In a collection of journal entries, sketches and photographs, Margaret Piggott, 89, details her account as a woman and an environmentalist working during the 1970s on the Klondike Highway and the Alaska Pipeline in her second book, “No Place to Pee.”

“There was no place to pee,” Piggott said of working in the all-male environment of road and pipeline construction nearly four decades ago. “You had to go behind a tree or under a machine and pee there.”

Being a woman in a man’s world is a theme of the book, as Piggott details life in short diary bursts in between breaks from work, her takeaway from experiences working in a man’s world.

“They don’t like women,” Piggott said. “Women are too uppity, unless you’d go to bed with them.”

Her entries range from weather reports, “Sunny, slight wind, it was cold with a low of minus thirty and high of minus four,” to her various encounters with sexism. “I suggested to Al that when the powder class started, I would attend. Al treated me like a kid and said he was not giving one! Mike told me later: ‘He didn’t teach you because you can’t explain things to a woman!’”

Piggott, who studied physical therapy in England, traveled to Alaska for work. She landed an itinerant therapist job in Ketchikan but was later fired for her role in a local conservation organization.

“I got fired because I was a conservation nut,” Piggott said. “I was fired for being a secretary of the Ketchikan Conservation Society.”

But the job introduced her to Southeast Alaska, so she moved to Glacier Bay where she found inspiration for her first book, “Discover Southeast Alaska with Pack and Paddle.”

She later moved to the Upper Lynn Canal and spent time in Haines and Skagway and in 1975 got a job working on the Klondike Highway. She put in 10-hour days with jobs ranging from working with the bush crew and powder crew to operating drills in the Laborers’ Union 942.

Piggott said she took the construction jobs, in part, for the money. In 1977, for example, she grossed nearly $40,000 in today’s dollars during the season, but she worked to serve as an environmental watchdog. She was opposed to the pipeline and thought “it would create an ugly scar across the Alaskan wilderness” and that its construction would harm wildlife populations. She admonished her peers for littering food waste and packaging along the pipeline, and was made fun of by the workers, until a bear came and entered their bus one day.

But it wasn’t all bad. In a final diary entry while working on the Skagway-Carcross Road with the brush-clearing crew, she wrote about a late-night romp.

“Before I went out on the town with the boys for the party, I bathed and washed my hair,” Piggott wrote. “We had supper, and a presentation at the Klondike for Terry (the main boss), and he danced with a female hand for the first time! That hand was me. It was 1:30 a.m. when I went to bed.”