Alaska Part One - We're Going to Land Where?

As I looked out the airplane window the snow-capped mountains touched the sky. A broad bay licked mud flats blending to salt marshes then to verdant muskegs, all laced with watery tendrils bisected by a slate blue river. I spotted a glacier deep in a mountain pass. Our flight path would take us closer. This was the Alaska of my father’s reminiscence. I had arrived.

The pilot’s voice drifted through my trance, “We’ll be landing over there.”

I craned my neck. Perhaps Anchorage was ahead and not yet in view though the plane banked and began a slow circle illuminating the glacier in sharper relief.

More distinctly I heard, “I have not landed here in years.”

What did he mean “…not landed here in years?” Doesn’t he fly this route all the time? I looked harder for signs a runway, or anything approaching civilization. My watch indicated we had at least an hour left. What was going on?

“Yep! That should do,” came his announcement and with that the plane powered back and we began a frightening descent into the abyss.

We hit the ground and bounced, then settled down and rumbled over rough gravel. Behind us the plane’s tail shimmied side-to-side. Then we were stopped.

“That was a terrible landing, just terrible!” the pilot quipped.

We were alive. That made it a good landing. Any landing from which you walk away is a good landing.

I extracted myself and walked weak-kneed through the scrub. On a small knoll I spun a gawkish pirouette. In the middle distance the Knik Glacier rose above a narrow lake. An icy blue archipelago floated before it.

I turned again and looked upon the aircraft from which I had emerged, a gold and white two-seat bush plane. The pilot, Bill Quirk, busied himself near the doorway looking for his camera to take with us on a hike to the ice field.

To say Bill is enthusiastic about bush flying would be an understatement. As a young boy growing up in south central Louisiana he caught the flying bug after a helicopter ride with a local pilot. Though his aviation aspirations were stifled by his family, his interest remained and finally in his mid-thirties he joined an Army flying club near Anchorage, Alaska where he worked as a natural resources manager for the Department of Defense. He soloed in 1976 and has since amassed several thousand flying hours and written two books on Alaska bush piloting. It was through Bill’s work as a federal land manager that he met my stepmother, who in turn tracked him down for me.

We walked through the scattered brush down a winding descent to the water’s edge. The icebergs drifting in the light gray water looked much larger now than they had flying over them. Some had smooth pale white contours while others rose in jagged, blue spikes. Bill lamented that the glacier was now only half the size it was a few decades ago. The glaciers in the Alaska Pacific Range are melting, and I could see it both here at Knik and on my airline flight in along the coast where tall, dark ledges surrounding the flows marked where ice had once been. Bill considers he has lived during the “golden age” of bush flying in Alaska before the melt when he could do winter ski-landings just about anywhere.

 
We returned to the aircraft and with an equally bumpy take off the plane, an Arctic Tern, leapt into the air. We turned northwest out of the pass, the Chugach mountains rising sharply to our left and Lazy Mountain towering over Butte and Palmer to the north. Beneath us, the chalky-blue Knik River meandered along the base of the mountains. Scattered ponds and creeks separated by lemon lime colored grasses filled the remaining expanse as far as the eye could see. Bill shot another landing on a gravel bar though rather than exiting he offered, "Let me take take you to a better place." Up we went again.

Our third landing did not disappoint. We put down on a broad gravel bar in the middle of the Knik River. The Glenn Highway Knik River Bridge was visible immediately to our east leading to Butte. As we walked Bill pointed to a tall Chugach peak and recounted an arduous hike to its summit years ago, “I couldn’t do that now. I’m too old.”

"You want to see some moose," he blurted as we walked back to the plane.

"Well, sure." I half expected he would snap his fingers and bulls would appear though it did not take much more than that.

Part of Bill's role as a natural resources manager was to conduct aerial wildlife surveys. In his book he recounts detailed surveys of moose, Dall sheep, bald eagles, bear, trumpeter swans, and even beluga whales though they proved elusive. Now retired he still enthusiastically tracks swans and moose.

Within minutes of flight over the muskeg he banked the plane sharply to the right and pointed, “See the cow moose and her calf?” I did. We proceeded to do a number of sixty degree figure-eight turns all the while spotting more moose and swans. My stomach was reeling.
 
Soon we pointed straight west then southwest toward Anchorage while Bill recounted his favorite flying exploits over the headset. We settled down for a smooth landing on the gravel runway at Merrill field, and the tower controller chatted with Bill about the swans.

Once out of the plane Bill was eager to continue his narrative, but my time was short and I was eager to see more of Alaska in the few hours before my trip home. I gave Bill a heartfelt thanks, jumped in my rental car, and rolled off the tarmac.