Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I think of my aircraft of choice, the Piper Super Cub, and hold my tongue.
And then the Alaska Range rises up in front of us like gleaming white teeth, jaws open,
ready to bite. Michaelangelo on his best day never conceived of anything this glorious and
this terrifying. Massive, immense pillars of granite, fractured and fissured like stone crys-
tals, soaring before and behind and on either side. Layers of snow clinging to sheer vertic-
al faces of rock, varying in hue from smoke to charcoal. Broken Tooth, a notched peak
whose rust-streaked facade looks like dried blood, as if it had been jerked that morning
from the jawbone of a T. rex.
And then the vast white river of ice known as the Kahiltna Glacier, with seventeen
thousand feet of Foraker looming up on the left, the pyramidal massif of Hunter on the
right, and before us, filling the sky, all twenty thousand feet of dromedary-backed Denali,
the highest peak on the North American continent.
We can see the brightly colored tents of the Kahiltna Base Camp next to a smoothed-
down section of the glacier's surface that serves as the base camp's airstrip, from which a
ski plane is just taking off. Further up the glacier, two more tents are pitched just below a
ridge, the owners either on their way up to the summit or on their way back down. Three
climbers hang by ropes from a sheer rock face, looking like tiny red and blue flyspecks
against the immensity of the surrounding peaks.
Up Ruth Glacier and the Great Gorge to the Don Sheldon Amphitheatre we fly, south of
Hunter Peak and up to the head of Kahiltna Glacier and down again through Little
Switzerland. It is Shangri-La. It is NeverNever Land. “You,” I say to Rich, “have the best
job in the world.”
“It's just like work,” he replies with a grin. “Only different.” He gets on the loudspeak-
er. “That's as good as it gets, folks. Now it's just a boring ride back to Anchorage.”
Our visit to Denali has lasted forever and a second. All of us have our faces mashed up
against the windows as we leave the Alaska Range behind to regain the Susitna River val-
ley once again. Lisa Joyner is starstruck. “I've been waiting since I was a little kid for
this,” she says as she snaps one last picture.
To ease the pain of parting, Francesca pours us more champagne, offers us chocolate
chip cookies and Cracker Jacks, and invites us to play the Guess the Date Game. “It was
the year Winston Churchill coined the name the Iron Curtain, and the year the bikini
