Wrangell Mountains

Part of the answer is terrain knowledge of a depth that is almost impossible to describe to someone who has not flown the same routes hundreds of times.

He had crossed the Alaska Range and the Wrangell Mountains and the coastal corridors of the Inside Passage so many times that the landscape had become interior geography, as familiar as a neighborhood.

He knew which valley offered a corridor through the range and which one closed in on you with no exit.

He knew where the terrain gave him clearance and where it did not.

The Electra was a modern machine for its time, the same basic design that Amelia Earhart had been flying when she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937.

Think about what that kind of flying meant to the people waiting at the other end of the route.

A mining camp in the Wrangell Mountains in February temperature 30 below, a worker with appendicitis, the nearest surgeon in Anchorage, 300 miles away.

Before aviation, that was a situation where people died of things that were manageable in any city with a hospital.

The old gold towns had gone quiet.

The fishing industry was struggling, but up in the Wrangell Mountains, some of the most rugged terrain on the continent, there were still miners working high altitude claims.

Copper mostly, a little gold, men who'd staked everything on a patch of rock a few thousand feet above the clouds, accessible in summer by a mule trail and in winter by nothing at all.

They needed supplies, food, fuel, dynamite, machine parts, and whoever could get those supplies to them stood to make enough money to survive another season.

He understood that in a world without good options, you flew with the least bad option and you flew it well.

the mudflats were the least bad option.

In the spring of 1932, Bob Reeve began hauling freight to the glacier mines of the Wrangell Mountains.

Let me tell you what a glacier landing looked like in those days, because there's no such thing as a routine glacier landing, not then, not now.

He was quiet, almost eerily calm, the kind of man who didn't waste words and didn't waste motion.

He built his reputation in the Copper River country and the Wrangell Mountains, flying the routes nobody else wanted.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

Most pilots had weather limits.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

The mining operations up in the Wrangell Mountains and beyond needed supplies, and they needed them through the summer when the trails were washed out and the country was impassable by foot or pack animal.

An airplane could get there.

But where would you land? In that vertical, crevassed, staggeringly beautiful wreck of country, flat ground as rare as a clear day in November.

He landed clean, unloaded, and flew out without incident.

The wrench cost him maybe $2.

The alternative was auguring a Fairchild into a glacier in the Wrangell Mountains with a load of mining supplies on board.

That calculation, cost of patience versus cost of the alternative, was the arithmetic that ran through every decision Reeve made.