I never thought I would see this place mentioned on HN. It is a fairly quiet place way up in British Columbia. When I was there a long time ago they had a nice self-contained town with skating/hockey rink, a Mountie station, a couple of streets through the middle of town with shopping for all the essentials, and gas stations and clubs near the outside of town. We would hit up that club that had beer, billiards, and karaoke for fun when we'd get the occasional chance to go into town.

I worked on a drilling rig outside of town on the side of a mountain above timberline. It was beautiful country, absolutely fantastic. When I got there I thought about what a waste it was to be drilling in such a beautiful place with all the desolate places still available on earth and no guaranteed payout due to complex geology.

Native wildlife wandered by camp and the location daily. Back then Canada really led the way with their environmental protections. All water related to drilling had to be contained on the location within a berm large enough to prevent escape. Vacuum trucks ran all day if necessary and when it did rain it was a 24 hour a day job until the location was clear of pooled water that could escape into the clear creeks in the area. Solids control (handling drill cuttings) involved collection and compression of cuttings to remove fluids which were then chemically treated to restore their properties for reuse in drilling while the cuttings were pelletized for shipment offsite. I had never seen that in the US. They clearly had a commitment to environmental protection.

Years later the Harper government came in and eliminated some of those protections to favor production, especially of their vast oil sands resources.

When I was in college, those oil sands were given as an example of one of the largest petroleum deposits on earth. The case was made that they would never fully be developed since the oil had lost all the lighter fraction and it was necessary to inject steam to recover from most of the sands. This was an expensive process wasting and polluting huge quantities of water, but it was also something that would forever destroy a huge region and render the water undrinkable. The projection back then was that it would take sustained $80/bbl oil for it to be economical since the process was so expensive.

Fast forward a couple decades and everything has ramped up due to oil price increases driven largely by a switch from demand pricing in the markets to speculative pricing and you see the resulting devastation they have wrought on the area.

Pretty sad. I hate that my career has enabled bullshit like this. All those places I visited and came to love have been destroyed by an industry full of liars who value integrity only when it involves keeping an industry secret and encourage the opposite when the truth could cause your business model financial problems.

Tumbler Ridge has some really nice waterfalls nearby if you ever visit and it is not far from other places worth seeing. I took all the time when I should've been in camp sleeping for the next tour (shift) and drove out to Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Fort St John and other places so I could see things that I felt I would never again have the opportunity to see. I saw the color change from summer to fall colors as it spread across the landscape, watched trees lose their leaves, felt the first unexpected snowfall as it buried our gear under 3 feet of fresh snow, I jumped off a snow cornice and slid down the side of the mountain on my chest using my feet as steering so I could dodge all the obvious rocks. I watched a grizzly walk down the same valley I had just crossed and pause to sniff the wind when he caught my trail.

I know they'll get the problem fixed. This just brought back so much.