Travelers' Tales Alaska (4 page)

As many as a hundred bears—eighty black, twenty brown—come to Anan during any given year. Today, I lose count. There's a bear in the pilings of the platform, chasing fish into a dead-end cave. There's another on the hill opposite, twenty yards or so off. A third is hiding by crouching next to the platform stairway. Jean, a huge smile on her face, lifelong fear gone in sheer wonder, points out one in a cave on the other side of the stream. There are two more in the upper river. There's a brown bear, a yearling, in the stream below, pouncing on fish with legs splayed, butt in the air, body not yet sure what to do with the knees, while the fish get away.

There is no way to keep all the bears in sight at the same time. The forest is so thick there could be a dozen more out there, patiently waiting their turn at the river.

And this is a good thing. It's good to find out that nature still has you hopelessly outnumbered.

On our way back to the boat, a brown comes out of the bush and sits on the trail in front of us. In the movies, bears crash through the bushes, making as much noise as a freight train, but they'd be lousy predators if they did that. This one appears as silently as a ghost. She's three, maybe four years old, 600 pounds or so. She has a huge scar on her hind leg from a fight with another bear. She's about ten feet away. She looks at me. I look at her. A few minutes ago I'd watched her dissect a fish, her claws as agile as a surgeon's scalpel, as dexterous as
chopsticks, but the size of butcher knives.

I bow to her, in respect. She scratches her ear and walks into the bush, utterly indifferent.

She smells like a very large, very wet dog.

Here's the lesson from the bears, what I think Jean's taking home with her: Tarzan was never lord of the jungle. It's just that the jungle was so full, the animals didn't get around to eating him. What Tarzan was yelling about was not danger, but sheer joy. There's so much of it. More than we ever imagine.

Ed Readicker-Henderson has been traveling in Alaska since 1978, and is the co-author of eight guidebooks on the state. Over the years, he's been chased by wolves, charged by moose, attacked by eagles, ravens, and snow geese, and once had to deal with an enraged pika. Bears, though, are never a problem.

JON KRAKAUER

Glacier landings and flying blind without instruments are routine for the off-strip set.

I
T'S AN ORDINARY
J
UNE MORNING IN DOWNTOWN
Talkeetna, cultural hub of Alaska's upper Susitna Valley, population maybe 250 on a good day. The dawn breeze carries the scent of spruce and wet earth; a moose wanders across the hamlet's deserted main drag and pauses to rub her head against the fence of the local ballpark. Abruptly, out on the airfield at the edge of town, the peace of the young day is shattered as the engine of a small red airplane coughs two or three times and then catches with a roar.

The fellow in the pilot's seat is a big shaggy bear of a man named Doug Geeting. As he taxis his craft to the end of the runway, Geeting gets on the radio and files a flight plan in the terse, cryptic argot that's the
lingua franca
of aviators everywhere. “Talkeetna, four-seven-fox. We've got four souls to the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna. Three hours fuel. Hour and thirty on the route.”

“Four-seven-fox, roger. Wind three-five-zero at six, favoring three-six. Altimeter two-niner-eight-niner.”

“Two-niner-eight-niner, roger. Away we go.” With that, the thirty-five-year-old pilot pulls back on the throttle, the din of the engine rises to an unholy wail, and the little airplane leaps off the tarmac in the huge Alaskan sky.

Beyond Talkeetna's two airstrips, half-dozen dirt streets, and ramshackle assemblage of log cabins, trailers, Quonset huts, and souvenir shops lies a vast plain of black spruce, impenetrable alder, and waterlogged muskeg—a mosquito's idea of paradise that's flat as a griddle and barely 350 feet above sea level. Just fifty miles away, however, the immense ramparts of Mt. McKinley— the highest point in North America—erupt out of these lowlands without preamble. No sooner is Geeting in the air than he banks sharply to the left, buzzes west over the broad, silty braids of the Susitna River, and
points the airplane squarely toward that hulking silhouette.

Geeting's craft is a Cessna 185, a six-seater with about as much room inside as a small Japanese station wagon. On this particular flight he is carrying three passengers, who are jammed into the cabin like sardines beneath a heap of backpacks, sleeping bags, skis, and mountaineering paraphernalia that fills the airplane from floor to ceiling. The three men are climbers, and they have each paid Geeting two hundred dollars to be flown to a glacier at the 8,500-foot elevation on Mt. McKinley, where they will spend the better part of a month trying to reach the 20,320-foot summit.

Approximately one thousand climbers venture onto the slopes of McKinley and its satellite peaks each year, and landing them on the high glaciers of the Alaska Range is Doug Geeting's bread and butter. “Glacier flying”—as this demanding, dangerous, little-known facet of commercial aviation is generally termed—is practiced by only a handful of pilots the world over, eight or nine of whom are based in Talkeetna. As jobs go, the pay isn't great and the hours are horrible, but the view from the office is tough to beat.

Twenty-five minutes out of Talkeetna, the first snaggle-toothed defenses of the McKinley massif rise sharply from the Susitna Valley, filling the windshield of Geeting's Cessna. Ever since take-off the airplane has been laboring steadily upward. It has now reached an altitude of 8,000 feet, but the pickets of snow-plastered rock looming dead ahead stand a good 1,500 feet higher still. Geeting—who has logged some fifteen thousand hours in light planes, and has been flying this particular route for more than fifteen years now—appears supremely unconcerned as the plane bears down on the fast-approaching mountain wall.

A few moments before collision seems imminent—by which time the climbers' mouths have gone dry and their
knuckles turned white—Geeting dips a wing hard, throws the plane into a dizzying right turn, and swoops through a narrow gap that appears behind the shoulder of one of the loftier spires. The walls of the mountainside flash by at such close range that individual snow crystals can be distinguished glinting in the sunlight. “Yeah,” Geeting casually remarks on the other side, “that notch there was what we call ‘One-Shot Pass.'

“The first rule of mountain flying,” the pilot goes on to explain in the laid-back tones of his native California, “is that you never want to approach a pass straight on, because if you get into some unexpected downdraft and aren't able to clear the thing, you're going to find yourself buying the farm in a big hurry. Instead of attacking a high pass directly, I'll approach it by flying parallel to the ridge line until I'm almost alongside the pass, and then turn sharply into it so that I move through the notch at a forty-five-degree angle. That way, if I lose my lift and see that I'm not going to be high enough to make it over, I'm in position to turn away at the last instant and escape. If you want to stick around very long in this business, the idea is to leave your back door open and your stairway down and clear at all times.”

On the far side of the pass is a scene straight from the Pleistocene, an alien world of black rock, blue ice, and blinding-white snow stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the Cessna's wings lies the Kahiltna Glacier, a tongue of ice two miles across and forty miles long, corrugated by a nubbly rash of seracs and crevasses. The scale of the setting outside the plane's windows beggars the imagination: The peaks lining the Kahiltna rise a vertical mile and more in a single sweep from glacier to summit; the avalanches that periodically rumble down these faces at a hundred-plus miles per hour have so far to travel that they appear to be falling in slow motion. Against this immense landscape, Geeting's airplane is but a miniscule
red mote, an all-but-invisible mechanical gnat droning its way through the firmament toward McKinley.

Ten minutes later the gnat makes a ninety-degree turn onto a tributary of the main Kahiltna called the Southeast Fork and settles into its descent. A crude snow-landing strip, delineated by a series of plastic garbage bags tied to bamboo tomato stakes, materializes in the middle of the glacier ahead amid a maze of gargantuan crevasses. As the plane gets closer, it becomes apparent that the glacier here is far from flat, as it had appeared from a distance; the strip, in fact, lies on a slope steep enough to give a novice skier pause.

The thin air at this altitude has severely cut into the Cessna's power, and the plane will be landing uphill into a cul de sac of mile-high granite walls. Hence, Geeting cheerfully allows, “When you land here, there's no such thing as a go-around. You've got to nail your approach perfectly the first time.” To avoid any unpleasant surprises, he scans the surrounding ridges for wisps of blowing snow that might tip off the existence of hazardous wind conditions. Several miles away, up at the head of the main arm of the glacier, he spies a blanket of wispy cotton-like clouds creeping over a 10,300-foot saddle called Kahiltna Pass. “Those are foehn clouds,” he says. “They indicate extremely turbulent downslope winds—rotors we call 'em. You can't see it, but the air is churning down those slopes like breaking surf. You take an airplane anywhere near those clouds and I guarantee you'll get the crap kicked out of you.”

As if on cue, the Cessna is buffeted by a blast of severe turbulence, and the stall-warning shrieks as the airplane bucks wildly up, down, and sideways. Geeting, however, has anticipated the buffeting, and has already increased his airspeed to counter it. Serenely riding out the bumps, he guides the plane on down until the glacier rises to meet the craft's stubby aluminum skis with an easy kiss. Geeting taxis the Cessna to the
uppermost end of the strip, spins the plane around with a burst of power so that it will be pointed downhill for takeoff, then shuts off the engine. “Well, here we are,” he offers, “Kahiltna International Airport.”

Geeting's passengers crawl hastily out into the glacial chill, and three other alpinists, their faces purple and peeling from a month on the hill, eagerly climb on board for a lift back to the land of beer, flush toilets, and green growing things. After five minutes at Kahiltna International, Geeting snaps off a crisp Junior Birdman salute to the dazed-looking crew he's just unloaded, fires up his Cessna one more time, and roars down the strip in a blizzard of prop-driven snow to pick up the next load of climbers, who are already impatiently awaiting his arrival back in Talkeetna.

From May through late June, the busiest climbing season on McKinley, it is not unusual for the skies over Talkeetna to reverberate with the infernal whine of ski-equipped Cessnas, Helio Couriers, and cloth-winged Super Cubs from five in the morning to well after midnight. If the racket ever cuts short anybody's beauty rest, however, no complaints are registered, for Alaska without airplanes would be as unthinkable as Iowa without corn.