The Bakken Oilfield is a region in North Dakota where oil is quite literally king. Last summer I spent time working there before my fall semester of college began, and it was an unforgettable experience.
I moved to the Bakken all by myself. Upon confirmation of a job there, I packed my stuff and made the 8 hour drive with no knowledge of the area and no friends or connections there. As many people know, oilfields pay high wages, but there is a reason for that. The climate is unforgiving, and the hours are insanely long. I worked as a rigger for a crane crew, and we did a number of things. From setting tank batteries to building and servicing pumping units, the majority of my time was spent on oil pumping locations. In the brief time while I was there, I had only one Sunday off. I worked 7 days a week and on average 85 -100 hours a week! I did not receive a single check in which I had less overtime hours than regular hours.
We would frequently start earlier, but normally I would wake up around 5:30 am and be at the shop by 6 am. Grabbing breakfast from any of the numerous gas stations in the area, we would be on the job site by 7. Sometimes jobs would take multiple days to complete, but more often then not we would do several jobs a day on different locations. Sometimes these pumping sites would be hours away from each other so we would have to rig up the crane and haul our other rigging equipment all over western North Dakota. This also meant we had to rig up and rig down the crane several times in a day, and that is a task that takes a lot of work! Many times we would end up hours away from the shop, so if we were home by 8 pm it was considered an early day. Each night I would get about 1-1.5 hours of personal time, which I would use to go grocery shopping or grab supper from town. After that, I had to be in bed to get enough sleep for the next day.
Working 7 days a week is kind of a strange but freeing concept. I started to lose track of the days and ditched the feeling of working for the weekend. At the end of my tour, I had no concept of Saturday and Sunday, because they were still simply working days, just like a Wednesday! Looking back at my time in the Bakken, it was the hardest I have ever worked in my life, yet I prospered in the rough oilfield lifestyle. It was incredibly hard to come back to South Dakota and readjust to shorter workdays and getting weekends off work. In my current position in life I have too much invested in my life here to move back, but I often miss beautiful sunrises and the stench of raw oil. The hard work and long hours may seem unbearable, once you live it for some time it becomes normal. The pay checks also make it worth it 100 times over!
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