Heliportable Begins
By Jon Horton

It was early summer of 1976 in Afton, Wyoming when I heard helicopters flying over town and watched them approach the airport to land. I drove down and saw that one was a strange-looking ship I’d never seen before so I walked up and asked the pilot what it was. He said it was a French-made Alouette.

I was tending bar in the basement of the Valleon Hotel in those days and that evening a bunch of hippies came in and started throwing hundred dollar bills around as they drank like there was no tomorrow. I learned that they called themselves “Juggies” and worked for a company called SSC. They said the helicopters I’d scoped out at the airport supported their ops and they were headed for the Salt River Range behind Afton the next morning to lay out seismic equipment to explore for oil.

The next morning I was at the SSC office looking for a job and they hired me to work on the powder crew because of my experience with explosives. In those days we just opened the leads on caps, shook the leads loose, stuck the charges into one pound Kine-paks, wired that charge to the next cap and charge, and did that ten times, dropping the shots onto the ground. That meant that the shot was an open circuit as we were making it up! Why we weren’t blown up, I’ll never know. The shots left craters all over the place and we had a two-man fire crew with shovels and “piss pumps” right behind the shooters. The Forest Service was not happy with the fires and damage the operation caused and it wasn’t long before they started making us put the charges on stakes. We were making it up as we went along. CGG was using five-lb dynamite sticks and I remember one place where their 01 crew’s line crossed our’s and it looked like a freaking impact area of an Army mortar range.

Dudley Seifert was truly the father of heliportable ops, fielding the first crew on Whisky Mountain near Dubois, Wyoming in August 1975, the same crew I worked on outside Afton in ’76. Anyway, we were doing some shaped charge velocity testing one day and he walked up to me and, in his clipped English accent, said, “Mister Horton, you’re a native of this area. Perhaps you can identify these objects for me.” He held out his hand. “Those are elk turds, Mr. Seifert,” I said. He dropped them, wiped his hand on his pants and walked away.

It has been a long, strange trip down the dinosaur trail, as Mr. Jerry Garcia said. I’m now in my thirtieth year of seismic and waiting to hear if I’m off to Peru or Algeria for my next assignment. For the last fifteen years I’ve been an international HSE supervisor and worked in Mexico several times, Peru several times, Ecuador several times, Venezuela, Bolivia, Yemen, Chad, Tanzania, South Africa, Alaska and the Rockies from Montana to Arizona, California to Kansas and I’m still kickin’