There were indeed crevasses. “Very gingerly and scared stiff,” wrote Brad, “I approached [the gear depot] by a series of wide zigzags.” The cached snowshoes, as luck would have it, lay near the bottom of the pile; Brad had to pull aside four or five hundred pounds of boxes to retrieve them.
Meanwhile, at the Fairchild, as soon as Brad had headed off toward the cache, Reeve had said to Bates, “Let’s get ’er gassed up right away.” The two men poured the contents of the five-gallon gas cans they had hauled to the Walsh into the tank.
Then Reeve said, “See if you can dig ’er out. I’ll try to taxi up to Brad.” With manic energy, Bob used Reeve’s shovel to dig away at the submerged skis, clearing a ramp just in front of the plane. Reeve got back into the cockpit and fired the engine. As Bob recalls, “He rocked the plane to get the skis loose. Then he started uphill, with me running along behind him in the deep snow.” Heading back toward his teammates with the extra snowshoes, Brad beheld a disheartening scene. “I watched the plane coming toward me up the gentle grade,” he wrote the next evening in his diary, “wallowing and roaring in the slush. Then, all of a sudden, the left wing slumped toward the snow, stopping only a yard from the ground. The motor roared louder, and then the wing sank to within a foot of the surface. From where I was, it appeared to be on it.”
The trio made a second try, with Bob and Brad taking turns digging out the now more deeply submerged craft. It took forty minutes of nonstop toil before Reeve was ready. He gunned the engine and rocked the plane, while Brad and Bob yanked on a rope tied to its tail; at last the Fairchild lurched out of its glacial hole. This time Reeve managed to taxi the plane several thousand feet up-glacier before it slumped once more. Recognizing defeat, at the last moment Reeve turned the plane sideways, so that it sat parked at right angles to the slope. Brad and Bob snowshoed up to the plane; then Reeve jacked it up so they could put wooden blocks under the skis to prevent the craft’s freezing in during the night. “Quite a workout on an ice cream soda apiece!” wrote Brad in his diary.
The only option was to wait for night and hope the temperature plummeted low enough so that the glacier might firm up. At the moment, however, the thermometer read 40°F, at an altitude where 20 to 25°F would have been normal in July. To make matters worse, rain squalls began to sweep the Walsh.
The three men trudged up to the cache, arriving exhausted at 7:00 P.M. Bob and Brad dug out the big four-man Logan tent and pitched it; then they rooted through the gear for sleeping bags and air mattresses. Even puttering about camp was perilous. Wrote Brad, “Both Bob and I fell into small crevasses not ten feet from the tent but caught ourselves with the shovel…. The whole place is just riddled with crevasses.”
In Bob’s memory, “We were so tired from gassing up the plane and digging it out, we didn’t feel like eating very much. We cooked up some soup and crackers and ate a little cheese.”
Reeve was known for his fiery temper: the townsfolk of Valdez talked about several legendary brawls in which he had taken part. But according to Bob, in the face of this unprecedented setback on the Walsh, Reeve neither ranted nor cursed, but maintained a stony silence: “He looked pretty gloomy when we got to the cache.” Still, all three protagonists felt confident that in the chill of early morning, Reeve would be able to take off on a newly frozen runway. As the men fell asleep around 10:00 P.M., it was still raining.
During the night, the temperature dropped no lower than 39°F. The men woke to find the slush that surrounded them unconsolidated. Attempting a takeoff was out of the question. Reeve stayed in the tent all day. A warm sun burned through banks of clouds; at noon, the thermometer read an outrageous 55°F. Trying to put a brave face on things, Brad and Bob roped up and snowshoed a mile or two up the glacier, reconnoitering the route they had set their hearts on six months before. At their high point, the clouds cleared for a few minutes, giving the men their first glimpse of the summit of Lucania, capped by a lenticular bonnet, towering 8,000 feet above them.
Reeve’s funk deepened. The pilot was, Bates later wrote, “wild to get home.” It was not as though he had never before been forced to sit by his stranded plane and wait out the weather. In February 1933, flying a couple, their four-year-old son, and their four-month-old baby to Nome, Reeve ran into a whiteout and had to make a forced landing on the frozen bed of the Kateel River. Hauling logs to build a bonfire, the pilot kept his passengers alive through a twenty-five-hour ice fog that prohibited takeoff; in the night, the thermometer reached minus 55°F. It was for this survival feat that Reeve first made newspaper headlines.
Several years later, alone in his Fairchild, Reeve ran into a violent storm and had to put down on a high divide only fifty miles from Valdez. There he waited out five days of bad weather, camping in his cockpit, living on canned corned beef and Ry-Krisp, using his tools to tune up the plane while he killed the empty hours.
In 1935, however, Reeve had met a spunky young woman named Janice Morisette, who hailed from a small Wisconsin town not far from the pilot’s birthplace. As restless of spirit as Reeve himself, Morisette had read about the aviator’s exploits and got up the nerve to write him a letter, asking, “Do you need a secretary, bookkeeper, or extra mine hand?” After a four-month correspondence, Morisette announced her imminent arrival in Valdez. The confirmed bachelor, terrified of women, fled on a prospecting trip to Canada rather than greet his pen pal. But curiosity modulated into romance. In 1936, the couple married.
Morisette’s first job in Alaska was as secretary to the Road Commission in Valdez. As Reeve later told his biographer, Beth Day, “Punching that ole typewriter, with her black hair and all, she reminded me of Tillie the Toiler.” “Tillie” Miss Morisette thus became, in homage to the famous comic book character of the ’20s and ’30s, a beautiful flapper turned hardworking stenographer. In early 1937, she gave birth to the couple’s first child, Richard.
Thus as Reeve loitered, trapped by slush on the Walsh Glacier through June 18 and 19, he badly missed his wife and his infant son—and worried about their worrying about him. Had the flight been routine, Reeve should have landed back in Valdez by 7:30 or 8:00 P.M. on the 18th. Twenty-four hours later, with no sign of him, “Tillie”—and Russ Dow and Norman Bright—could have only feared the worst: a crash landing, possibly a fatal one. No other pilot in or around Valdez had enough knowledge of the terrain to go check on Reeve. The Fairchild carried no radio, and in any event, no receiving station on the ground could have heard his distress call had he broadcast one.
If too many days passed and Reeve failed to appear, the bush pilots of Alaska would launch an all-out search, for despite their internecine rivalries, they looked after their own. In November 1929, when the most famous of them all, Carl Ben Eielson, disappeared on a bold attempt to push a flying route from Alaska to Siberia, all the best pilots in the territory launched a heroic search, despite the grim conditions of an Arctic winter. It took more than two months, however, before a pair of them found the wreckage of Eielson’s plane on an obscure hillside near the Siberian coast.
In the evening of June 19, as further token of the fluky weather, a violent thunderstorm crossed the glacier (such tempests are rare at 9,000 feet in Canada). Though the storm brought another deluge of rain, by 10:00 P.M. the temperature had dropped to 33°F, giving the men hope for an overnight freezing.
The rain, however, persisted through the night. Discouraged, the men lolled in their bags until 11:00 A.M. on June 20. In mid-afternoon, Brad decided to dig a pit to see how deep the snow lay here at 8,750 feet. Only six feet down, he hit bare ice. Both he and Bob had assumed that far more snow had accumulated over the long winter. Evidently, the rain and warmth had washed away months’ worth of drifts.
This new discovery added to the men’s sense of alarm, for it made it likely that, a month hence, those scant six feet of cover would have melted off, leaving bare ice and open crevasses, an impossible surface for a ski-equipped plane to land on. At the end of the expedition, Reeve would thus
most likely be unable to return to pick up the team. They would have to hike out from the Walsh Glacier.
At this point, however, Brad and Bob were still thinking in terms of a four-man team. On June 20, in a letter to his parents that he hoped Reeve might carry out with him, Brad expressed his first doubts about that fact: “Bob [Reeve] won’t be able to get in after the first of July so we must walk out…. In fact, I think we’ll be lucky if we can get the other two boys in here before the snow is getting too thin for safe landing. Bob and I are going to make a very careful search for cracks after Bob Reeve leaves for Valdez, and mark out with flags a safe runway for his next landing.”
Meanwhile, in the tent, Reeve brooded on, keeping his silence, gazing often at a photo of Tillie he carried with him. Hoping to improve his morale, the two climbers urged Reeve to join them for a roped stroll up-glacier, but the pilot refused. “You skin your skunks and I’ll skin mine,” was his gruff reply.
“Bob Reeve is so scared of cracks,” Brad wrote in his diary on June 20, “that he has not moved an inch from camp!” Washburn was right on this score, but at the time he was ignorant of the immediate cause of Reeve’s terror.
Just two years before, in the spring, Reeve had been eating dinner in a Valdez café when a miner stumbled in, hands and feet frozen. The man and his partner had been caught out on the Valdez Glacier just above town in a sudden storm. The partner had been left there, in danger of freezing to death.
Reeve leapt from the table, collared two friends, climbed into his Fairchild, and made a daredevil landing on the moraine beside the Valdez Glacier—terrain on which he had never before attempted to put down. Up on the ice, the trio of rescuers found the miner near death. They wrapped him in their coats, improvised a litter of sorts, and started to haul the victim toward the plane, but before they had gone a mile, the prospector expired. By now it was almost pitch dark. The three men left the body and hurried back to the plane.
In the darkness, Reeve stepped suddenly into empty space. Instinctively, he flung out his hands and caught hold of a rock imbedded in the wall of the crevasse. Before his strength gave out, his friends managed to pull him back to safety. They made their cautious way to the plane and flew back to Valdez. A dog team retrieved the body in the morning.
Twenty years later, Reeve described that near-accident to Beth Day, as she made notes for her biography, Glacier Pilot. According to Day, “The shock of that fall is almost as sickeningly vivid to Reeve today as it was then. For years afterward, he had to force himself to walk down an ordinary sidewalk in the dark.”
Dinner on June 20 was a bit more “royal” (in Brad’s phrase) than it had been the first night on the Walsh. The men cooked Knorr pea soup and then a goulash of chicken, rice, and gravy mix. They washed it all down with a drink made from powdered lemonade. By 8:00 P.M. the temperature was down to 32°F, the coldest yet. “A thin crust is beginning to form,” noted Brad in his diary.
Sixty-four years afterward, neither Bob nor Brad can recollect just how their friends Russ Dow and Norman Bright handled the long wait in Valdez without news. Nor did Beth Day think to interview Tillie about the cruelties of that vigil. Every bush pilot’s wife in the territory knew that she had to live with the constant fear that each flight might prove her husband’s last. Yet Tillie would have also known that the landing on the Walsh was far more dangerous than a routine ferry of supplies to a Chugach mine. And parenthood adds a heavy burden of angst to the bargain anyone who loves an adventurer strikes with fate.
The ordeal of those three—Tillie Reeve, Dow, and Bright—lies, unfortunately, beyond recapturing, for none of them is alive today. Nor is Bob Reeve.
Brad and Bob had jumped into the Fairchild for the first flight simply because they were the more experienced mountaineers. Yet it was by no means inevitable that that pair would have made up the team’s vanguard. Sometimes the leader of the party comes in on the last flight, after tidying up the last details of the frantic logistics that always bedevil a mountaineering expedition.
Be that as it may, the luck of the draw now dictated that Dow and Bright would be excluded from a journey that would turn out to be one of the great American adventures of the century. Brad and Bob share a vague sense that their friends took this huge disappointment in stride, that they stayed good sports to the end. Brad had chosen the men for that sort of quality. Neither was a first-rate climber, but Bob Bates himself had had only scanty mountain skills when Brad first met him at Harvard. Throughout his two-decade career of Alaskan campaigns, Brad would again and again choose his partners not for their technical ability, but for their character. What he sought above all was the capacity for hard work, the ability to get along under stress, a sunny zest for an arduous challenge.
Russ Dow had met Brad in early 1933. Dow climbed with Washburn on the Mount Grillon expedition. As Brad remembers, “Russ Dow was just solid gold from the marrow of his bones to the top of his head. He was a hell of a nice guy and a very strong backpacker. He didn’t get very far up the mountain, but we depended on his competence, and he was always fun to have around base camp.”
In 1937, learning that Dow was unencumbered, by career or school, Brad recruited him to form the one-man advance guard for Lucania. Arriving in Valdez in mid-spring with a ton of expedition supplies, Dow took a series of odd jobs while he helped Reeve organize the shuttle to McCarthy, then flew in on the historic May flights to lay the depot on the Walsh.
Norman Bright had a different background. A student at the University of Washington in Seattle, he was introduced to Brad and Bob by a mutual friend. He had done a little climbing, but in 1937, Bright’s claim to fame was that he was one of the top track stars in the country, second only to Glenn Cunningham in the two-mile. To accept Brad’s invitation to Lucania, he had to turn down a spot on an All-American track team touring Japan that summer.
Bob traveled with Bright by boat from Seattle to Valdez. “He was completely broke,” Bob recalls, “so we traveled steerage. We got along wonderfully with the cook and the crew, so they gave us extra of everything. At each little port on the way to Valdez, we would get off and help the stevedores move baggage.”
WHEN the three men on the Walsh awakened the morning of June 21, they were seized with wild hope. The freezing had done its trick: the surface of the glacier had turned to crust, atop which lay an inch of fresh snow. At 8:00 A.M., the trio snowshoed down to the plane. Brad gave Reeve the several letters he had written to be mailed from Valdez. Yanking on the tail, the men straightened the plane so it pointed down the runway. The pilot climbed into the cockpit, started the engine, and gunned the plane downhill.
As Bob and Brad watched, their elation turned to despair. After a promising first few hundred yards, the Fairchild began to bounce. Instead of gaining speed, the plane seemed to slow down. Later the men understood what had happened. The crust was only a thin glaze over a still unconsolidated swamp of slush. With each bounce, the plane broke through the crust, plunging deeper into the slush each time. Reeve managed a full mile of lurching, bouncing progress, a parody of a takeoff, before grinding to a halt just uphill from a mass of crevasses.
As fast as they could, Bob and Brad wallowed down the glacier to rejoin their comrade. There was nothing to do but tie a rope to the tail, turn the plane around, and let Reeve try to taxi back to where he had begun his abortive flight. The newly exposed slush proved diabolical. After only a hundred yards, the Fairchild slumped halfway in, up to the wingtip. Bob and Brad hiked all the way back to the cache, retrieved the shovel, and headed down once more to the stranded plane. They dug for half an hour before Reeve tried again. He managed three hundred yards. Now the plane lay more deeply mired than ever: the left wingtip actually was stuck a foot beneath the surface of the snow.
For the first time, Reeve began to wonder whether he might lose his plane altogether. With the energy of desperation, Brad and Bob recommenced their digging. “This time it was a terror of a job,” Brad told his diary; “she was in at least s
ix feet deep and at a terrific angle.”
It took three full hours of digging, then ten separate savage gunnings of the engine, before Reeve managed to jolt the Fairchild out of its potential grave. Only halfway back up the travesty of a runway, the pilot parked the plane sideways once more; then he jacked the craft up so Brad and Bob could plant wooden blocks under the skis. They returned to camp, oppressed by dark thoughts.
“Bob Reeve is a stoic and a prince,” wrote Brad that afternoon. “He certainly took the two wrecks this morning calmly.” But Reeve was making his own calculations. Quite apart from the dangerous futility of his failed takeoffs, each attempt used up precious gas. He might well eventually get airborne, only to run out of fuel before reaching Valdez.
By now the three men acknowledged that there would be no second flight. “It is a terrible shame for Russ and Norm,” Brad recorded, “but it would be ridiculous to risk their lives and Bob’s on another flight in here.” He added, “It will be absurd to try to take off again until we have rock-hard crust, even if it means waiting a month.”
Now Brad suggested to Reeve an even gloomier option. “Why don’t you leave the plane for another time,” he proposed, “and walk out with us?” If Reeve answered at all, it was with a scowl.
In one sense, the men faced no immediate danger. There was so much food in the massive cache that they could indeed have waited a month for the Walsh to firm up. But for a man unwilling to take a single unnecessary step outside the haven of the tent, that prospect was unthinkable. So was the gauntlet let of a hike out, across those eighty desolate miles of glacier, scree, boulders, alder thickets, and surging brown channels of the Chitina River that they had peered down upon on the flight in.
Escape from Lucania Page 3