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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: There’s no place like home — extreme catering in rural Alaska Chiulista Camp Services provides remote site catering and personnel and gains a reputation while its clients gain weight Mara Severin PNA Contributing Writer
What does the word “home” mean to you? A white colonial with shutters and a picket fence? A luxury apartment complete with Jacuzzi? Perhaps you have simple tastes and favor a log cabin with one room and a fireplace? Whatever your preferences, it is unlikely that you conjured up a home on the North Slope. Few people call this terrain home. And what about the view? Do you see a city skyline from your home’s windows? Or perhaps a wood, or another house. Probably not the Arctic desert dotted with oil rigs.
Not many Alaskans call this home, but many Alaskans call it work. These Alaskans live, at least some of the time, in the remote sites where the petroleum, mining and construction sites set up camp. The view from their windows is oil rigs. And that’s where Chiulista Camp Services comes in. This company that provides catering and housekeeping services, as well as temporary remote site personnel would like to change the definition of home. “We try to provide a home away from home under severe conditions,” says its president, George Gardner.
Getting their feet wet in Donlin Creek In 1995, this wholly owned subsidiary of Calista Corp. undertook its first project at Donlin Creek, a major gold exploration project in the Calista region, and it was a dozy. Chiulista Camp Services not only provided workers for the site, but also provided the catering through a joint venture. Setting up the camp required constructing the living and working structures, laying 17 miles of roads, and building the 5,000 foot airstrip. Once the camp was set up, five drills were put into operation at once. Gardner was right there at the inception of the company working as an expeditor. He recalls the scope of the project with a smile. “We really got our feet wet on that one.”
A few years ago, the company dissolved the joint venture and went into catering on their own. “It’s one of our big focuses now,” says Gardner, “providing cooks and housekeepers for remote site projects.” The Donlin Creek Project is still a client. “There’s a lot of gold resource out there,” says Gardner. The job of determining the size and the scope of the gold that’s there has provided and continues to provide a venue for Chiulista’s services.
Hiring rural Alaskans for rural Alaskan jobs Chiulista’s talent base goes beyond cooks and housekeepers, according to Garner. In addition to providing catering, the company is in the business of providing heavy equipment operators, mechanics, geotechs, diamond core drillers, survey personnel, and general laborers.
Employee supply ad demand works both ways, he says. While the company is committed to providing the workers to keep these sites operating, it is also committed to providing employment for the people in the villages located near these sites. “One of our big services is providing temporary remote site workers,” says Gardner, “and, as much as possible, we try to recruit people from the surrounding villages. It’s definitely a good fit. It makes good business, economic, and social sense to hire locally whenever possible.”
“One of our mandates is to hire as many Calista shareholders as possible,” he says, “and we’ve been very successful at that.” During the high season this year, 55 people were employed through the company, 90 percent of whom are Calista shareholders. “I’m kind of proud of that,” he says.
The advantages are not all on the employee side, says Gardner, though he is pleased to help provide his corporation’s shareholders with jobs, training and experience. According to his philosophy, hiring from this employment pool is an advantage to the company seeking the personnel. “Village residents are familiar with rural Alaska,” he says, and that provides an edge. “The quality of our people is outstanding.”
And they have to be, he says, “You can’t stay in business if you don’t provide excellence.”
Easy living where the living ain’t easy Providing catering day after day for groups of 10 to 50 people in sites as diverse and remote as Donlin Creek and Prudhoe provides intense logistical planning. “Every project has its own challenge,” says Gardner. “The cost of transportation is certainly one of the biggest factors that affect our industry.We have to think about transportation every day.” Harsh conditions can impede the delivery of supplies, but more importantly, can affect the comfort of the site’s workers.
“We have the very difficult job of making people feel happy and warm and fed,” says Gardner, in conditions where those words are the last that would come to mind.
They appear to succeed however. Jim Winchester, of Wilder Construction, worked with Chiulista Camp Services while working on an airport job in a remote location. He says they handled the logistics very well. Camp services is not his own “forte,” and he, quite simply, doesn’t want to have to worry about it. When dealing with Chiulista, he says, he didn’t. “I was able to focus on my job because they did theirs,” he says firmly. The survival of the fittest Gardner’s investment in his company and in the future of the industries it serves is obvious. A born and bred Alaskan with 30 years business experience under his belt, Gardner is modest but confident about Chiulista Camp Services’ future. “We’re a small company,” he says, “but we’ve survived and grown and maintained a profit throughout our existence.”
Making a profit, he says, seems assured, in light of their reputation. “We fully expect to grow the company as our name becomes more widely known and our reputation remains unblemished. We have a good reputation with our clients and that in itself will grow the company. Alaska’s expansion is going to go into rural Alaska and we’ll be right there with it.”
Reputation is all very well, but what about the real measurement for the success of a catering company? Winchester describes Chiulista’s gifts in a nutshell — “We all gained ten pounds,” he recalls with a laugh.
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