Alaskan Buffalo, Camels & the Moose Corral

Alaskan Buffalo, Camels & the Moose Corral
By: Jim Burns

Buffalo & Camels

Every helicopter unit has a group of tricks and/or gags up its sleeve to spring on the new guys when they show up. Some happen right away and some take a little time to build to the climax and are sprung on the newbie’s.

We’ve all had some of these pulled on us at one time or another, or we’ve pulled them on others ourselves. Some are quite simple and others are a bit more sophisticated. You know what I’m speaking of … the ole’ “get me a bucket of rotor wash” or “go get a new hovering gasket out of the supply room” or “get me some prop wash”, etc. Well here’s a couple of tails of some of the more sophisticated ones that would be pulled on new pilots at some time or other after their arrival at the 5040th Helicopter Squadron in Alaska.

Sometimes it would take at least a year or so to get this one set up. It would usually begin when the Pilot’s started their first rotations to Eielson AFB where we kept a HH-3E on alert 24/7. This mission also involved daily flights supporting the Air Force Blair Lakes gunnery range to the South East of Eielson. We would begin the set up by “spotting” buffalo tracks in the snow. Now the first thing the newbie would come back with was “buffalo tracks! … You guys are full of it; there ain’t any buffalo in Alaska”.

But we were not to be deterred and would keep this up, insisting that we were seeing buffalo tracks in the snow and telling the story about how the government had brought two herds of buffalo to Alaska, in 1928, to see if they could survive in the Alaskan climate. One herd was placed near Big Delta, Alaska and the other SW of the Denali National Park and Preserve near the Rainy Pass area. After a bit, our skeptical newbie in most cases would become uncertain, because after all …. Our story did sound a bit reasonable.

We would follow this up with the next setup … where we would be on the way to Blair Lakes and would still be calling out spotting buffalo tracks … and then some one would call out some different tacks in the snow that looked like they may be the camel tracks.

Now our somewhat skeptical newbie suddenly was back to being the full skeptic he was to start with. But we kept up with the story, telling him how during WWII the Army brought several dozen camels to Alaska to test if they would be useful pack animals in a snow environment, like they were in the deserts of North Africa. We went on to tell about how the test proved unsuccessful and the Army abandoned the project and released the camels near Ft. Greely. Now our newbie was convinced that we were all full of it and trying to pull one on him.

Once we got him to this stage it was time to set the “hook”. The “hook” in this case being the buffalo herd. You see, this part of our tail is true … there really were two herds of buffalo in Alaska and they were surviving quite well. So to set the hook, the pilot would call the tower at Ft. Greely and ask if the buffalo herd had been spotted and reported by anyone flying into the area. The tower would give us a “no sightings reported” response a lot, but then some days they would tell us that someone reported the herd being spotted and let us know where they were at.

Ft. Greely tower knew the part that they played in this and would play along when we ask if any camel had been spotted, coming back with something like “no camels reported today”. When the tower reported a spotting of the buffalo herd, we would break off what ever we were doing and go looking them. Now you can just imagine the look on our skeptical newbie when we actually would spot the buffalo herd and make a few passes nearby, close enough that there could be no doubt that they really were buffalo.

We now had our skeptical newbie hooked, and all we need to do now was reel him in. Amazingly all of the sudden our newbie was no longer skeptical about the camel story. Even wanting to spend a lot of time on our training flights searching for them.

On occasion we would spot some tracks (most likely moose or caribou) and claim that they looked like camel tracks. We’d fly off following them for a while, but could never spot the camel herd. Of course we explained that they were very skittish and would usually hear a chopper or plane coming long before we could get close enough to see them, and they were very adept at hiding to avoid being spotted.

By this time we could tell him just about anything and he would have believed it. But, over time, most of these guys would begin to realize that they had been ‘had’ and sucked into this tail and then they couldn’t wait until they could spring the trap on the next newbie to show up.

But, of course …. There’s always one who is more gullible than the others and I remember one young 2nd Lt. by the name of James Grider who really got sucked in on this one and I think it was a couple of years before he realized he’d been had!! In fact, we even sucked him in on our moose corral story.

The Moose Corral

On Elmendorf AFB, there was this huge HF antenna farm shaped in a large circle, several hundred feet across. One day when we were flying around the base, with Lt. Greider as co-pilot, he inquired about what that thing was. We informed him that is was a thermal moose corral.

Explaining that in the severe winters the thermal properties generated by the circular design of the installation created a ‘warm zone’ inside the circle and even kept it warm enough that the snow fall would not accumulate much inside the circle and that the grass even continued to grow.

Because of this condition the Alaska fish and game folks would herd the moose that live on Elmendorf into the ‘moose corral’ during the harshest time of winter where they could eat the grass and not worry about freezing. Lt. Grider pretty much accepted this tail (as far fetched as it was), only asking a few questions and then, as we found out a few days later, just logged it into his memory as a landmark on the base.

A few days later we were returning to Elmendorf from somewhere and Lt. Greider was again flying. As we approached the base to enter the flight pattern he contacted the tower for permission to enter the down wind leg. The tower responded that they did not have us in sight and to establish an orbit until they could get a visual on us. Lt. Greider responded that he was entering an orbit over the ‘moose corral’ awaiting clearance to enter down wind.

The tower, in this case, was not in on our story and had no idea what he was talking about. They ask him two or three times, where he was at and what he was talking about and he kept telling them he was in orbit over the ‘moose corral’.

The tower finally spotted us and gave us clearance to break off our orbit over the ‘moose corral’ (you could actually hear all the laughing going on in the tower when they transmitted) and enter down wind for landing. Of course, by now Lt. Greider knew he had been suckered ….big time … what with the tower laughing at us and all of us in the cabin rolling with laughter.

As is often the case when someone is ‘had’ as bad a Lt. Greider was, he became one of the best in the unit at setting up and sucking in the next ‘newbie’s who followed.