Valdez

Twice a day when the tide pulls back from the flats, you've got maybe two hours to do your business before the sea reclaims everything you just used.

Welcome to Valdez, Alaska in the year 1932.

Welcome to the career of Bob Reeve.

I'm Tail Dragger.

The aviation infrastructure that the States was building up through the 20s barely existed up there.

What existed was raw country, desperate need, and opportunity for the right kind of man.

Reeve arrived in Valdez with approximately $5 and an old Fairchild 71 that had been through some things.

Valdez sits at the head of a long, narrow fjord on Prince William Sound.

He came back to the States in '32 with a solid ticket, a set of deeply ingrained conservative habits, and almost no money.

He worked his way north, picked up ferry work where he could get it, and by spring of 1932 he was in Valdez, Alaska, looking at the Chugach Mountains on three sides and saltwater on the fourth.

A town that needed an air service and had no airport.

Valdez had no suitable flat ground for a runway.

What it had were tide flats, a broad shelf of glacial silt and gravel that went hard as concrete at low tide and disappeared under two feet of water when the tide came in.

Twice a day, you had a runway of about two thousand feet.

The Fairchild was a proper bush airplane, a high-wing cabin biplane with a four hundred horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine, honest flying qualities, good useful load, and a reputation for reliability that the Alaska backcountry demanded.

He fitted it with skis for the winter work, converted back to wheel-ski combinations in the shoulder seasons, and did both conversions himself on the gravel flats with hand tools.

close.

Valdez, Valdez, Alaska.

So in 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck the Alaska area.

It changed the fundamental look and shape and everything of Alaska.

It's a really huge deal that affected everywhere from Anchorage down to Seward to over to Valdez, right? What happened was an underwater landslide kind of shifted everything.

Destructive waves devastated all the areas around, including Valdez's waterfront.

And investigators later determined that the original town site rested on dangerously unstable sediment.

There was a chance that the original town site could slide again,

It's the spring of 1932.

A man walks into Valdez, Alaska with $9 in his pocket, a borrowed winter coat, and a reputation he'd earned doing airmail runs in South America that had, for reasons he'd rather not discuss, come to an abrupt end.

His name is Bob Reeve.

And nobody in Valdez has heard of him.

Nobody in Alaska has heard of him.

Nobody in Alaska has heard of him.

He didn't have money for skis.

What he had was an old Fairchild 51, a high-wing monoplane with a radial engine, and a mechanical aptitude that bordered on obsession.

So my job was a lot of liaison, both between the fishermen, legislators, politicians.

We did a number of big campaigns in Washington, D.C. around the Exxon Valdez litigation.

So Cordova is right at the heart of where Joe Hazelwood in 1989 ran his oil tanker aground in Valdez, and it was the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Alaska.

The impacts of that spill are still being felt today.

It completely collapsed several fisheries.

Oh, sorry, I had to swallow.

In 1964, Kodiak, Cordova, Homer, Seldovia, Valdez, and Seward were added to the system and serviced by the MV Testamina.

As service extended to additional communities, Alaskans gained access to not only their coastal neighbors, but to other parts of North America, and at a price that was often more reasonable than other forms of transportation.

In 1964, the first year of service for both Southeast and Southwest Alaska, AMHS had a total of five ferries and 16 ports of call and provided service to more than 100,000 passengers and nearly 22,000 vehicles.

So they had celebrated their 50th anniversary of the Alaska Marine Highway, beginning a year-long celebration highlighting the history of the system, including Vestals and communities serviced.

Overall, celebrations were held in 15 communities, including Cordova, Prince Rupert, Ketchikan, Wrangell, I'm sure I said that wrong.

Petersburg, Juneau, Haines, Skagway, Pelican, Seldova, Unalaska, Valdez, Whittier, Bellingham, and Sitka, as well as Fairbanks and Anchorage.

I don't know why they throw those in like that.