Flying West with the Bureau of Land Management
In my 6 summers working with the Bureau of Land Management at the Anchorage District Office, I had three memorable flights that took me to the west, flying over the Alaskan Range, an area quite different from the Panhandle region near Juneau and from Central Alaska on the road system connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks.
One of flights initiated a 6 week stint in Kotzebue, discussed at length in other chapters of this missive.
A second was a trip to Nondalton.
Nondalton was a small Athabascan Indian village just north of the large Iliamna Lake at the beginning of the Aleutian Chain. It was small with only about 150 people and was situated to the north and west of Lake Iliamna on the connecting Six Mile Lake.
My call to visit was administrative. A fire ignited close to the village and was threatening the oil storage tanks that fed the various village homes and structures. I was responsible for locating and providing heavy equipment needed to cut a swath of bare earth around the tank farm, and then later paying off the cost of the equipment, which was pre-arranged through my office in Anchorage. By pre-inspecting and pre-authorizing the leasing of this equipment in fire emergencies, the BLM was protecting itself from a past where outrageous prices were demanded to rent equipment on the spot.
As the fire moved toward the tank farm, a line of bare earth was cut around the tanks. A local resident was able to climb to the top of each tank and open the vents that allowed gases to escape before exploding if a fire reached the tanks. The fire did reach the tanks, hopped the fire break, and the tanks burned but did not explode. Had they exploded the town may have been destroyed.
However, a number of propane tanks did explode, with stories of how they were propelled like rockets into the center of Six Mile Lake.
The fire line and the quick-thinking resident saved the town from disaster.
I was able to fly over the Alaskan Range into Nondalton, where I inspected the equipment used to cut the line and pay the owner for his work. While it was unfortunate that the fire was not stopped before it reached the tanks, it did not reach the town buildings, a successful save.
My third trip west was an optional trip that, today, I would not take.
One morning I was asked if I would like to accompany a mechanic to Aniak, a town on the Kuskokwim River in Central Alaska. With about 500 residents, it was a fairly large town for the area. There, the BLM maintained a retardant site. This was a location where bags of red “retardant” were mixed into large reservoirs of water and made into a slurry that could then be pumped into an airplane for dropping on a fire. We leased and maintained a forklift there to move the large bags of retardant, and the forklift stopped working. No one in Aniak could fix it, so we hired a local Anchorage mechanic to do the job. While it was not necessary for me to go, my supervisor in Anchorage thought it might be a nice diversion from my mundane administrative paper-pushing duties to have me accompany and oversee the mechanic. I agreed.
I departed the BLM’s small airfield with a pilot and the mechanic in a small 4-seater Cessna. Not a large plane, it was a dependable mode of transportation, capable of climbing high enough to navigate through certain passes in the high mountains of the Alaska Range.
The flight was only about 30 minutes into our travels when we started to ascend in order to fly through a low point in the very tall mountains of the Alaskan Range. The plane labored at full throttle to rise to the top of the pass. As it passed into a deep valley, we could see small lakes in the snow, colored brightly according to the minerals beneath them. Azure blue, deep sienna, light magenta. All were beautiful against the white snow backdrop. But we hardly noticed since the little plane was being buffeted up and down and bounced right and left as it labored up the windy mountain valley.
Just as we were about to top off and hit the large stone wall ahead of us, with white knuckles and sweaty foreheads, we and the pilot banked steeply to the left. Below us were the remnants of a plane that did not make the saddle. We did.
We sailed over it with little room to spare and suddenly were gliding down another long valley to a large extended lake below. The pilot followed this out into a large plain of flat land, no mountains, just lakes and a river.
The pilot pointed out Sparrvahn, a secret air force NORAD site (no longer in existence since 2005) to the left, and the large river ahead of us. The river was the Kuskokwim, one of the large rivers north of the Bristol Bay area, flowing west toward the Bering Sea. As we approached the river, the wind and rain became intense. The pilot lowered the Cessna toward the river and crabbed sideways down the river against the wind. Still going full throttle, he took the plane west along the river until we reached Aniak.
There we left the mechanic at his work while we went into the Aniak Lodge for a beverage and burger. Asking around, I was able to negotiate a deal to buy two large king salmon at $.60 a pound. These were put on ice for me to carry back to Anchorage.
While I was impressed with the pilot’s skill navigating the trip, I can’t say I was impressed when he filled the wing tank with aviation fuel while smoking a cigarette. That lack of judgment frightened me since I had to fly north with him and the mechanic to McGrath, then East past Mount Denali and south to home.
I managed to get home intact, with the mechanic paid and sent home, carrying my large catch of salmon for many meals to come.
I decided that flying in small planes in Alaska was not for pleasure in the future, but for business only.
One of flights initiated a 6 week stint in Kotzebue, discussed at length in other chapters of this missive.
A second was a trip to Nondalton.
Nondalton was a small Athabascan Indian village just north of the large Iliamna Lake at the beginning of the Aleutian Chain. It was small with only about 150 people and was situated to the north and west of Lake Iliamna on the connecting Six Mile Lake.
My call to visit was administrative. A fire ignited close to the village and was threatening the oil storage tanks that fed the various village homes and structures. I was responsible for locating and providing heavy equipment needed to cut a swath of bare earth around the tank farm, and then later paying off the cost of the equipment, which was pre-arranged through my office in Anchorage. By pre-inspecting and pre-authorizing the leasing of this equipment in fire emergencies, the BLM was protecting itself from a past where outrageous prices were demanded to rent equipment on the spot.
As the fire moved toward the tank farm, a line of bare earth was cut around the tanks. A local resident was able to climb to the top of each tank and open the vents that allowed gases to escape before exploding if a fire reached the tanks. The fire did reach the tanks, hopped the fire break, and the tanks burned but did not explode. Had they exploded the town may have been destroyed.
However, a number of propane tanks did explode, with stories of how they were propelled like rockets into the center of Six Mile Lake.
The fire line and the quick-thinking resident saved the town from disaster.
I was able to fly over the Alaskan Range into Nondalton, where I inspected the equipment used to cut the line and pay the owner for his work. While it was unfortunate that the fire was not stopped before it reached the tanks, it did not reach the town buildings, a successful save.
My third trip west was an optional trip that, today, I would not take.
One morning I was asked if I would like to accompany a mechanic to Aniak, a town on the Kuskokwim River in Central Alaska. With about 500 residents, it was a fairly large town for the area. There, the BLM maintained a retardant site. This was a location where bags of red “retardant” were mixed into large reservoirs of water and made into a slurry that could then be pumped into an airplane for dropping on a fire. We leased and maintained a forklift there to move the large bags of retardant, and the forklift stopped working. No one in Aniak could fix it, so we hired a local Anchorage mechanic to do the job. While it was not necessary for me to go, my supervisor in Anchorage thought it might be a nice diversion from my mundane administrative paper-pushing duties to have me accompany and oversee the mechanic. I agreed.
I departed the BLM’s small airfield with a pilot and the mechanic in a small 4-seater Cessna. Not a large plane, it was a dependable mode of transportation, capable of climbing high enough to navigate through certain passes in the high mountains of the Alaska Range.
The flight was only about 30 minutes into our travels when we started to ascend in order to fly through a low point in the very tall mountains of the Alaskan Range. The plane labored at full throttle to rise to the top of the pass. As it passed into a deep valley, we could see small lakes in the snow, colored brightly according to the minerals beneath them. Azure blue, deep sienna, light magenta. All were beautiful against the white snow backdrop. But we hardly noticed since the little plane was being buffeted up and down and bounced right and left as it labored up the windy mountain valley.
Just as we were about to top off and hit the large stone wall ahead of us, with white knuckles and sweaty foreheads, we and the pilot banked steeply to the left. Below us were the remnants of a plane that did not make the saddle. We did.
We sailed over it with little room to spare and suddenly were gliding down another long valley to a large extended lake below. The pilot followed this out into a large plain of flat land, no mountains, just lakes and a river.
The pilot pointed out Sparrvahn, a secret air force NORAD site (no longer in existence since 2005) to the left, and the large river ahead of us. The river was the Kuskokwim, one of the large rivers north of the Bristol Bay area, flowing west toward the Bering Sea. As we approached the river, the wind and rain became intense. The pilot lowered the Cessna toward the river and crabbed sideways down the river against the wind. Still going full throttle, he took the plane west along the river until we reached Aniak.
There we left the mechanic at his work while we went into the Aniak Lodge for a beverage and burger. Asking around, I was able to negotiate a deal to buy two large king salmon at $.60 a pound. These were put on ice for me to carry back to Anchorage.
While I was impressed with the pilot’s skill navigating the trip, I can’t say I was impressed when he filled the wing tank with aviation fuel while smoking a cigarette. That lack of judgment frightened me since I had to fly north with him and the mechanic to McGrath, then East past Mount Denali and south to home.
I managed to get home intact, with the mechanic paid and sent home, carrying my large catch of salmon for many meals to come.
I decided that flying in small planes in Alaska was not for pleasure in the future, but for business only.