“The first rule of mountain flying,” the pilot goes on to explain in the laid-back tones of his native California, “is that you never want to approach a pass straight on, because if you get into some unexpected downdraft and aren’t able to clear the thing, you’re going to find yourself buying the farm in a big hurry. Instead of attacking a high pass directly, I’ll approach it by flying parallel to the ridge line until I’m almost alongside the pass, and then turn sharply into it so that I move through the notch at a forty-five-degree angle. That way, if I lose my lift and see that I’m not going to be high enough to make it over, I’m in position to turn away at the last instant and escape. If you want to stick around very long in this business, the idea is to leave your back door open and your stairway down and clear at all times.”
On the far side of the pass is a scene straight from the Pleistocene, an alien world of black rock, blue ice, and blinding-white snow stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the Cessna’s wings lies the Kahiltna Glacier, a tongue of ice two miles across and forty miles long, corrugated by a nubbly rash of seracs and crevasses. The scale of the setting outside the plane’s windows beggars the imagination: The peaks lining the Kahiltna rise a vertical mile and more in a single sweep from glacier to summit; the avalanches that periodically rumble down these faces at a hundred-plus miles per hour have so far to travel that they appear to be falling in slow motion. Against this immense landscape, Geeting’s airplane is but a miniscule red mote, an all-but-invisible mechanical gnat droning its way through the firmament toward McKinley.
Ten minutes later the gnat makes a ninety-degree turn onto a tributary of the main Kahiltna called the Southeast Fork and settles into its descent. A crude snow-landing strip, delineated by a series of plastic garbage bags tied to bamboo tomato stakes, materializes in the middle of the glacier ahead amid a maze of gargantuan crevasses. As the plane gets closer, it becomes apparent that the glacier here is far from flat, as it had appeared from a distance; the strip, in fact, lies on a slope steep enough to give a novice skier pause.
The thin air at this altitude has severely cut into the Cessna’s power, and the plane will be landing uphill into a cul de sac of mile-high granite walls. Hence, Geeting cheerfully allows, “When you land here, there’s no such thing as a go-around. You’ve got to nail your approach perfectly the first time.” To avoid any unpleasant surprises, he scans the surrounding ridges for wisps of blowing snow that might tip off the existence of hazardous wind conditions. Several miles away, up at the head of the main arm of the glacier, he spies a blanket of wispy cotton-like clouds creeping over a 10,300-foot saddle called Kahiltna Pass. “Those are foehn clouds,” he says. “They indicate extremely turbulent downslope winds—rotors we call ’em. You can’t see it, but the air is churning down those slopes like breaking surf. You take an airplane anywhere near those clouds and I guarantee you’ll get the crap kicked out of you.”
As if on cue, the Cessna is buffeted by a blast of severe turbulence, and the stall-warning shrieks as the airplane bucks wildly up, down, and sideways. Geeting, however, has anticipated the buffeting, and has already increased his airspeed to counter it. Serenely riding out the bumps, he guides the plane on down until the glacier rises to meet the craft’s stubby aluminum skis with an easy kiss. Geeting taxis the Cessna to the uppermost end of the strip, spins the plane around with a burst of power so that it will be pointed downhill for takeoff, then shuts off the engine. “Well, here we are,” he offers, “Kahiltna International Airport.”
Geeting’s passengers crawl hastily out into the glacial chill, and three other alpinists, their faces purple and peeling from a month on the hill, eagerly climb on board for a lift back to the land of beer, flush toilets, and green growing things. After five minutes at Kahiltna International, Geeting snaps off a crisp Junior Birdman salute to the dazed-looking crew he’s just unloaded, fires up his Cessna one more time, and roars down the strip in a blizzard of prop-driven snow to pick up the next load of climbers, who are already impatiently awaiting his arrival back in Talkeetna.
From May through late June, the busiest climbing season on McKinley, it is not unusual for the skies over Talkeetna to reverberate with the infernal whine of ski-equipped Cessnas, Helio Couriers, and cloth-winged Super Cubs from five in the morning to well after midnight. If the racket ever cuts short anybody’s beauty rest, however, no complaints are registered, for Alaska without airplanes would be as unthinkable as Iowa without corn.
“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 Sh
eldon 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.
Alaska is hailed as the “flyingest” state, with more private pilots per capita than anywhere else in the nation. It’s also one of the most dangerous places to fly. Alaska’s crash rate is five times above the national average and forty-five people, on average, are killed in plane crashes annually. Bad weather, inadequate or non-existent navigation systems, and pilot error are to blame. Only a handful of the state’s 435 runways have control towers and many are unpaved and unlit—and those are the easier places to land. Where airports don’t exist, small planes equipped with skis, floats, and fat tires touch down on glaciers, lakes, and gravel bars.
—Andromeda Romano-Lax
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.…
Jim Okonek and Lowell Thomas Jr. have retired from commercial flying and Cliff Hudson has turned over his company’s flying chores to son Jay, but Talkeetna’s contemporary “flyboys”—which still include Doug Geeting—remain a competitive and adventurous bunch who transport climbers and an ever-increasing number of flghtseers to and from the Alaska Range.
—Bill Sherwonit
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.”
From the time he dropped into the cloud bank, Geeting was irrevocably committed. The peaks looming unseen in the mists beyond his wingtips left absolutely no room for error: If the pilot were to complete a turn a few seconds late, or steer a few degrees too far to the left or right, with each subsequent maneuver he would unwittingly compound the mistake, and the airplane would eventually plow blindly into one of a dozen icy mountainsides at 110 miles per hour.
“I made my way down through the cloud between the mountain walls,” Geeting says, “watching the compass, the clock, and the altimeter real close, listening for the climbers to yell, ‘Now’ when I buzzed over them. I figured touchdown would be right at seven thousand feet, so when the altimeter showed seventy-five hundred I lined up for final, slowed to landing speed and went on in. It was a real odd feeling, because in a whiteout like that you can’t tell where the sky stops and the glacier begins. All of a sudden my airspeed went down to nothing, and I thought, ‘Son of a bitch!’ Then I looked out the window and saw these climbers running out of the cloud toward the airplane. Damned if I wasn’t on the ground.”
Jon Krakauer is an outdoor and adventure writer and the author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, and Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, from which this story is excerpted. A contributing editor to Outside, he writes for many national magazines and newspapers. He lives in Seattle.
Travelers' Tales Alaska Page 3