Rusty Dow, the first woman to drive a fully loaded truck the length of the Alaska Highway, did it in 1944. She drove the 1600 miles from Fairbanks to Dawson Creek in seven days, and she astonished every man along the way. Rough Draft of a Highway Rusty had been driving trucks down in …
Tag Archives: Alaska
Glaciers
Glaciers. As you travel north, the first one you see tells you that you have well and truly reached the subarctic region. You can scratch that off your bucket list. The Valdez Glacier It is summer, but a vast sheet of ice covers all but the peaks of the mountains towering in front of you. …
Liquified Soil
Liquified soil? Tectonic plates? On Good Friday afternoon people in Valdez, Alaska didn’t think about such things, few even knew they existed. People in Valdez thought about dinner. Then came a crunching and a grinding noise and the ground around and under them suddenly rolled and heaved. Great cracks appeared and water spurted up through …
Russell Wesley on the WP&YR
Russell Wesley’s comment popped up on my post about the White Pass and Yukon Railway the other night, and it took my breath away. Russell got my attention with this, “When I worked on the Yukon and White Pass Railway in the early 70’s, we had no modern equipment. We had a radio that was …
Stench and Reeve Airways
Stench? Bush Pilot Bob Reeve’s ingenious innovations made him a legend. They also made him and his planes stink. “Reeve had worked out a way that he could pee past the stick and out a hole in the floor. The whole damned plane smelled of dried piss.” (A former passenger quoted in Alaska’s Skyboys by …
Point of Entry
Point of Entry? The North Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean surround the unimaginably vast and forbidding territory of Alaska on three sides. The equally vast and forbidding wilderness of Northern Canada borders it to the east. For outsiders, Alaska offered no real point of entry before the turn of the century. Until …
Mushers fought Bush Pilots
Mushers fought Bush Pilots and lost. With their dog teams they made money delivering mail to isolated outposts in Alaska through the early years of the 20th Century. They became legendary heroes driving rescue missions. One famous relay of mushers saved Nome from Diptheria. Gillam Weather and a Legendary Bush Pilot But in the early …
Fairbanks, the Accidental City
Fairbanks exists because life is what happens while you are making other plans. Transportation was still a problem in 1942 In 1901 the United States Army worked on a trail from Valdez north to Eagle on the Yukon River. Civilians planned a railroad along the same route. None of that would happen, but no one …
A 20 Something Girl
A 20 something girl from Seattle transplanted to a part of Alaska so remote that even today it doesn’t have a zip code, learned to survive, to cope with deep snow and temperatures as low as 40 or 50 below, to work a mine, to raise and train and drive sled dogs. Picture a one …
Gillam Weather and a Legendary Bush Pilot
Gillam weather took its name from pilot Charles “Harold” Gillam. His flights through the foulest weather Alaska could dish out, made him the very first legendary Alaska bush pilot. Old time pilots said that Alaska offered three kinds of weather; clear and unlimited “Pan Am” weather; ordinary weather; and Gillam weather. Becoming a Bush Pilot …
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