"Loved Them Choppers"

By Andrew Selsky

The choppers. I loved the choppers, man. Lamas. Alloeutte IIIs. Hughes 500s. LongRangers. JetRangers. And the pilots. Most were Vietnam veterans. I worked in the mountains of Wyoming, mostly, in '81 and '83, logging lots of hours aboard helicopters. With a Shell outfit, headed by a cowboy-booted Texan whose name I don't remember, we lived in the KOA campground in the summer and fall of '81.

There were a lot of helicopter accidents that summer, but fortunately none hit our crew. (I was with a CGG crew a few months earlier, in March '81, that lost seven members and the pilot in a helo crash in North Dakota. I had actually been laid off a few days earlier, then rehired after. I was very sad when I learned a friend, Skip Pegg, had perished.) In one incident that summer with another unlucky crew in Star Valley, the pilot was bringing juggies to the LZ at the end of the day, forgetting he had his long-line attached to the belly of the helo. It snared on a fence and when the fence snapped, the cable flew like a sling-shot into the rotor blades, seizing them up. The chopper went down hard. Injured backs and bruises.

One of our pilots saved a life, or his helo did. A juggy on our crew was stung by a bee while working the line. He was allergic to bee stings, and he quickly began swelling up. He didn't have any antidote with him. By the time the pilot got him to the hospital in town, his throat was so swollen he could barely breathe. The doctors injected him with the antidote, and he was fine. Just in time.

Within a few weeks, a buddy named Kelly, from Sheridan, Wyo., was directing the pilot where to place the doghouse he had suspended on a long line. As the doghouse settled on the ground, Kelly made the mistake of reaching out to help settle it.

"I remember seeing this beautiful blue light leap out to my hands," Kelly remembered later. The huge charge of static electricity generated by the whirring rotors knocked him out cold. I was on the pickup crew out of sight and heard radio calls. The pilot saying "We have a man down." The pilot couldn't put down anywhere nearby. Kelly was alone on the ground. No one knew if he was alive or dead.

Finally someone got to him. He was still unconscious but breathing. he was belted into a stretcher, attached to the end of the long line and flown to the hospital in Afton. He later told me he came to in the stretcher, spinning madly below the belly of the chopper as the mountains rushed by underneath. The docs said he still had an irregular heartbeat by the time he got to the hospital. He turned out OK.

Someone mentioned toeing in. Yeah, brings back memories of hovering next to a sharp mountain ridge. getting onto the skids and jumping off, then crouching as the chopper whirred away.

The pilots often would do aerobatics if you asked them to. Remember the hammerhead? G forces so strong you'd be squeezed back in your seat.

And flying at top speed through the mountains in a Lama, sitting in the front with the Plexiglas below your feet. A ridgeline would come up perpendicular under you, just a few feet below, as you rushed across the landscape. Then a new valley would open up below, the ground dropping away so steeply right under your feet that it almost took your breath away.  

When the crew moved to the Powder River region, operating out of Sheridan, and went from portable to trucks, it just wasn't interesting anymore. More like factory work outdoors. In December 1982, the oil industry took a dive along with the price per barrel of oil. I was laid off along with a lot of other people.

I got into another line of work, but those days are still vivid.