Generations in the Sky

@ KÜHL

By Lance Leslie on October 03, 2024

7 min read

Raw Beginnings

“Fly an hour or walk a week.” That axiom of bush life in Alaska was written on a sign hanging over the door of legendary pilot and aircraft mechanic Robert ‘Bob’ Reeve’s ramshackle hangar and workshop on the airstrip at Valdez, Alaska, in the early 1930s. Reeve, a true aviation trailblazer on “the Last Frontier,” knew a thing or two about the dangers of both flying and walking in the hazardous terrain of steep canyons, glacier-fed rivers and towering mountains that cover much of the state.

While servicing the gold mining operations that dotted the heights above the coastal boomtown, Reeve had the idea to cut up a stainless-steel bar top and fabricate skis to rig onto his Fairchild 51 airplane. This innovative addition allowed him to take off from the slick tidal mudflats at low tide and land on the high snowfields where the mines were located.

In 1937, he put his plane to the real test when he flew two young Harvard Mountaineering Club climbers, Bradford Washburn and Robert Bates, to the Walsh Glacier at the base of 16,644-foot Mt. Lucania in the Saint Elias Mountains, the third highest peak in Canada and at the time the highest unclimbed peak in North America. Encountering terrible soft snow conditions, the plane and its trio of occupants were stranded on the glacier for several days until cooler temperatures hardened the surface.

Reeve narrowly executed the takeoff from the crevassed runway and vowed not to return, forcing the ultimately successful summiteers to undergo an epic—and hungry—150-mile overland march back to civilization. Despite the enduring journey home for these mountaineers, this adventure marked the beginning of mountain flying in Alaska.

The world’s very first glacier landing took place in 1932, when pilot Joe Crosson set his ski-equipped Fairchild monoplane down at the 5,700-foot level of the Muldrow Glacier on Mt. McKinley (Denali) in support of the ill-fated Cosmic Ray Scientific Expedition. Crosson would return to fly out the bodies of team members Allen Carpé and Theodore Koven, who perished in a crevasse fall, becoming the first fatalities on the mountain.

*Left to right: James Whittaker, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Bradford Washburn, Unknown.*

The names of early aviators like Reeve, Crosson, Carl Ben Eielson, Hakon Christensen, Virginia ‘Ginny’ Wood, and later glacier pilots Terris Moore, Don Sheldon, Cliff Hudson, Doug Geeting, and Kitty Banner are written large in the history of Alaska. As mountaineering developed into a major attraction for 20,310-foot Denali, along with the surrounding peaks of the Alaska Range, an expanding adventure industry that relied heavily on aviation was born.

The name of Don Sheldon is synonymous with the advent of commercial mountain flying. The young Wyoming native arrived in the Territory of Alaska in 1938, eventually making his way to the railroad and mining outpost of Talkeetna, where he found work cutting firewood and laboring in the nearby gold mining district in the foothills of the Alaska Range.

He also helped build Talkeetna’s first official airstrip, on the edge of the wide, braided Susitna River. After achieving his private pilot’s certification in Anchorage and serving as a gunner in B-17 bombers during WWII, the decorated Sheldon returned to Talkeetna in 1948 to start his flying business serving the miners, trappers, hunters and bush residents of the region.

But it was the arrival of the aforementioned Dr. Bradford Washburn in the spring of 1951 that set Sheldon on a career trajectory that would occupy the next two decades of his life.

In the years since Washburn’s historic mountaineering exploits in the Yukon and Alaska, he had served as a consultant for the U.S. Army during the war, testing cold-weather equipment in the high, sub-arctic environment on Denali.

During those years, he set a new standard in large-form black-and-white aerial photography of the mountains of the Yukon, Alaska and the European Alps and authored many articles for National Geographic magazine and other publications. The multi-disciplined Washburn was embarking on a mapping survey of the glaciers and peaks surrounding the Denali massif and needed a pilot who could access the remote and difficult terrain involved.

Sheldon had been recommended to him by Bob Reeve, then president of Reeve Aleutian Airways, who praised the young pilot’s skill and nerve. Ironically, later that year Washburn would introduce Sheldon to Reeve’s daughter Roberta, who 13 years later became his wife and an essential component of his flying operation.

That season, Sheldon and Washburn began flights into the Alaska Range, landing his special four-wheeled Piper Super Cub on gravel bars at the terminus of the Ruth Glacier to begin locating a survey station. By the following year he had acquired a set of the newly available hydraulic wheel-skis, enabling his plane to take off from the Talkeetna airstrip and land on the glacier surface.

Of his first landing on the upper Ruth, Sheldon remarked, “Hell, it was no big thing. I already knew that you had to look the area over before you landed, and had to do it in good light. The landing area had to be steep enough to slow you down as you landed uphill and assist you when you took off downslope. It had to be smooth enough to keep you out of the crevasses and offer enough room for an overrun.

After that, I just went ahead and did it.” He made hundreds of glacier landings with Washburn during the survey project that encompassed eight years, and which would eventually take Washburn over two decades to fully complete, producing a beautifully detailed map of the Denali massif that is a veritable work of art.

Don Sheldon’s mountain flying exploits are too numerous to recount here, but it can be said that he was involved in virtually all of the groundbreaking first ascents, and notable rescues, in the Alaska Range, Wrangell Mountains and Saint Elias Mountains from 1951-1974, a period that is considered to be the golden age of mountaineering in Alaska.

In the course of his flying career, the tireless pilot made close to 5,000 mountain flights and landings. He was the first commercial aviator to see the potential of opening the icy vastness of peaks and glaciers to an adventure-hungry public, and others would eagerly follow his lead into the ensuing decades.

A Flying Legacy Continues

What began as a rough-and-tumble, by-the-seat-of-the-pants business back in the 1930s has progressed to the technology of the 21st century. While avionics have evolved considerably, mountain flying techniques remain largely the same as when Don Sheldon first put his Super Cub’s skis down on the Ruth Glacier over 70 years ago. In Alaska, the professional pilots of today have a rich aviation legacy from which to draw knowledge and inspiration.

Joe McAneney, currently in his second year of flying for K2 Aviation in Talkeetna, views his profession as a continuum. “It’s hard to place myself in the lineage of so many great pilots that frequented the same Alaska Range that I do almost daily,” he says. “Something that does cross my mind a lot is when I’m flying through a well-known pass, imagining all of the legendary pilots who were seeing those exact same features and the varying conditions they encountered.

The mountains don’t change much in 100 years, but the ranks of pilots who have come and gone has spanned many names and legacies, and I take inspiration from all aspects regarding those bold aviators and their various eras. It’s both humbling and addicting to be doing this same kind of flying in one of the greatest and most challenging landscapes in the world, my backyard.”

Andrew Esola, himself a private pilot and professional aircraft mechanic who works closely with McAneney at K2, shares a similar perspective. “The lineage of Talkeetna and the lineage of the aircraft themselves become somewhat intertwined,” he notes. “We aren’t blazing trails like the founders of aviation in this community, but at the same time we are keeping 70-plus-year-old airplanes in the sky, and safely bringing a little piece of that wonder to people daily.

In a way, we’re museum curators—these planes are workhorses, but at the same time they get more attention and love than rare classic cars!” He adds, “It started with the ‘tube and rag’ airplanes going where no one had gone before, but here we are today with similar machinery from the same era doing the same thing. Being a part of the few remaining operators of these vintage aircraft, it feels like the story is ongoing.”

Featured image by Bradford Washburn.