A Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch
Route 2: Ross to Tioga
Heading west from Ross takes you into the historical heart of the oil patch and past several trucking stations that also feature workforce housing. The proximity of housing to places of work characterizes much of the temporary workforce housing in the oil patch. In many ways, these practice of combining work and life echoes agricultural traditions in this region where the family farm was surrounded by agricultural equipment, shops, barns, and fields. The workforce housing areas also reflect traditions of mining and work camps in the 19th and 20th century American West where workers would live close to the entrance of the mine or exposed vein as possible, or lived in temporary housing near the work site when employed on large construction projects.
Tioga (pop. ca. 1500) is the first town in Williams County and a central community in the Bakken oil boom. The Bakken oil boom started just north of the city of Tioga at the No. 1 Clarence Iverson Well which struck oil in 1951 and soon became productive. Tioga sits astride the Nesson Anticline, which saw exploratory drilling as early as the 1920s. Most of the earliest productive wells were sunk by the Amerada oil company which later became part of Hess, and since that time, the Hess Corporation has become a major part of the community. Today, the town has felt the influx of workers acutely. Workforce housing has always been a problem in the community with workers in the first boom living in chicken coops and grain silos. The legacy of the housing challenge remains visible today as the town in ringed by RV parks and mobile homes. Moreover, the community has experience ecological disasters. More recently a leak in a Tesoro pipeline the area dumped in November of 2013 over 20,000 barrels of oil (over 800,000 gallons) into field.
The truck traffic in area around Tioga gets heavier and the population of the community has grown by nearly 30% since the start of the boom. This number may not take into account the short term residents living in the several, large workforce housing facilities around the outskirts of town. Before entering town on US Route 2, it is worth turning left or south on North Dakota Route 40 (also called 104th Avenue NW) down a dirt road past a trucking company depot. Over the last few years, the company has parked hundreds of brightly colored 500 barrel, “frack tanks” used to transport the various fluids used in the hydraulic fracturing process. In the winter against the bright white now and in the summer months against the green of the prairie, these tanks provide a dramatic photo opportunity. They are also a nice indication of the amount of fracking fluid (and other liquids) necessary to open an oil well in Western North Dakota. Five hundred barrels is 15,500 gallons. On a lovely winter day, we counted over 200 trailers there amounting to close to 3 million gallons of fluid. These tanks provide a useful indication of how many trucks, how much fluid, and how much infrastructure is necessary to frack an oil well.
Further south along the same road, stands the former site of Betaini Lutheran church is worth a visit. Turn south down 106th Avenue NW and continue on this road for about about a mile. The church no longer stands, the rural cemetery, and a substantial metal cross mark the former spot of this small, wood-framed church once stood. It is possible to stand in the peace of this rural landmark and see the bobbing of oil pumps, hear the rumble of passing trucks, and still imagine the isolation that turn of the century communities must have felt under the vast North Dakota sky.
Returning north across on ND Route 40 to US Route 2 takes one toward Tioga town. ND Route 40 is flanked by two clusters of RVs housing workers immediately north of the intersection with Route 2. The RVS on the left (east) are associated with a truck maintenance bay. The cluster on the right or west side of Route 40 is a good example of the kind of informal RV parks that characterized an early phase of workforce housing in the oil patch. Today, many of the units look worse for wear and seem to sit heavily on their gravel and dirt lots. Many have signs of being winterized including skirts around their bases made of extruded polystyrene affixed to plywood frames. In 2013, there was a small coffee stand operated by the Dynamite Sisters at the northeast corner of the park.
Continuing north along Route 40 toward Tioga, there are a range of industrial and commercial establishments that serve the functioning of the oil patch intersperse with workforce housing. A small, well-appointed series of mobile home trailers is on the left just over a mile after the intersection with Route 2 and immediately after Route 40 veers to the right. In less than a half a mile, a more temporary RV park appears on the right. Worth noting here are both mobile homes, mobile housing units (moved apparently by rail), and RVs reflecting the hybrid nature of the workforce housing in the Bakken.
As the industrial and commercial character of the southern boundary of Tioga gives way to the more residential core, be sure to stop for a moment at the R and R mobile home park which stands about 2 miles north on Route 40 from the previous stop, immediately to the right (east) as you descend the railroad overpass. Established to provide workforce housing for newcomers in the first oil boom in the 1950s it accommodated newcomers when the towns population grew from 500 to over ; in less than a decade. The trailer and RV park houses workers in the current oil boom today. The owner has remained committed, however, to spacious lots to take the and the park has several long term residents.
At the park’s northeast corner is a small municipal cemetery located at its northeast corner. Of note in this cemetery is the marker for Kono wife of Ben Kitagawa who died at age 27 in 1915. “Ben” Kitagawa was most likely Bunhichi Kitagawa who became a US citizen in Minot in 1905 having immigrated to the area from Japan. The sleeping lamb motif on the grave marker is apparently common in Japan. It is unclear why this Japanese couple lived in Tioga, but it probably involved railroad work. The cemetery and the mobile home park stands in the shadows of the Hess Gas Plant which processes natural gas from the Bakken formation making for a dramatic backdrop for photographs.
The impressive Tioga Gas Plant. Originally built to process gas during the first Bakken boom, the plant has been continuously updated and recently expanded to accommodate production during the most recent oil boom. Hess and its predecessor Amerada Oil Company has been the major player in the Bakken since the 1950s. Today, their plant is the largest such facility in the area and it is fed by over 2000 miles of pipeline. The plant processes natural gas into butane, propane, and natural gasoline and other petrochemicals which are used to make plastic. These products are exported by pipeline and rail to national markets.
Downtown Tioga is worth passing through, if only for its small town charm. Despite the increased traffic and gaggles of official looking pickup trucks, it is possible to envision businesses in downtown Tioga serving a rural community unaffected by the oil boom. The city center is free of chains or “big box” stores, and small-town facades communicate a mom-and-pop feeling for a town that calls itself the “Oil Capital of North Dakota.” The food and service at the Sportsman Cafe and Steakhouse is decent, and the small town feel contrasts with the seemingly endless flow oil patch workers. The towering grain elevators compete with church steeples to represent two key values central to the history of many North Dakota small towns. Curiously there is little in Tioga to explicitly commemorate its central place in the history of oil production in North Dakota.
Continuing west through the town reveals the extent of new residential development in Tioga. Between new housing developments, mobile home parks, and crew camps, the population pressure from the current boom is being met in a range of ways. The dearth of permanent housing available to new comers in the most recent oil boom serves as a reminder that the previous booms relied on temporary housing, and housing stock in the town of Tioga remained inadequate to accommodate the more recent influx of workers. At the western edge of the town along the route of the railroad there is a small, geometrically organized temporary workforce housing facility. In 2012, many of the residents of this camp were surplus labor for a large regional trucking company. They earned enough to pay rent in the camp and have some food, but they spend most of their days waiting to get a call to come to work. Immediately to the west of this camp is a large rail terminal also built by Hess to transport Bakken oil and other products to refineries and markets outside the region. During construction workforce lived on site.
Depart town by heading south on ND Route 21 toward US Route 2. At about a half a mile from the turn onto ND Route 21, turn right onto ND Route 19 and continue 5 miles through the gently rolling countryside to the town of Temple, ND.. This short detour introduces a largely abandoned town that even in the 1950s only had 20-odd residents. During the opening rush of the first boom, the now-vanished train station in Temple served as a major depot for North Dakota crude oil. Contemplate the difference between the Hess Tioga rail yard and the now abandoned town of Temple before returning to ND Route 21 and heading south toward US Route 2.
If traveled in the fall or late summer, the rutted roads around Tioga will provide a clear testimony to the heavy infrastructural demands of oil production. ND Route 21 intersects returns to the comfortable pavement of Route 2 at the 3 mile mark. Turning right (west) on Route 2 toward Williston passes three more examples of large scale workforce housing in the Bakken. The first camp on the left is so-called Wanzek Camp. Further along on the left is the Target Logistics Tioga Lodge, and then Capital Lodge is on the right side of the road heading west.
Target Logistic’s Tioga Lodge opened in 2010 and features over 1000 beds. When it was opened this camp was the largest workforce housing facility in the U.S. and it was primarily designed to house employees at the Hess facility in Tioga. The site features an innovative, modular sewage treatment facility that serves the nearly 4,000 beds presently deployed in North Dakota. Waste water is trucked to Tioga for processing and the resulting grey water is used for purposes ranging from dust control on roads to agriculture. It is interesting to note that the sewage treatment facility at the Target compound is far more sophisticated than the facility serving the town of Tioga’s 1500 residents.
Across US Route 2 is Capital Lodge which can house close to 1000 residents, but recently put on hold a major expansion. Unlike the Target camp which provides rooms only for specific companies, it is possible to arrange to stay in Capital Lodge. While their policies have changed recently, it remains possible to get a room in the camp for a few days and use it as a base of operations for exploring the area, but this requires contacting the facility some weeks in advance of your trip. The rooms are spartan, but comfortable and the food in the dining hall is abundant and has a distinctly southern flavor which both reflects the southern base for the company running the camp and the tastes of many of the residents. The dining hall, common spaces, and staff offices occupy an impressive inflatable quonset hut. This camp as well as the Wanzek Camp across the Route 2 both saw episodes of violent crime in the last few years, but these appear to be isolated incidents and both camps responded with more rigorous security.
For more, continue on to: Route 3:Tioga to Williston
