Travelers' Tales Alaska (5 page)

“Alaskans,” writes Jean Potter in
The Flying North
, a history of bush pilots, “are the flyingest people under the American flag and probably the flyingest people in the world.… By 1939 the small airlines of the Territory were hauling twenty-three times as many passengers and a thousand times as much freight, per capita, as the airlines of the United States. The federal government and large corporations had little to do with this.” The driving force behind the development of Alaska aviation, Potter points out, was a ragtag assortment of self-reliant, seat-of-the-pants bush pilots—larger-than-life figures like Carl Ben Eielson, Joe Crosson, Noel Wien, and
Bob Reeve, who cheated death on a daily basis to deliver groceries and medicine and mail to outposts at the edge of the earth—of whom Doug Geeting and his glacier-baiting rivals in Talkeetna are very much the spiritual heirs.

A 12,800-foot peak overlooking Kahiltna International's makeshift glacial airstrip now bears the name of Joe Crosson, which is fitting, because it was Crosson, in April, 1932, who pulled off the first Alaskan glacier landing, on McKinley's Muldrow Glacier, where he delivered a scientific expedition to measure cosmic rays. According to one of the expedition members, Crosson took the momentous initial landing “much as a matter of course, and lit a cigar before leaving the plane,” though Jean Potter reports that the job resulted in “such risk and such damage” to the aircraft that Crosson's employer, Alaskan Airways, subsequently forbade him to engage in any further glacier sorties.

It was left to Bob Reeve—a high-strung Wisconsin-born barnstormer and bon vivant—to perfect the art of glacier flying. Beginning in 1929, the twenty-seven-year-old Reeve had been introduced to mountain aviation while pioneering extremely hazardous long-distance air-mail routes over the Andes of South America between Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires, where he occasionally shared a bottle between flights with a dapper, romantic French airman named Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who would soon thereafter write both
The Little Prince
and an intensely lyrical, hugely popular record of the early flying life,
Wind, Sand, and Stars.

Reeve left South America in 1932 after incurring the wrath of his superiors by smashing up an expensive Lockheed Vega. Back in the States, he promptly lost all his money in the stock market and contracted polio. Finding himself flat broke and seriously ill at the height of the Depression, he stowed away on a freighter to Alaska seeking a change of luck, and wound
up in the seedy port city of Valdez.

Unfortunately, Alaska had already attracted a host of hungry pilots in those Depression years, and there weren't enough paying customers to go around. Desperate for work, Reeve decided to specialize in a corner of the aviation market that not even the territory's boldest aviators had dared to go after: landing gold miners and their heavy supplies on the glaciers that flowed down from the jumble of high peaks surrounding Valdez. By trial and error, Reeve quickly developed a sense for steering clear of hidden crevasses, discovered that the incline of a glacier could be an aid, rather than an impediment, to making short-field landings and take-offs, and learned that by dropping a line of spruce boughs or gunny sacks onto the snow before setting down, he could establish a horizon and judge the lay of a slope on cloudy days when it was otherwise impossible to tell exactly where the ground was.…

By the 1950s, though, Reeve had moved on from Valdez and was unavailable for glacier work, so mountaineer and mapmaker Bradford Washburn was forced to turn elsewhere when he needed a full-time pilot for an ongoing nine-year cartographic survey of Mt. McKinley. A fearless young Talkeetna-based flyer named Don Sheldon was recommended. Washburn says that when he asked Reeve what he knew about Sheldon, Reeve replied, “He's either crazy and he's going to kill himself, or he'll turn out to be one hell of a good pilot.” The latter proved to be the case.

Taking advantage of the newly invented “wheel-ski” landing gear—which permitted a pilot to take off with wheels on a dry runway, and then, while airborne, lower a set of skis into position for landing on snow—Sheldon flew commercially out of Talkeetna for twenty-seven years, routinely logging more than eight hundred hours each summer in the malevolent skies over the Alaska Range. Along the way he went
through forty-five airplanes—four of them totaled in violent crashes—but he never injured either himself or a single passenger. His nervy high-altitude landings and life-saving rescue missions were legendary not only throughout Alaska, but in much of the world at large. At the time of his death from colon cancer in 1975, the name Don Sheldon had become synonymous with heroic glacier flying.

Sheldon's career coincided with the mushrooming popularity of mountaineering on McKinley; over the last decade of his life Sheldon was so busy flying climbers that in the spring and summer months he averaged just four or five hours sleep a night. Even with the onerous workload, though, most years Sheldon barely made enough money to pay the bills. “Nobody gets rich owning an air-taxi business,” explains Roberta Reeve Sheldon—Don's widow and Bob Reeve's daughter—who still lives in Talkeetna in a modest wood-frame house at the end of the village airstrip. “All the money you make goes back into the airplanes. I remember once we went to the bank and borrowed forty thousand
dollars to buy a new Cessna 180. Three months later Don totaled it on Mt. Hayes. I'll tell you, it hurts to be making payments on an airplane you don't even have anymore.”

Sheldon's financial woes were exacerbated by the existence of a second, equally talented glacier pilot in town, one Cliff Hudson, who started working out of Talkeetna a few years after Sheldon did. It was not a friendly rivalry: Sheldon and Hudson were forever stealing each other's customers, and longtime Talkeetnans still vividly recall a fistfight between the two pilots that splintered the candy counter in the B & K Trading Post and left both men with black eyes and split lips. Things got so bad between them that Sheldon once allegedly buzzed Hudson at extremely close range in midair, an incident that wound up in the courts and nearly cost Sheldon his license.

Sheldon—a cocky, ruggedly handsome ex-cowboy from Wyoming—looked every inch the dashing bush pilot. In marked contrast, Hudson—who is still alive and flying—might easily be mistaken for a stray panhandler from the Bowery, thanks to the soiled wool shirt, shiny polyester slacks, and cheesy black loafers that make up his standard flight uniform. Hudson's sartorial shortcomings, however, haven't diminished his reputation as a masterful glacier pilot.

The primary windsock for the village airstrip sits atop the roof of an infamous local watering hole called the Fairview Inn. It is not uncommon, within the Fairview's dimly lit chambers, to overhear barstool aviators bickering over the relative abilities of Hudson and Sheldon in the manner of baseball fans comparing Maris and Ruth, or Bonds and McGuire. There are denizens of the Fairview who argue that Hudson is at least as good a pilot as Sheldon was, pointing out that Hudson—incredibly—has yet to wreck a single airplane despite having logged more hours of glacier flying than any
After Sheldon's death, Hudson enjoyed a few relatively flush years without serious competition, but only a few: by 1984 there were no fewer than four air-taxi companies operating full-time out of Talkeetna—Hudson Air Service, Doug Geeting Aviation, K2 Aviation, and Talkeetna Air Taxi—all specializing in glacier flying, and all headed by brilliant pilots hell-bent on being top dog. Jim Okonek, the owner of K2 Aviation, candidly allows that “each of us considers himself the best pilot in town, and can't imagine why a person would ever want to fly with anybody else.”

Not surprisingly, the confluence of so many robust egos in such a small place throws off sparks from time to time. Insults are traded, clients are rustled. The pilots are constantly reporting each other to the authorities for real or imagined breaches of regulations.…

All of the pilots now regularly take planeloads of tourists, ordinary vacationers from Philadelphia and Des Moines, on sight-seeing flights to the glaciers. These trips have become so routine, in fact, that cynics suggest that the risk and romance has all but disappeared from the job—that glacier flying today isn't much different from driving a cab. Okonek, a retired Air Force colonel who flew helicopters in Viet Nam, disagrees, insisting that “this
has got to be the best flying job anywhere. Jacques Cousteau's pilot recently called to ask me for a job; top commercial pilots from all over the world have expressed interest in working here.

“I take quite a few airline pilots up to the glacier on their layover days,” Okonek continues, “guys who fly 747s for Swissair and Quantas, and it bowls them over to see the places we land, the terrain we fly over. Glacier flying still holds plenty of challenge. Pilots lacking mountain experience will fly up the Kahiltna for a look around and get disoriented by the incredible scale of the peaks. All of a sudden their little airplane is out of breath, they're out of ideas about what to do, and they crash onto the glacier. We see it year after year.”

And green, amateur flyers are not the only ones who smash airplanes into the Alaska Range. In 1981, an experienced Talkeetna pilot named Ed Homer took two friends on an afternoon joyride around McKinley, got caught in a down-draft while crossing Kahiltna Pass, and slammed his Cessna into the mountainside. By the time rescuers reached the wreckage four days later, one passenger was dead, the other had lost both his hands to frostbite and Homer had lost both his feet. “We're often up against a fine line in this business,” Lowell Thomas emphasizes. “It's just a question of whether you can recognize when you're stepping too far over that line. And there are definitely times—usually when we're called upon to rescue climbers who've gotten themselves into trouble—when we step over the line quite a ways, and do things that are extremely marginal.”

Geeting handles more than his share of those marginal flights. Several years ago, a climber plunged 70 feet into a hidden crevasse on Mt. Foraker—a 17,400-foot peak next to McKinley—and suffered massive head injuries. After two days of stormy weather stymied several rescue attempts, a doctor on
the scene radioed in desperation that the victim would die if he didn't get to a hospital soon. “It was completely socked-in,” Geeting recalls. “Visibility was zero-zero from the surface of the glacier all the way up to eleven thousand feet. But I'd landed beneath Foraker before, and I'd memorized the layout of the surrounding peaks and ridges, so I decided to take a shot at evacuating the guy.”

Geeting's plan was to approach Foraker above the clouds, get his bearings, and then establish a precise descent pattern into the soup. “I'd fly straight for exactly one minute,” he explains, “then turn for one minute, fly straight for another minute, turn again for a minute. It was a total whiteout—I couldn't see a freaking thing—but I trusted the course I'd worked out ahead of time and stuck to it. For a reference point, I asked the people on the glacier to give me a shout on the radio every time they heard me pass overhead.”