No Kids, No Booze, No Pets: Inside North Dakotaâs Largest Man Camp
This article is for subscribers only.
TIOGA, N.D. -- The North Dakota winter is relentless. Air temperatures hover around zero degrees Fahrenheit. Yet that’s easy to forget here, inside a network of steel mobile homes opened in 2011 in the state’s northwestern corner. Guys walk around in flip-flops, shorts and T-shirts. They eat ice cream at regularly available opportunities and then sweat it off on a treadmill.
And they are nearly all guys. This is Tioga Lodge, the sprawling barracks that are home to men at the heart of the North American oil fracking boom. The compounds are known as “crew-camps”, or more often, as “man-camps.”