small aircraft in Alaska

Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has DIED IN A PLANE CRASH IN ALASKA.

I’m sorry for Stevens and his family. But it also brings back memories of my own small aircraft flight in Alaska, which you have to do when you’re there. Alaskans probably fly more than any other population in the world; there is often no other choice.

My trip to Alaska was in the summer of 1998, during graduate school. The occasion was simply that I had flown to Europe enough times to earn a frequent flyer ticket on United, good for any flight within the USA. I noticed that Hawaii was specifically excluded, and that led me to look into Alaska. To my surprise, Alaska was not excluded.

And Alaska is an incredible place, I must say. I’m not an outdoorsy type, but it didn’t matter. I flew into Anchorage, rented a car for a week, and drove a loop from there up to Fairbanks and back down the other side to Valdez, then over to Anchorage again for departure. (Seward was completely booked and I couldn’t go down there, much though everyone recommended it.)

The gorgeousness of Valdez, whose 1989 oil spill now looks like a classroom prank in comparison with this summer’s incident, was probably the highlight of the trip. It was one of those things where I spent my first week back in Chicago trying to think of how I was going to move to Valdez. Obviously there was no practical way to do that for someone in my line of work, and the plan faded. But for that whole week I was seriously thinking: “I have to live in Valdez, Alaska. It’s too beautiful not to live there.”

But back to the small aircraft story… I found one of those flying services in Talkeetna (made famous by Jon Krakauer’s essay about the company, which is how I knew it existed and where to look for it). Our goal was Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley. An elderly couple from North Carolina was sitting in the office waiting; I believe there was a three passenger minimum, and I was the third.

The interior of the Denali range is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I hadn’t read Lovecraft at that point, but it was a lot like some of the Antarctic landscape described in “At the Mountains of Madness.” It is a vast interior zone of glaciers shrouded by mist and buffeted by high winds; you cannot see your way out of it while in there. If we had crashed in there and survived the crash (a possibility, since the plane was equipped with landing pontoons) we could easily have died of starvation or exposure before being found. You’re in the state of nature in Alaska, or as close as one can get to it in today’s United States.

On the way to and from Denali, we flew over lightly forested wilderness, where we could again have easily crashed and died of starvation before ever being found; the area is simply so vast. That wilderness area is also swarming with wolves and bears.

Overall, I was blown away by Alaska in so many respects. It’s nice to know that a place like that still exists. It vastly exceeded my expectations.

Here’s Valdez, below. (It’s pronounced val-DEEZ, which was a deliberate pronunciation change during the Spanish-American War of 1898, to make it sound other than Spanish.) And there’s a reason that the town is at the side of the water. Originally it was at the very end of the water, but in the 1960’s it was completely destroyed by the massive tsunami that rolled in. (You can see a diorama of what it used to look like in the town museum.) They wisely reconstructed the new Valdez several miles from the old location, and on the side rather than in the bull’s eye of some future tsunami.