Fissured tongue

Alaska Traveler

Years ago I flew to Cordova to visit relatives. We were on a DC-3 that belonged to Mudhole Smith's Cordova Airlines. The plane was stripped down to the fuselage, half the seats had been removed to make room for cargo and an army blanket had been stretched across the center of the plane, from behind which came cheeping sounds. The cheeping increased in volume every time we hit a bump, which, since there was a lot of turbulence that day, was often. Now and then, little yellow feathers would float up over the army blanket and land in my lap. We all landed safely and pretty much on time, as I recall, and it has remained one of my favorite memories of the good old Gooney Bird ever since.

This is a story about a completely different kind of flight. It's on board a DC-3, all right, but the ride-well, Aladdin never had a ride like this.

Every day at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. from mid-May through mid-September, Era Aviation flies one of two restored DC3s, the world's most famous propellerdriven airliner, on sight-seeing trips called the Era Classic. Where do they go? "Well," Capt. Rich Harkness said, "I take bribes." Scheduled flights include, variously, Prince William Sound, the Harding Ice Field, Lake Chakachamna and Denali (known to people from Ohio as Mount McKinley).

Rich is our pilot on this sundrenched June afternoon, and prior to our flight he calls the passengers together in Era's lobby, where pink lemonade is being served and South Pacific is playing on the television.

"Unfortunately," he tells us, "the only good weather in Alaska today is in Denali National Park and Preserve."

He pauses, deadpan. "It takes us 40 minutes up and, coincidentally, 40 minutes to get back." Another pause. "We'll go up the south face of Denali and come down the Kahiltna Glacier. We should see climbers." Pause. "It's a nonpressurized aircraft, and we'll be cruising at 10,000 feet. No jumping jacks in the aisles."

We board our DC-3, the Spirit of Alaska, and it's like stepping back 40 years: wood paneling, maroon and gray leather upholstery, square windows and In the Mood playing over the speakers. Our stewardess is Francesca Carsen, and she is dressed in the uniform of the DC-3's airliner days, complete with white gloves and seamed stockings. "Older gentlemen have asked me if they can have a picture of just my legs," she says. She makes a face, but I think the older gentlemen are probably remembering their Betty Grable pinups. This is Carsen's fifth year as the Era Classic stewardess. "I dedicate my summers to this flight. Let's face it, being a flight attendant isn't that much fun anymore. On these flights, everyone's happy, they're drinking champagne, they're looking at the scenery."

Rich and our first officer, Derek Ward, start the engines and we roll onto the runway and into the air, climbing over Knik Arm and the Susitna River valley. Black clouds loom over the Matanuska valley to the east, but west and south the view goes on to the Alaska Range and Redoubt and Cook Inlet.

Francesca serves champagne and Classic Coke in glass bottles as Rich begins giving us history lessons over the loudspeaker on the DC-3 (the first one was built in 1935, and the other DC-3 in Era's fleet dropped paratroopers during the D-Day invasion), Mount Spurr (the last eruption was in 1992), Captain Cook (his first visit was in 1778 aboard the Endeavor, when he mistook Turnagain Arm for the Northwest Passage) and the Iditarod Trail when we cross it. We are invited to visit Rich and Derek in the cockpit, an opportunity of which we take prompt advantage.

Fellow passenger Steve Thaxton, of Tennesee, flies a Cessna 182, and he's on board with his wife, Brenda, and son Paul because he has never before been on a DC-3. John Roberts flies a 747 for Atlas Airlines, and he's aboard with his daughters, Amy and Tiffany, to revisit the days when he flew DC-3s.

Some passengers are concerned about the size of the DC-3. Therese Dolan is a TWA flight attendant taking the tour with her son Kevin. "I fly DC9s," she says. "This is a little small for me." Nurse Lisa Joyner of Anchorage agrees. "It takes a lot to get me on a small plane. I need more champagne." Rich has a cousin on board, Charlie Harkness and his wife, Sandi, who says, "I wouldn't be on this small a plane except for Rich."

I think of my aircraft of choice, the Piper Super Cub, and hold my tongue.

And then the Alaska Range rises in front of us like gleaming white teeth, jaws open, ready to bite. Michaelangelo on his best day never conceived of anything this glorious or terrifying. Immense pillars of granite, fractured and fissured like stone crystals, soar on all sides.

Layers of snow cling to vertical faces of rock varying in hue from smoke to charcoal. Through the big windows we see Broken Tooth, a notched peak with a rust-streaked facade that looks like dried blood, as if it had been jerked from the jawbone of a T. rex.

And then the vast white river of ice known as the Kahiltna Glacier, with 17,000 feet of Foraker looming on the left, the pyramidal massif of Hunter on the right, and before us, filling the sky, all 20,000 feet of dromedary-backed Denali, North America's highest peak.

We can see the brightly colored tents of the Kahiltna Base Camp next to a smoothed section of the glacier's surface that serves as the base camp's airstrip, from which a ski plane is taking off. Farther up the glacier, two more tents are pitched below a ridge, the owners either on their way to the summit or on their way back down. Three climbers hang by ropes from a sheer rock face, looking like tiny red and blue flyspecks against the immensity of the surrounding peaks.

Up Ruth Glacier and the Great Gorge to the Don Sheldon Amphitheater we fly, south of Hunter Peak and up to the head of Kahiltna Glacier and down again through Little Switzerland. It is Shangri-la. It is never-never land. "You," I say to Rich, "have the best job in the world."

"It's just like work," he replies with a grin. "Only different." He gets on the loudspeaker. "That's as good as it gets, folks. Now it's just a boring ride back to Anchorage."

Our visit to Denali has lasted forever and a second. All of us have our faces mashed up against the windows as we leave the Alaska Range behind. Lisa Joyner is starstruck. "I've been waiting since I was a little kid for this," she says as she snaps one last picture.

To ease the pain of parting, Francesca pours us more champagne, offers us chocolate chip cookies and Cracker Jacks, and invites us to play the Guess the Date Game. "It was the year Winston Churchill coined the name the Iron Curtain, and the year the bikini bathing suit was introduced in Paris," Francesca says. I guess 1963, which is only seven years off. The winners, almost everyone on the plane except me, receive postcards of our DC-3 signed by the crew. "I've never had so many correct guesses on a plane before," she says, avoiding my eyes as she passes out copies of Life magazine dated from the 1940s.

Rich announces that it is Francesca's birthday today, her 45th. When we land again in Anchorage, she gets on the loudspeaker and says, "Welcome back to the year 2001. That was a pretty good landing so I expect it was the first officer's," thereby getting revenge on Rich for advancing her age 10 years. "That was the first tour of the season that I've run out of champagne," she says.

Once again inside the Era lobby, I see hanging on the wall what I missed before, a black and white picture of a Cordova Airlines DC-3 in flight.

Mudhole Smith would have approved.

DANA STABENOW is the author of 17 novels. She lives in Anchorage and can be reached through her Web site at (www.stabenow.com).

Copyright Morris Communications Oct 2001
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