf birch, willow, Labrador tea, bog rosemary, blueberries, and bearberries. The valley also supports spongy carpets of sphagnum mosses and various lichen that take unusual forms in delicate shades of pale yellow, gray-green, charcoal, off-white, and pink.
On the morning of July 5, 1959, a tugboat pushing a heavily loaded barge pulled out of Kotzebue heading north. It steamed past Cape Krusenstern, past the little village of Kivalina, and past Cape Seppings. When it reached Ogotoruk Creek, it throttled back and slowly chugged into the beach.
• • •
Chariot was not dead, not by a long shot. In the face of AEC chairman McCone and Commissioner Libby’s published statements regarding Chariot’s imminent demise, Edward Teller and Gerry Johnson at Livermore had moved quickly to mollify the opposition in Alaska by offering to fund a major program of environmental studies. By January 1959, the strength of the Alaskan opposition had been made clear to LRL. Johnson had by then received President Patty’s polite letters backing up the Alaska faculty’s call for “detailed investigations”; Keller and Shelton had reported back on the grilling they had received in the faculty lounge; Tom English had forwarded his statement charging that studies had not been “contemplated on a realistic scale”; Ginny Wood, Al Johnson, and others had written outspoken and critical letters to the News-Miner; and fifty Fairbanksans had formed the Committee for the Study of Atomic Testing in Alaska.
By the time Gerry Johnson made his own visit to Alaska in late February, he was talking about an environmental program that might last more than one season. He didn’t seem to like to use the word environmental, however, preferring to term the program “health and safety” studies. But, as one AEC official wrote in a revealing historical review of Chariot: “The first parties of AEC and Livermore representatives to visit Alaska were noticeably impressed by the demands of the Alaskans for environmental studies as part of Chariot. Gerry Johnson responded by demanding that AEC undertake an environmental program!” Even though it is clear from this statement that the original idea for such studies came from the University of Alaska biologists, AEC and LRL officials would later insist that the investigations were always a part of their Chariot program and were not developed in response to any external demands.
Before Gerry Johnson and his traveling companions, Duane Sewell of LRL and Elison Shute of AEC’s San Francisco office, arrived in Fairbanks on the evening of Friday, February 27, they stopped in Juneau and Anchorage. While in Juneau, Johnson’s party concentrated on legislators. In Anchorage, they gave a breakfast presentation to the chamber of commerce and conferred with Public Health Service officials. Shute, the man who was to have issued contracts “on the spot” at the university, did not accompany the others on to Fairbanks. Perhaps this was because Shute had found himself involved in a sales campaign that seemed at odds with the recently published statements of his boss, AEC chairman John McCone. One member of his staff at the San Francisco office said that Shute “was very discomfited to read some of the statements by LRL people in Alaska,” particularly the solicitation of suggestions from Alaskans on “where to blow holes.” He reportedly felt that he was going from one surprise to another while he was traveling with them.
In any event, Elison Shute was not on hand for the two meetings at the University of Alaska on Saturday, February 28, 1959. An informational meeting took place that morning in the small auditorium in the mining building. First, Gerry Johnson described the October 1958 Neptune test in Nevada. He said that from the small, ninety-ton (i.e., a little less than a tenth of a kiloton) Neptune shot, the AEC had developed new theories about the cratering characteristics and radiation release of nuclear explosions. But extrapolation of the theories to larger explosions needed to be confirmed with a test in the kiloton range.
As Johnson spoke, it gradually dawned on his audience that the Chariot design had undergone radical revision in the six weeks since Keller and Shelton’s visit, and that LRL was now quietly revealing its second major policy shift in seven months. Justification for the blast had devolved from being a grand “economic development” opportunity requiring private financing, to a “demonstration project” underwritten by the government to showcase the beneficial uses of the new technology, to a scaled-down scientific “experiment” designed to answer more prosaic questions such as how big a hole in the ground would be made by a given charge buried at a given depth.
To corroborate the Neptune findings, the size of the shot need not be as large as the earlier model for Chariot, Johnson said. He revealed it had been scaled down to 460 kilotons, just 19 percent of the original 2.4-megaton blast. Furthermore, he said, because the new design would not require the wallop of a hydrogen bomb, a fission-type device would be employed. But the AEC’s downsizing of the shot was small comfort to those Alaskans who cared about contamination of the environment. Gerry Johnson had acknowledged that the fission bomb was much “dirtier,” producing 95 percent more radioactivity than a hydrogen bomb of the same yield. Gone, apparently, was the “clean bomb” rhetoric Teller had used in 1957 to convince President Eisenhower that a panoply of spectacular Plowshare projects depended on clean bombs. Now, a little more than a year later, when new data suggested Chariot should be a smaller—and therefore a fission—shot, Livermore’s logic shifted.
• • •
In the time between Gerry Johnson’s call to President Patty on February 18, 1959, in which he referred to “on the spot” contracts and his arrival in Alaska on the twenty-fifth, a welter of letters, phone calls, and miscommunications passed between Livermore, Fairbanks, and Washington. Professor Al Johnson questioned Alaska senator Bob Bartlett on his support of Chariot. Bartlett replied that while he had tentatively endorsed the project, he had reached “no fixed, unalterable conclusion on the subject.” Within a few hours, he was writing Johnson again. Bartlett had heard that AEC chairman McCone made a statement before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy intimating that Chariot was canceled. Bartlett confessed to Johnson that “my state at the moment is one of high confusion.”
Al Johnson answered, stating that the university people were also quite bewildered: “We were informed on the one hand that the project is ‘off,’ and on the other that we should be thinking about contracts.” Could the senator help clarify the situation before the Livermore scientists were due in Fairbanks the following week? Bartlett’s terse reply showed his patience with the AEC had run out: “Quite candidly, the last thing I am capable of is clarifying anything having to do with the Atomic Energy Commission.” The senator enclosed a carbon copy of a letter he had just sent to Gerald Johnson at Livermore in which he tartly withdrew his support for Project Chariot. Al Johnson received his copy in Fairbanks a couple days later, but when the original arrived at Livermore, Gerald Johnson was already in Alaska. So it came to pass that Professor Johnson had the pleasure of reading Sen. Bartlett’s letter to his Livermore namesake at a public meeting in Fairbanks. In part it said:
I had better tell you sooner rather than late that I am absolutely discouraged about this whole situation. . . . I had been convinced by you and others that this proposal was defensible and had in this respect taken a position opposite from that of some of my constituents. To have Chairman McCone announce as he did was anticlimactic and I must say my interest in the whole matter promptly evaporated.
Those in the audience who were on Bartlett’s mailing list knew that the senator had been even testier in his recent newsletter: “I have now become completely disillusioned. If there is such absolute lack of coordination within the commission in planning, goodness knows what would happen when the trigger were pulled. For one, I hope the AEC does its blasting elsewhere.”
But Gerry Johnson, who was as unflappable as he was affable (years later he would serve as a negotiator on SALT II and comprehensive test ban talks), laughed off the letter as unimportant. He told his Fairbanks audience that he had first heard of McCone’s statement while in Juneau and had called Livermore to find out what was going on. It was only a misunderstanding, he said, and it had all been cleared up.
For the afternoon session, the university’s scientific people convened in the faculty lounge. Gerry Johnson said he wanted to talk about the university’s participation in “health and safety” studies. But only in a general way, as it turned out. As Al Johnson recalled in a 1961 letter, “everyone was getting very weary of the whole business.” When asked about radioactivity and biology, Gerry Johnson and Sewell claimed to know nothing about it, except that biological risks would be minimized. Al Johnson did not remember any talk about contracts for the biologists.
President Patty’s hasty memo announcing “on the spot” contracts was apparently premature. This latest AEC tour seemed purely informational—a chance to establish the new rationale for the project and to hobnob with those the AEC called “community opinion leaders.” Meanwhile, on March 9, 1959, the Alaska legislature responded just as the Livermore physicists had requested: with a statement of support, which nudged Chariot closer to reality. House Joint Resolution #9 declared that, whereas the AEC’s interest in the proposed nuclear excavation had been “effectively illustrated by the visit in Alaska of certain atomic scientists . . . the Cape Thompson project of the Atomic Energy Commission is hereby endorsed.”
• • •
Dr. John N. Wolfe of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington was known to be an urbane sophisticate brimming with wit and savoir faire, as comfortable quoting from literary classics as he was at explicating current scientific theories. He had earned his Ph.D. in ecology at Ohio State University, where he’d been strongly influenced by Edgar Nelson, one of the nation’s pioneering ecologists. Wolfe had left a faculty appointment at Ohio State to accept a position as chief of the AEC’s Environmental Sciences Branch in the Division of Biology and Medicine (DBM). In March of 1959, the AEC selected him to coordinate a program of biological studies prior to the Chariot detonation. It was to be a choice of some consequence. As an academic scientist who had done notable research in the then all-but-unknown field of ecology, Wolfe felt that “it [was] scarcely too early in the Atomic Age to give considerable attention to the environment which supports man on this planet.” In a paper presented to the Second Plowshare Symposium in San Francisco two months after he had visited Alaska, Wolfe showed a knowledge and appreciation of the Arctic tundra biome that was in striking contrast to the popular mythology:
Not infrequently it is described as remote, barren, and climatically rigorous. Probably none of these adjectives is accurate, and very possibly they are all misleading. . . . It is not remote to the Eskimo, the Arctic fox, the ptarmigan; the flowering plants blooming by the thousands per acre in brilliant colors during the early period of wet earth belie its barren-ness and desolation, and represent the showiest natural floral display of any vegetation in the world; and the tundra climate is most salubrious to indigenous dwellers among which are some of the majestic animals of the earth, not excluding man.
In addition to his growing understanding of Arctic ecology, Dr. Wolfe clearly saw the need to establish a new philosophy of development, one that incorporated bioenvironmental knowledge. At the symposium, he told the assembled would-be practitioners of “geographic engineering” that it was “inconceivable that undertakings of this technical magnitude should ignore the living aspects of geography.” His paper, “The Ecological Aspects of Project Chariot,” seemed nearly a manifesto, articulating, possibly for the first time, the philosophic underpinnings of what would someday be called “environmental impact assessment.” He said that while biologists were not competent to judge technical feasibility, “they do raise the question of biological cost and can provide pertinent data as to when, where, and under what biological conditions such an effort could best be accomplished from a total environmental point of view.”
On March 13, when Wolfe and his entourage touched down in Fairbanks, the News-Miner’s Albro Gregory launched into paroxysms of adulation. Gregory was an ardent Chariot partisan whose news articles—not “opinion” or “analysis” pieces—would regularly dub AEC scientists “brilliant” and “eminent,” while labeling Chariot critics as “misinformed.” After interviewing the scientists, Gregory’s page-one story announced that “a team composed of some of the world’s leading scientific minds is in Fairbanks today.”
Wolfe had told the News-Miner that the group was formulating a program of “environmental” (rather than “health and safety”) studies. He introduced his traveling companions as the nucleus of a still to-be-formed committee on environmental studies very much like the one the University of Alaska biologists had advocated should be established to oversee the investigations. Besides Wolfe, the other members of the Planning Committee on Environmental Studies, as they called themselves, were likewise AEC-affiliated scientists: two men from Livermore and two from other laboratories funded by the AEC.
Wolfe said that environmental studies would commence that summer, and that University of Alaska scientists would be working on some of them. He said that the studies would focus on food chains and on the movement of radioactivity through the environment, either by biological or physical transport mechanisms. “We want to know what is there,” he said. If the danger was found to be too great, Wolfe told the newspaper, the blast would be called off.
In the faculty lounge at the University of Alaska, Wolfe was ready to get down to business. He wanted to know whom the university had, which parts of the envisioned study could be done by them, and what research would need to be contracted from other universities or agencies. But he did not yet have official authorization to spend money, and the university scientists pointed out that time was running out. It was March 13. The snow would be melting and the brief Arctic summer would be at hand. The logistics of a three-month stint of Arctic fieldwork was no small thing. There were people to hire, as well as tents, food, and gear to order and ship up from “outside,” and all this to be transported to a spot on the tundra 560 roadless miles from Fairbanks.
Nevertheless, John Wolfe went to the comptroller’s office and made statements that were so reassuring to the university administration that they were willing to authorize the hiring of additional biologists immediately. Because the university people had not yet prepared research proposals, Wolfe, according to one account, “essentially signed off to the university without having seen anything on paper, he essentially made a pledge . . . that AEC would supply funds and would supply contract money for university scientists to work in the Arctic the summer of ’59.”
In fairly short order, the University of Alaska biologists, who had led public opposition to Project Chariot, became contract employees of the Atomic Energy Commission. Not that anyone had any illusions that the university scientists, for all their protests, were entirely free of opportunism. As William Pruitt, a biologist hired for the Chariot studies, allowed years later:
There [were] a number of people who, over a period of quite a number of years, had been trying to do Arctic research—field biology—living from hand to mouth, trying to pick up grants here and there. So that when this rather magnificent grant, or contract, came through, of course they jumped at it. Yeah, I did too. Sure. You know, a good field biologist will do damn near anything to get back in the field again.
Nor, says Dr. Pruitt, did the biologists fail to appreciate that with the funding came expectations of cooperation. There was always a feeling, says Pruitt, “that we were the tame biologists that they had bought.”
Shortly after John Wolfe left Alaska, labor unions joined the newspaper publishers, the chambers of commerce, the legislature, and even some clergymen, by weighing in with support for Project Chariot. The Anchorage Building and Construction Trades Council, representing union workers hard hit by the postwar decline in construction, wrote to Wolfe rooting for results that would permit construction work: “We sincerely hope your findings will support the feasibility of the project.”
• • •
William Pruitt had come to Alaska in 1953, a year after he had earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan. He was not a member of the University of Alaska faculty but rather a field biologist who lived near the campus in a log cabin without electricity or plumbing. During his first three years in Alaska, he had traveled all over the northern part of the territory doing small-mammal research under the auspices of the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory. In 1957 and 1958, he took a contract with the Canadian Wildlife Service to follow the caribou migrations throughout the year in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. With his wife and baby, Pruitt literally followed the herd for a year. His family stayed at an old abandoned Hudson’s Bay post at Duck Lake in northern Manitoba. Later they moved on to Stoney Rapids, then to Yellowknife and Fawn Lake in the Territories. At Fawn Lake, Pruitt’s family was with him in the field part of the time, living in a wall tent outfitted with a small wood-burning stove. Pruitt kept track of the animals with his dog team or on foot, and at night in the tent he examined caribou guts and blood samples by the light of a gas lantern. Pruitt’s wife, Erna, had a master’s degree in zoology, and when the baby was asleep, she assisted in the work, probing intestines and writing up the notes. The Canadian government provided good air support; while conducting aerial surveys of the migrating caribou, the bush pilots also flew in food, fuel, and scientific supplies. As the animals moved, Pruitt moved—sometimes by airplane, sometimes by dog team, sometimes by canoe.
According to Brina Kessel, then acting head of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alaska, John Wolfe “demanded we hire Pruitt if we were going to get the contract.” Wolfe thought the university team needed the strength of Pruitt’s field experience. And, as Kessel conceded, “Bill Pruitt did Arctic field biology like nobody had ever done it before or since.” As a consequence, Pruitt was hired as associate professor to teach biology and head the university’s mammalian investigations at Cape Thompson.
Meanwhile, Al Johnson had begun to consider who else the university might hire to work that summer at Ogotoruk Creek, and he began to draft a formal research proposal for submission to the AEC. The proposal, which was ready by the twenty-fifth of March, 1959, sought over $107,000 from the AEC to support ecological investigations of the flora and fauna of the Cape Thompson region. The University of Alaska would stick to its areas of special competence—the vegetation, cliff-nesting birds, the mammals, including the peripatetic caribou—and leave other investigations to various other agencies. Al Johnson would head up the botanical research, cliff birds would be studied by L. Gerard Swartz, and Pruitt would lead the mammalian investigations. Written two months before John Wolfe’s manifesto articulating the philosophy of impact assessment, the U of A proposal documents the biologists’ hope for the ambitious study and foreshadows the scope of the “environmental impact statement,” which would not be formally invented for ten more years:
We should understand much of the basic ecology of the area, the interrelationships of all the plants and animals with their environment; the structure of the biotic communities; the dynamics of population fluctuations; the food chain—energy flow factors; and much more.
By May 22, Wolfe had secured AEC approval of the full $107,327 requested by the university for the first year’s work. Besides the University of Alaska, which would conduct six studies, other institutions undertaking research included the University of Washington, Ohio State University, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers, the General Electric Company’s Hanford facility, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Weather Bureau, and the Arctic Health Research Center. Forty-two separate investigations would include terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biology; oceanography; meteorology; geology and geophysics; archaeology; human geography; and radioecology.
One hundred and seven thousand dollars was big money to the University of Alaska in 1959. Aside from the affiliated Geophysical Institute, the university had never received anything like it. Brina Kessel, general supervisor of the project, finally relaxed. Twenty-five years later, she could still recall the day two university officials confronted her outside her office and made her aware of the administration’s desire to land the big contract: “They didn’t literally do so, but essentially, they grabbed me by the collar and said, Brina, don’t let this research go through your fingers.”
• • •
When Al Johnson put his mind to thinking about hiring field biologists for the big study at Cape Thompson, one of the first people he wrote was Les Viereck.
Leslie A. Viereck was reared just outside the old whaling port of New Bedford along the southern coast of Massachusetts. His father was a land surveyor who, whenever he could manage, fled the world of metes and bounds for the inconstancy of the sea: He liked to fish. Les grew up on the water, working on boats and crewing on yachts brought down by summer tourists. When he entered Dartmouth College in 1949, he took civil engineering courses, considering the possibility of a family business. But college, predictably, awakened other interests, which in turn suggested possibilities beyond his home town.
Viereck was drawn to the study of nature, in which Dartmouth offered opportunities. The Geography Department’s David Nutt ran a schooner up the Labrador coast in summers. And Doug Wade, a naturalist, inspired Viereck with his knowledge of ecology, biology, and conservation. Wade was not required to teach formal classes; instead he led field trips nearly every weekend during the school year. Les Viereck was there, with long strides and wide eyes, his bird book and binoculars. He was there, too—not at Daytona Beach—when Wade took advantage of spring breaks to visit some interesting biotic community or other down in the Carolinas.
And, of course, Dartmouth had “Stef,” Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the famous Arctic explorer and ethnologist who had lived for a year (1906–07) among the Eskimos, learning their language and culture and adopting their survival technologies. Later, he spent five consecutive years above the Arctic Circle and discovered the last four unknown islands of the Canadian archipelago. From 1947 until he died in 1962, he was at Dartmouth as Arctic consultant in the school’s active Northern studies program. He brought with him his tremendous library of Northern materials and sat, more or less as a brood hen, incubating clutches of embryonic geographers, anthropologists, and naturalists. Seventy years old by Viereck’s second year, the noted raconteur led a loose seminar, regaling budding explorers with tales of survival on the ice floes and the tundra. In the center of campus one winter’s day, he taught Les Viereck how to build an igloo.
The summer following his second year at Dartmouth, Viereck was off to Alaska. He and a friend, hoping to find adventure and a summer job before starting their third year, drove a Model A Ford from New Hampshire to Fairbanks. The Alaska Highway was (and, until recently, remained) a narrow and winding track, at least 1,500 miles of which was unpaved. A potholed and dusty washboard while the long day’s sun beat down, it could be a canal of mud in the rain. Between the isolated roadhouses where food, gas, and some repairs might be available, there could be 100 miles of road bounded by unpopulated wilderness.
His Model A survived, and Viereck landed work as a laborer in a coal mine at Healy near Mount McKinley National Park. He put in long, hard, dirty hours, but when the boss finally declared a day off one Sunday, Viereck headed for the park. Today a road links Healy and Denali National Park, as it is now called, but in the early 1950s there was no road. Just to have a look at the park, Viereck hiked the twenty-odd miles, through the Nenana River canyon to park headquarters and back, in one day. His Sunday stroll impressed the park superintendent enough that Viereck landed a job as a temporary ranger there in each of the next two summers. Whenever he had free time, he helped out the wildlife biologist and naturalist Adolph Murie. “This looks like the job for me,” Viereck thought, “just wandering around the hills observing wildlife.”
But he was wrong. He would return, by way of a meandering course, to botany, each detour adding to his kit of Arctic and subarctic experience. He completed a year of graduate work in wildlife biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, then spent the summer camping out west of Mount McKinley, live-trapping marten and studying their food habits. He quit wildlife biology and was quickly drafted. Happily for Viereck, Uncle Sam decided to make use of his outdoor skills, assigning him to the Talkeetna Mountains, where he served as a military game warden, and flying him up to the Brooks Range to survey edible plants. He climbed 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. He spent a year in Labrador taking weather readings, studying the vegetation on an alpine summit, and getting married during a three-day leave in the spring. He earned a master’s degree in botany at the University of Colorado; started a Ph.D. dissertation there on the revegetation of glacial moraines; explored glaciers around the Kenai Peninsula, the Alaska Range, Prince William Sound, and McKinley Park; and, before he was quite finished with his Ph.D., made the fateful decision to accept a job offer at the University of Alaska to work on Project Chariot.
Al Johnson had been a few years ahead of Viereck at Colorado and was now on the staff of the biology department at the University of Alaska. He wrote Viereck to say he was “about 85% confident that we can offer you a job” teaching and doing research. Johnson said he needed an assistant on studies to be sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska. He himself was committed to several projects already and would only be able to spend about three weeks in the field during the summer of 1959. He could design the scope of the scientific investigations and assemble the equipment and camping gear, but he wanted Viereck to run the program in the field. Viereck was reluctant to abandon his dissertation before it was finished, but to be able to return to fieldwork in Alaska—and to be offered a job at the university—was more than he could resist.
As soon as school let out in Colorado, Les Viereck and his wife, Teri, who had just finished her Ph.D. in animal physiology, drove north. Within a day or two of arriving in Fairbanks, Les flew off to start botanical investigations at Ogotoruk Creek.
• • •
Thanks to Al Johnson’s advance planning, University of Alaska biologists and field assistants were the first researchers to arrive at Ogotoruk Creek and were comfortably installed in their tents three weeks before construction of the AEC camp began. The party was favored by a rare two weeks of sunny, calm weather. Gerry Swartz’s crew turned their attention to the seabird colonies inhabiting the Cape Thompson complex of cliffs. Nearly half a million puffins, murres, kittiwakes, and other cliff-nesting birds had already arrived from the south, swirling in gyres off the sheer rocky cliffs and pinnacles facing the sea. Viereck and his assistants headed up the valley to make a rough survey of the area. Seven miles up, they saw shorebirds nesting in the marshes around several ponds. Young longspurs were already trying their wings, their nests abandoned. Some of the inland ducks who had hatched their young trailed strings of ducklings over the black ponds. “The headwaters of the Ogotoruk was a great surprise to me,” Viereck wrote in one of his notes. “From the aerial photos, I expected it to be all upland shale with the typical Dryas and other mat vegetation. Instead it is a very lush, green basin several square miles in extent . . . we saw two herds of 500 caribou each crossing the very headwaters of the Ogotoruk.”
The serenity ended on July 5, at 9:00 A.M., when “the great confusion,” as Viereck called the AEC’s disorganized landing, commenced.