awing, I’m glad you bumped this thread as I missed it before.
I’m pretty sure I’ve met the guy that wrote GSI in the tundra. I worked the North Slope back in the late 80s and early 90s and he was kinda infamous for it back then. If it’s the same issue, and I can’t imagine it was anything else, here’s what I know of the story.
There’s an outpost in the middle of the North Slope that ‘services’ much of the area as there’s nothing else around for miles, no roads, nothing. It’s an airstrip on the bank of the Colville River called Umiat and there’s enough graded room to store lots of exploration expedition equipment; seismic thumpers, receiver trucks, basically anything they need for shooting 2D lines or 3D grids. Plus there’s a manned station, a place to buy aviation fuel, spend the night, get a meal, a way station for hunters or scientists, etc.
I was running a geochem survey party camped 75 miles south of there and periodically we’d stop in for supples and even worked out of Umait for about 10 days. Umiat (at the time) had two (2) permanent residents; O.J. Smith, who was the Mayor, and his son. His son had pretty much grown up there in that vast, isolated place and while his survival skills were supurb, his business acumen and professionalism might have been a little lacking. What we were told was that he was the one that had been employed by GSI to run one of the vehicles pulling a seismic trailer one winter and, bored, decided during some downtime to write the company name in the snow. He didn’t actually carve the name, he meant to simply write it with the vehicle tracks but that compressed the snow, it melted at a differential rate in the spring and actually caused the permafrost to warm and settle, thus permanently impressing the large GSI into the tundra. I’ve flown from Anchorage to Prudhoe on the ARCO jet and apparently others on that routine flight were quick to look down and visibly read the shiny, new services company advertisement. As you might expect he was fired pretty soon thereafter.
I’m drawing a blank on the guy’s name right now, other than “Smith.” Maybe I’ll think of it later and report back. While I won’t offer any defense of his action I will say that he was just an uninformed, screwey, fun-loving, often reckless kid. The entire slope was his backyard and he’d fly his SuperCub or ultralight all over, often landing on point bars to collect mastodon tusks, lead hunting parties, etc. After losing a front wheel on his ultra I watched him dump his fuel, lean over and put the plastic fuel can over the axle and land it on the gravel without flipping. He was basically a good but mischevious young man living an incredible outdoors life and occasionally did things that were kinda 'effing stupid. The GSI incident arguably shines as the crown jewel.