Ruth Glacier
Glacier in AlaskaWikipedia
13
MENTIONS
6
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 13 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Ruth Glacier".
Sep 12, 2026
Tail DraggerHOST
Imagine you're in a Cessna 180, flying into a canyon so narrow the granite walls on either side seem close enough to touch the wingtips.
Tail DraggerHOST
Below you, the Ruth Glacier is moving.
Tail DraggerHOST
Not the way rivers move, the way nothing you've ever seen moves.
Tail DraggerHOST
It creaks.
Tail DraggerHOST
Not the way a distant peak fills a view, the way a wall fills a view.
Tail DraggerHOST
Don Sheldon stared at that wall for the better part of 30 years, and he figured out how to fly into it.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Ruth Glacier drains the southern flanks of Denali and its neighboring peaks, and it runs through what geologists call the Great Gorge.
Tail DraggerHOST
Now here's where it gets interesting.
Michael TelstadGUEST
I was like, oh yeah, we are able to operate in pretty stressful, difficult terrain well together and still have fun while doing it.
Jim AikmanHOST
Their first big trip together was back in Alaska, in the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier in 2024, where they did a new hard 4,660-foot route on Mount Bradley that they named Sports.
Jim AikmanHOST
From there, they were hooked.
Jim AikmanHOST
Alaska was the place.
Tail DraggerHOST
Sheldon operated at that edge constantly, and he knew exactly where the edge was.
Tail DraggerHOST
Let me tell you about the Ruth Glacier.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Ruth Glacier drops out of the central Alaska range and cuts through what geographers call the Great Gorge, a canyon of granite walls that rise 3,000 feet on either side of the glacier floor.
Tail DraggerHOST
The walls are vertical in places.
Tail DraggerHOST
The weather in that gorge can go from clear to zero-zero in an hour.
Tail DraggerHOST
Picture the Ruth Glacier on a January morning, 1962.
Tail DraggerHOST
The temperature outside is 40 below, and that is before the wind.
Tail DraggerHOST
The sky above you is that impossible shade of blue you only see above 10,000 feet, clear as glass.
Tail DraggerHOST
The surface can be hard-packed and fast or soft and treacherous, and often you cannot tell which from the air.
Tail DraggerHOST
You land, and then you find out.
Tail DraggerHOST
The elevation on the Ruth Glacier runs roughly fifty-five hundred feet.
Tail DraggerHOST
That sounds manageable until you consider that your engine is losing power with every foot of altitude.
Tail DraggerHOST
Your climb rate on the way out is maybe a third of what it would be at sea level, and the walls on either side of you are not going to move if you miscalculate.
Matt CornellGUEST
You fly in in good weather, and you're like, "Oh, it's splitter.
Matt CornellGUEST
Like, we'll just climb tomorrow." And we flew into the Ruth Gorge.
Chris KalousHOST
Who's we?
Matt CornellGUEST
Didn't really know...
Tail DraggerHOST
The magic was in the seat.
Tail DraggerHOST
And one place he landed became famous, down in the great gorge of the Ruth Glacier, ringed by granite walls thousands of feet high.
Tail DraggerHOST
There's a natural bowl of ice and snow so grand that the mapmakers named it after him, the Sheldon Amphitheater.
Tail DraggerHOST
He built a little hexagonal mountain house on a rock nunatak out there, a place still standing today, and he'd fly people into that cathedral of stone and silence just so they could see it.