Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
steaming pool of morning mist. There were a few clouds and a lot of blue sky and the ho-
rizon went on forever.
Hans is a pilot first and a tour guide second, but that didn't stop him from banking a
quick hard right when he spotted a moose. We flew over rivers carving lazy S's into the
land, with glassy parenthesis outside the S's showing the channels of days gone by. I felt
like I was back in Mr. Kaufman's sixth-grade geography class. There were cabins here
and there, some on stilts in the middles of swamps, some on dry knolls with airstrips and
windsocks, some camouflaged so well by the trees clustering close to the walls that I
wondered if maybe that dark green roof was just my imagination. That person wanted pri-
vacy.
Half an hour northwest of Anchorage Hans put us down onto the Yentna River, where
Chris, an elementary school teacher, her brother and her uncles (one was a clown, liter-
ally; he gave me his card, “Herdie” The Clown it says) climbed out to go fishing. This
was Chris's second trip out with Rust's; her last trip she caught a forty-two pound king
salmon. She was hoping to better her record that day. From that dropoff Hans taxied up-
river so we could pick up five fishermen who had been there since Friday and were com-
ing out tired, grubby, hairy and happy. They'd all caught fish.
Megan says her father Hank started Rust's Flying Service in 1963 with a 1957 Super
Cub (that Rust's still flies) and a Cessna 185. It turns out Rust's only flies eight planes
after all, contrary to the fleet of fifty that I was imagining from the traffic over my back
yard, four Cessna 206s and four Beavers, with a soon-to-debut single Otter converted to
turbine. Hans leases his Beaver to Rust's for the summer, and then finds work Outside or
in Hawaii for the winter months.
If you laid a map of Alaska over a map of the South 48, the Alaska map would overlay
both borders and both coasts of the South 48. It's big, Alaska is, but it has only fourteen
thousand miles of road, only twenty-two percent of which are paved. That's why one out
of every 58 Alaskans is a registered pilot (I've met people who don't have a license to
drive a car but do to fly a plane), and that's why outfits like Rust's are lifelines for the oth-
er 57 of us.
Rust's started out as an air taxi for local customers, flying freight and passengers in and
out of remote locations with no roads to them. They still serve people with homes out in
