A seatbelt harness, wired headset, and two cameras in my lap contribute to the claustrophobia, but just millimeters of thin fabric stretched taut across a steel frame separate me from endless space. When Cloward banks the plane, I can see above and below the horizon through the glass roof, a sensation at once beautiful and unsettling.
“Most people don’t notice that,” he says. “People tend to look down, not up.”
As we cross the Childs Glacier, drafts and air currents buffet the small plane, nicknamed “Blue-52” for her color and the last two digits of her tail number, and we lift and drop without warning, drifting sideways like a hydroplaning car. I’m torn between taking pictures and holding the “Oh shit” handle over my seat, but Cloward looks as comfortable and unconcerned as a man in a La-Z-Boy. Off-duty, he flies his own plane—a beefed-up Cub with expanded wings, a stronger engine, a more-aggressive prop, and “tundra tires,” or bush wheels—that he calls Ruby. He talks about Ruby with the same tenderness with which some people talk about their horses.
“When I’m in a bad mood, my wife tells me to go fly,” he says. “It straightens me right out.”
The ice beneath us looks like a child’s science fair diorama, sprawling and detailed, the colors shifting from white to blue to black where the unrushed, transient ice carries centuries-old dirt along with it as it moves. Roughly 12 miles long and 7 miles wide, the Childs Glacier towers thirty stories above the water, dropping slabs large enough to create waves big enough to surf, as a number of YouTube videos attest—waves big enough to throw mystified salmon onto the beach near the glacier, leaving them easy targets for birds and bears.
Rain pushes against the windows. We clear the glacier and the landscape changes dramatically, the world suddenly watery variations of green as far as I can see. A thin mist dulls everything, imparting a soft focus, like we’re flying into a painting.
“Moose,” Cloward says, angling a wing toward the ground. I can’t distinguish anything in the texture of brush, somehow more disorienting even than the ice. He circles two or three times until I spot it, a giant bull in a small clearing.
As big as Alaska is, it looks even bigger from this vantage point. The horizon never gets any closer. We change elevation regularly, invalidating all my reference points. I don’t know if there’s a reason for it, something related to the laws of physics and aviation, or simply pilot’s whim. What looks one minute like a big tree the next seems a small shrub. Earlier, Cloward pointed out a brightly colored object on a beach that I thought was a fishing float washed ashore in a storm. He laughed, circled around and flew over again, lower. It was the hull of an overturned boat—a big one. How do you spot a lone hiker or hunter lost in the wilderness from here? “It’s even harder when there’s weather,” Cloward says. “Hunters are the worst to find, because a lot of the time, they’re dressed in camo. And if it’s not a SAR, if it’s poachers and they don’t want to be found, it’s even more difficult.”
He tells me about a search-and-rescue for two lost snowmachiners. He flew right over them and didn’t see them waving frantically. “When I found them the next day, they were pissed that they had to spend another night out there,” he says. “But they were OK, and that’s what matters.”
Regret lingers in his voice remembering the incident, but they were lucky he saw them at all.
The glory of Alaska stretches all around us, undisturbed. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any sign of human life, no cars or roads, no boats or cabins. No people. It’s easy to get in trouble down there, and when you do, you’re on your own. It’s a good place to get lost. A good place to hide too—the seemingly impenetrable vastness makes it tempting for some to hunt out of season or over limits, to jacklight deer, or bait bears illegally. But Cloward and the other troopers under his supervision at the Cordova post are always watching.
“We fly a lot just for visibility,” he says, “to let them know we’re up here. Let them know we’re watching. There are a lot of small planes in the area, and every time they hear one they should assume it’s one of ours. We do that with the boats too, just stop and talk to people to establish a presence. Quite simply, we have to foster relations with the people who inhabit these areas.”
There are just ninety Alaska Wildlife Troopers statewide. Remove management and allow for personal days, court dates, and shift changes, and you might have thirty covering all of Alaska at any given moment. It doesn’t sound like much given the size of the state. “It’s a staggering amount of country,” Cloward says. “How long have we been flying? We’ve covered about 32 miles. My coverage area extends another 125 miles from here.”
Airplanes are the best way to patrol much of that area, and in many cases the only way. Cloward flies nearly every day that weather allows. Statistics about the inherent dangers of flying in Alaska admit interpretation, but in general, aviation fatalities here are about twenty times higher than the rest of the country. Chalk it up to crappy weather, rough terrain, the high number of air miles logged by residents, and something the National Transportation Safety Board identified in a 1980 study as “Bush Pilot Syndrome”—the willingness and need to take repeated risks.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, aircraft crashes are the second-leading cause of occupational deaths in Alaska. In August 2010, a single month, twelve people died in thirteen plane crashes across the state, among them Alaska’s longtime senior senator, Ted Stevens. Ironically, Stevens had helped create a nonprofit foundation to promote a culture of safety among pilots and backed a federal initiative aimed at using technology to reduce the number of airplane crashes. He had survived a plane crash that killed his first wife some thirty years earlier, and the Anchorage airport is named for him.
Of the eleven Alaska State Troopers who lost their lives in the line of duty, five died in aircraft-related accidents. Another, Sergeant John Stimson, died of hypothermia after his helicopter crashed in 1983. At the time, Stimson was on a SAR for Gayle Ranney, a well-known local bush pilot whose Cessna 185 had been forced down 15 miles from the airport. Earlier this morning, Cloward introduced me to Gayle, a wiry, tough-looking woman in her sixties who’s done some remarkable things on wings around Alaska.
“Are you related to Bill Bernard?” she asked. “When I first came to Cordova with a friend, we stayed at Bill’s house.”
Small planes crash for many reasons, not the least of which is pilot error, but the more time I spend in the air with Cloward, the less I worry about that. He’s at ease behind the wheel, completely in his element, though he wears a fireproof Nomex suit and helmet and keeps survival gear in the plane because accidents still happen. You can minimize risk by choosing your weather, but that only gets you so far in Alaska—especially when flying is part of your job, your job includes rescuing people caught in bad weather, and their lives depend on you.
He tells me about a pilot he knows who carries a bowling ball on winter flights, which he drops out the window to test the thickness of the ice before he lands on it. “If it bounces, the ice is safe to land on,” he says. “If it breaks through, he flies home and buys a new bowling ball.”
Mechanical failure and weather pose the two biggest external factors that contribute to the high risk of flying in Alaska, but they’re not the only ones. “A few years ago I was flying a prisoner transport flight when one of them started getting rowdy in the backseat,” Cloward says. “He was kicking the bulkhead and throwing his weight around, so I turned to face him and said, as calmly as I could, ‘I’m dealing with wind, ice, and flying a plane. I don’t have time to deal with you. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to shoot you. Got it?’”
“What happened?”
“The other prisoners looked at me and all scooted to the other side of the plane. The other guy was quiet for the rest of the flight.”
The divisions of Alaska State Troopers and Alaska Wildlife Troopers are more or less tw
o sides of the same coin, distinguished colloquially by the color of their uniforms: blue shirts and brown shirts, respectively. Both fall under the state’s Department of Public Safety and have all the same powers and responsibilities, but the latter has a distinct core mission as Alaska’s game wardens and wildlife conservation officers. New recruits all train at the same public safety academy in Sitka and spend a year on patrol as a trooper, at which point some change their uniforms and go to work as game wardens.
Cordova’s post is part of the Alaska Wildlife Troopers E Detachment, which spans the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound. The divisions overlap at some posts, like Soldotna and Anchor Point—blue shirts handling criminal and traffic complaints, brown shirts sticking to more mission-related issues—but in Cordova the wildlife troopers cover all law enforcement that falls under the state’s jurisdiction. Cloward oversees a few brown shirts, and the motherly Dixie Lambert, who runs the office, handles dispatch and generally keeps the rest of the staff in line.
Enforcing the ever-changing regulations covering commercial, sport, and charter fishing, hunting, and trapping around the state makes for a complicated mission. Wildlife troopers also safeguard the land itself through watershed and environmental laws, enforce boating safety, and contribute to search-and-rescue efforts. In addition, Alaska Wildlife Troopers maintains a formal agreement with the government to enforce federal laws regarding endangered species and assist Fish and Wildlife, Marine Fisheries, the US Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Coast Guard. Each of those responsibilities comes with its own set of regulations, and to demonstrate the complexity, Dixie drags out a stack of printed regulations and drops them on the table. The table shakes beneath their weight.
There’s the Alaska Department of Fish and Game regulations, the Federal Aviation Regulations/Aeronautical Information Manual, and The Alaska Criminal and Traffic Law Manual, the first the size of the Oxford English Dictionary and each bigger than the last, plus the Pacific Halibut Fishery Regulations, the Migratory Bird Hunting Regulations summary, the Alaska Trapping Regulations, and the Statewide Commercial Groundfish Fishing Regulations.
“All updated every year,” she says. She takes pride in the work they do, and it shows. She may not be the boss, but the troopers are her boys, and each time we fly together Cloward checks his watch and says, “We’d better get back before Dixie starts to worry.”
A map covers the better part of a wall showing the Prince William Sound area. Cloward stands in front of it and spreads his arms like wings. “This is the geographic area we’re responsible for. Patrolling Cordova is Herculean. Enormous. Vast. Our coverage area is from Nuka Island to Icy Bay—about 30,000 square miles. A few hours east in a Cub, two hours west.”
So much space. So few roads.
We spend the morning in Cloward’s cluttered truck patrolling one of them, the Copper River Highway, while we wait for the weather to improve. Built on the old rail bed, the road stretches 56 miles from the ferry terminal to a viewpoint sandwiched between the Childs Glacier and the Miles Glacier. In between it passes Eyak Lake, Mudhole Smith Airport, and parts of the Chugach National Forest before crossing the Million Dollar Bridge, which officially is named the Miles Glacier Bridge and actually cost $1.4 million to build, an expense it quickly recovered by facilitating the railway transport of about $200 million worth of copper ore across the Copper River. Only the first 12 miles of the road are paved.
Cloward—one of those strong, silent, outdoorsy types who end up as cops, hunters, soldiers, or in his case all three—retired from the US Air Force and joined the troopers to become a game warden because of his love for hunting and fishing. When he busts a hunter for a game violation, it’s because he wants to protect the availability of game and future access to it, not because he’s an enforcement junkie. He’s also defending the sanctity of the hunt in a way by making sure those who practice it maintain the same high standards of fairness, honor, and tradition that he himself does. On the surface, he enforces, but at heart he’s stewarding the place he loves and protecting what he loves about it.
His uniform looks less militaristic than those of the blue shirts, including a baseball cap instead of a Stetson, and Cloward wears the authority of his position more like confidence than threat. His calmness has a disquieting aspect to it, though, an alpha dog’s ability to take control of a room simply by entering it. It takes him some time to decide he’s comfortable enough in my presence to loosen up.
Once he does, he’s very likable. He asks nearly as many questions about me and my work as I do about his. The structure of law enforcement appeals to him, as did the military, and in a few years he’ll be able to retire with a second pension and the better part of his life left to enjoy it. Only recently promoted to the Cordova post as sergeant, he’s new in town and trying to establish himself as the man in charge. That’s not the easiest way to make friends. People tend to respect the badge and gun in Alaska—troopers pull a lot of butts out of a lot of fires up here—but the hardware inspires a distance not always easy to overcome.
He keeps looking to the sky like he’s willing the clouds to thin and the rain to ease. The weather has cleared some since morning, but only subtly, and mist hangs in the air. It still might rain, but Cloward must see something he likes.
“I think we’re good to fly,” he says, his mood clearing faster than the weather.
The next morning we’re over the 1,100-square-mile Copper River delta, protected by a 50-mile series of sandbars. With geographic boundaries established by Fish and Game programmed into Blue-52’s GPS, Cloward flies over the salmon fishery looking for boats on the wrong side of the lines, which he identifies by registration numbers painted large enough to read from above. Just four bowpickers are working the flats beneath us, with no tender. From the water the boundary markers aren’t particularly clear—two placards on either shore, an imaginary line between them—and it seems like it would be pretty easy to drift across one with your mind on avoiding other boats, retrieving your net, and clearing fish from it as you haul it over the drum from the sea.
Cloward sees a binary: Either they’re over the line or they’re not. It’s their job to make sure they’re not, his to cite them when they are. Most violations are willful rather than accidental, he says.
It’s a quiet day, the weather calm, no wind to speak of, but currents visibly roil the surface of the water, and the force of the river at its mouth crashes against the pull of the tide. The conflict creates waves that wash across the sandbar like pulses on a heart monitor.
“See those waves?” Cloward says over the headset. “When the weather’s bad they peak ridiculously high. Dangerously so. The boats pitch with them, and if you get crosswise of one of them, you’re dead. They have to be down there, even when the weather’s bad. Safety doesn’t dictate the fishery—money does.” The regulations are different in each area of the geographically expansive fishery. From here they change at Cape Suckling, to the south, and Cloward has different rules to enforce on the other side of that line. It’s a lot to manage, especially while manning a tiny airplane subject to the same weather as the boats beneath it. “Most of these fishermen are honest guys just trying to make a living, but the ones who aren’t? That’s who I’m looking for.”
We head inland from the coast over an enormous field of fireweed in bright bloom. He angles down toward it and the glow fills three windows and the glass roof of the Cub, like flying into a pink sun. “Get a picture of that,” he says. “Dixie’s going to want a copy.”
We drop low and trace the route of a river for a while. We’re close enough to the ground to make out rocks beneath the surface, sticks in the current, individual plants along its banks. Cloward points out bear tracks in the muddy shallows.
“Three or four different sets,” he says.
After a few moments of squinting and staring, I see them. “How the hell di
d you spot them so quickly?”
“Practice,” he says.
We follow the tracks until we find the bears that made them, a brown bear sow and three cubs. All four rise on their hind legs as we pass. They’re investigating us, but it has the effect of a respectful, coordinated salute. “She’s been around here for the past week or so teaching them to fish,” Cloward says. “It’s pretty cool, really.”
We climb again and cross over a patch of more forested land, which gives way to muskeg. Then the land beneath us grows swampier, and we come upon a line of pilings that disappear into the bog. “Katalla,” he says, the big industrial and residential center before Cordova boomed. Founded after Alaska’s first significant oil discovery in 1902, within a few years the population had soared to over 5,000 in response to Big Mike Heney’s initial plans to route the Copper River and Northwestern Railway here. Steamships arrived, and the infrastructure—banks, stores, hotels, even a newspaper—rose to support it. A series of storms destroyed parts of the new town in 1908, including the jetty being built, and the railroad started second-guessing its decision. When it withdrew, so did the population, dropping to less than 1,000 residents by the following year. In 1910 the steamship Portland—the same ship that a decade earlier had launched the gold rush when it arrived in Seattle—sank just off the coast in another storm. That drove the final nail in the young town’s coffin. Fewer than one hundred people remained in town for the next two decades until a Christmas Day fire damaged the oil refinery in 1933. A decade later Katalla’s last residents abandoned it. From the air it’s a ghost town, haunting from above, like the remnants of a civilization that vanished.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 25