Travelers' Tales Alaska Read Online Free Page B

seat-of-the-pants bush pilots—larger-than-life figures like Carl Ben Eielson, Joe Crosson, Noel Wien, andBob 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 woundup 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