Alaska Oil Pipeline ........1976 - 1977
   Many of these bears felt right at home living here in our camp of 5000 workers. They skipped hibernation because leftovers were readily available from the quality food fed to the construction people working on the pipeline. I have never worked on a job where the food was so pleantiful and so delicious. Within a short while you got used to the bears as they entered in and out of your work area, or roamed past you on the camp road. Valdez Camp did have a bear patrol that kept watch on which bear's were in the area at all times. They would notify us if we needed to be watchful of one that was known to be troublesome. Other than that, they were free to roam because it was against the law to tranquilize and move them just because they were in the camp.   One of the areas I did electrical work in was the power house pictured here. This is a couple of my working buddies keeping an eye on one of the larger bear's we had named Bruno. He came right into our work place and decided he was hungrey .... we didn't argue with him when he spotted our lunch boxes. He was bigger than us! I took this nose to nose picture of Bruno with a little pocket camera.  I remember one day we had been served salmon for lunch. As we got outside to head back to our work place a large bear started following closer and closer to one of the electrician's in our group. He still had the smell of salmon on his hands from lunch and this bear could smell it. He was a newcomer to our camp, and evidently hadn't washed up throughly after this meal. His thinking was if he crawled into a large cylinder pipe the bear would just go past and forget him. Boy was he wrong........ nothing we could do at this point. This bear followed him right in, and proceeded to lick each finger until there was no more salmon smell on his hands. When he was done, he backed out of the cylinder and went on his way. The poor guy was almost in a state of shock as he crawled out of the cylinder pipe....... not a bite mark or a scratch anywhere on him or his hands.  
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