My first portable experience began in November of 1980. I had already had a taste of it while working for Pac West using horses to pack  equipment in while the juggies trudged along behind. If you never worked with horses on a seismic line you don’t know what you were missing. Horses and wires do not mix. I’ll never forget watching a whole pack team loaded with equipment rolling down a mountain in a cloud of dust, or watching the outfitter (Mariner Jensen) emerge from the tangle of horses, cables, dust, and blood, screaming and beating the shit out of the horse that caused the problem.
My buddy Eddie had called me in Oklahoma where I was nursing a broken leg (which I broke in a bar, that’s another story), and told me there was a slot on a helicopter portable crew in Pinedale, Wyoming and to come on up.
After fighting ground blizzards across southern Wyoming I arrived in Pinedale a few days after Thanksgiving. The crew was an SSC crew consisting of your typical cross section of degenerates which I’m sure you all can relate to. It seems that whichever crew you went on  there were the same type of folks.
Of course on my first helicopter ride all the juggies talked the pilot of the Hughes 500D into giving me a near death experience. They put me in the front seat and strapped me in. Now this was the first chopper that I had ever sat in, but even my un-experienced ass thought ‘this damn thing feels like getting in a toy’. As soon as we lifted off and started racing across the sage brush hopping fences with the Wind River Mountains looming ahead I knew I was where I wanted to be.
This was also the day where I strapped on my first snowshoes, started my first fire the primitive way (with primacord), and also my first day where every step was uphill. After a grueling day of trudging uphill in four feet of snow and laying out truck crew cables, it was getting dark when the 500 came to pick us up.
As soon as the pilot got there he informed us that the LZ was to small, he told us that we  would have to go another half mile up-hill or go back down  to a better LZ. We of course chose the down-hill option. The only problem was, the LZ that the pilot chose had a dead pine tree right in the middle of it. No problem says the pilot, “I’ll snap it off”. The pine tree in question had about a 20 degree lean to it and the pilot brought the skids down on it and bounced around a little and finally broke it off about halfway. It was still in the way and getting dark. So to make a long story short, my first mountain extraction consisted of each juggie climbing to the top of the 20 foot snag and letting the 500 hover beside it while we stepped in.
After a first day like that I was completely hooked. What better job could an outdoorsman want than flying in helicopters in the  mountains, blowing up dynamite, and hanging with people just like him, all while getting paid. Hell, if I could of , I probably would have paid them!