Pogo Moose Incident

In 2005, we spent our Christmas vacation in Redmond Oregon at my wifes sisters (IOW: my sister-in-law) place. Her husband (at the time, but no longer), Terry, a high voltage lineman, told me the following story and showed me original prints of these pictures (unfortunately I didn't get a copy or pic of them) and the tee shirt I took these pics of. I just ran across these while browsing through my old photos and decided to post them up and write this blog entry.

Terry was working for City Electric on a contract to string up a power transmission line to the Pogo mine in Alaska. They would run the cable through the pulleys you can see in the picture, pole after pole and eventually pull them tight through many poles at once.

Terry told me that he was sitting on the back of his service truck eating lunch while others on his team pulled the lines tight. When the lines lifted off the ground in front of him he noticed that one of the lines was twitching and moving around in a very unusual way. They went to investigate and this is what they found:

I couldn't put my watermark on these pics because I didn't actually take them. These are however copies of the original prints I did see with my own eyes. The next two pics of the commemorative tee shirt he showed me that he and his team members received I did take and therefore do bear my watermark.

He went on to tell me that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had to shoot the moose because it was too dangerous to try to detangle the animal even while tranquilized. The meat from the animal was donated to needy families in the area.

Verified by snopes.com and joe-ks.com, not that this makes it a fact, but I do believe I got the story from it's source.