Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the Bush, Megan says, it keeps the business going year round, but in the 80s tourism took
over and flightseeing was the name of the game.
Rust's know what they're doing, in the air and on the ground. That morning one of the
pilot's ran one of the Beavers onto a submerged mooring stake. They sent out another
plane to pick up the passengers, dropped off a mechanic to patch the hole in the float and
brought the Beaver back to Anchorage for a permanent repair. It was back in service that
afternoon. Business as usual.
We were weathered out of a tour of Denali and a glacier landing; Jessie Worrell, a
bright-eyed blonde who looks fifteen but who marshals troops better than Douglas
MacArthur, called all the passengers into the office to tell them the bad news and offer
them a choice of two alternative trips, flying on another day or a refund. There were about
thirty people whose plans had to be rearranged, and Jesse and the rest of the ground crew
got the job done in twenty minutes and passengers in the air in thirty. Business as usual.
It was one of the Cessnas that took us up to the Knik Glacier that afternoon, with pilot
John Seaman on the stick, who has been flying out of Lake Hood for seventeen years. We
took off east, heading straight for the Chugach Mountains. Like Hans, John is a pilot first;
like Hans, he can still talk, and, a local boy, he's forgotten more about Alaska than the rest
of us will ever know. I've hiked in the Chugach Mountains for years and until John told us
I'd never noticed how smooth each individual mountain was up to about thirty-five hun-
dred feet, becoming increasing rough and jagged above that. “Glaciers,” John said simply,
and it is simple when it's pointed out to you. Another geography lesson for me.
Sheer walls of rock thickly carpeted in glowing green lichen fell almost vertically three
and four and five thousand feet from beneath the right wing (don't take this trip if you are
even slightly afraid of heights), and the peaks were close enough to reach out and do
chinups on. We followed the edge of the range around to a wide valley carved out by three
glaciers, the Knik, the Lake George and the Colony, immense rivers of ice that reach deep
into the Chugaches. The Knik Glacier alone is twenty-five miles long.
Bob pointed out a tiny A-frame perched on the edge of a narrow gorge facing into the
valley. “A squatter,” he said. There was no airstrip for a plane, no clearing for a helicopter,
no ladder leading up the vertical cliff of the gorge. I wondered if the park rangers would
