Donald Sheldon

But despite some discussions between the park and the Air Force and the Alaska Rescue Group, the Air Force just said, we're not going to fly in these conditions.

There was a well-known glacier pilot out of Talkeetna named Don Sheldon who flew when people didn't fly.

He rescued rescuers.

He was the man that you went to if you needed to get somewhere in an airplane.

And he said, I was in charge, but I had to trust the Air Force.

I had to trust the Alaska Rescue Group.

And he said, we had people like Don Sheldon, and he said, if Sheldon couldn't fly, nobody could fly.

And, you know, so he carried a little bit of guilt, I think, or I don't know if guilt's the right word.

That is the Alaska Range.

And threading through that gorge in a Cessna 180 with Tundra tires and a prayer was a man named Don Sheldon.

I'm Tail Dragger, and this is the Hangar on Radio Hangar.

Pull up a chair, because this one is worth your time.

They walked in, long, brutal approaches across the tundra, carrying enormous loads, weeks of travel before they ever touched the mountain itself.

The logistics alone defeated most expeditions before they ever got to the climbing.

Don Sheldon looked at that and thought there had to be a better way.

He had learned to fly during the war.

Nobody had ever climbed there before.

When Don Sheldon, the bush father, took his place, he said, jeez, you guys, those are steep rock climbs there.

You know, everybody goes to the big mountains, of course, Denali and Forca and stuff like that.

But nobody had ever gone in there to climb.

one man the climbers trust with their lives on approach and evacuation.

His name is Don Sheldon, and he operates out of a gravel strip alongside the Susitna River in a town called Talkeetna.

Population, not many.

I'm Tail Dragger.

He used a nunatak, which is a rock island that protrudes up through the glacier ice as a staging area.

He landed on the glacier surface near this rock outcropping, and eventually he built a small prefabricated structure on that nunatak, hauling the pieces in by air, one flight at a time.

The Don Sheldon Mountain House, as it came to be called, sits there today, used by climbers and researchers as a wilderness refuge, at an elevation of around 6,000 feet, surrounded by glaciers in every direction, accessible only by aircraft or by days of technical mountaineering.

Sheldon built it because his climbers needed somewhere to wait out the weather.

The pilot climbs out, hands a supply package to a mountaineer too frostbitten to say more than a few words, exchanges something short and practical, gets back in, and the engine note rises, and the little airplane lifts off the glacier and disappears back into the peaks like it was never there.

That was Don Sheldon.

And if you know anything about Alaska, you know that name.

I am Taildragger.

He had made significant first ascents in the range and had a gift for aerial photography that produced images of the high peaks that nobody had seen before.

But to make those photographs, he needed a pilot who could put a small airplane at a specific altitude on a specific heading over a specific ridgeline in conditions that were trying to push the aircraft into the granite.

He found Don Sheldon.

For years, the two worked together.

Noel Wien put the first aircraft over the Arctic Circle.

Don Sheldon would later build a career out of Denali Mountain flying that bordered on the supernatural.

They all share a quality with Reeve, which is the willingness to take the landscape seriously, not to fight it, to learn it.

Reeve outlived almost all of them.

Now put a little airplane on that ice, skis instead of wheels, a single engine ticking over in cold that turns oil to molasses, and put one man in the seat who looked at all of that and decided it was a runway.

That man was Don Sheldon.

And this is Radio Hangar.

I'm Tail Dragger.

It makes its own weather.

It grows storms out of a blue sky in about the time it takes you to run a run-up.

And in the years after the war, Talkeetna's airport was pretty much Don Sheldon.

Sheldon came up to Alaska as a young man in the 1930s, worked the railroad, did a little of everything a man does up there to eat.

There's just the mountain, and it's the tallest one on the continent, and you are about to land on it on purpose.

That was a Tuesday for Don Sheldon.

This is Radio Hangar.

I'm Tail Dragger, and you're listening to The Hangar, the show where we sit around and tell the stories that made this whole business of flying what it is.

And today I want to talk about a man a lot of folks outside Alaska have never heard of, and every folk inside Alaska will never forget, Don Sheldon, the glacier pilot of Talkeetna.

Before we get rolling, let me tell you who's keeping the lights on today.

Today's show is brought to you by AviationSoul.com. Aviation Challenge coins for every milestone in flight.

That's a human being.