Travelers' Tales Alaska Read Online Free

andpoints the airplane squarely toward that hulking silhouette.
    Geeting’s craft is a Cessna 185, a six-seater with about as much room inside as a small Japanese station wagon. On this particular flight he is carrying three passengers, who are jammed into the cabin like sardines beneath a heap of backpacks, sleeping bags, skis, and mountaineering paraphernalia that fills the airplane from floor to ceiling. The three men are climbers, and they have each paid Geeting two hundred dollars to be flown to a glacier at the 8,500-foot elevation on Mt. McKinley, where they will spend the better part of a month trying to reach the 20,320-foot summit.
    Approximately one thousand climbers venture onto the slopes of McKinley and its satellite peaks each year, and landing them on the high glaciers of the Alaska Range is Doug Geeting’s bread and butter. “Glacier flying”—as this demanding, dangerous, little-known facet of commercial aviation is generally termed—is practiced by only a handful of pilots the world over, eight or nine of whom are based in Talkeetna. As jobs go, the pay isn’t great and the hours are horrible, but the view from the office is tough to beat.
    Twenty-five minutes out of Talkeetna, the first snaggle-toothed defenses of the McKinley massif rise sharply from the Susitna Valley, filling the windshield of Geeting’s Cessna. Ever since take-off the airplane has been laboring steadily upward. It has now reached an altitude of 8,000 feet, but the pickets of snow-plastered rock looming dead ahead stand a good 1,500 feet higher still. Geeting—who has logged some fifteen thousand hours in light planes, and has been flying this particular route for more than fifteen years now—appears supremely unconcerned as the plane bears down on the fast-approaching mountain wall.
    A few moments before collision seems imminent—by which time the climbers’ mouths have gone dry and theirknuckles turned white—Geeting dips a wing hard, throws the plane into a dizzying right turn, and swoops through a narrow gap that appears behind the shoulder of one of the loftier spires. The walls of the mountainside flash by at such close range that individual snow crystals can be distinguished glinting in the sunlight. “Yeah,” Geeting casually remarks on the other side, “that notch there was what we call ‘One-Shot Pass.’
    â€œThe 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