Still on my three-day stop in Haines Junction.

Overcompensation

I am glad to report that the lesson learned from my ethics breakdown—not stopping for the pickup—is sticking. On the way here I again saw a car on the side of the Alaska Highway. The turning signal is on, it’s parked on level ground.

Yet I do the right thing. I draw even with the driver‘s window, and peer in. A woman looks back at me. She sees a biker. The small facial portion left open by my helmet is obscured by sun glasses. My windscreen is literally dripping with small runs of blood from mosquitos and black flies that hit my windscreen.

The woman is clearly concerned about me. Rather than gratitude, I see in her face anxiety, trending towards terror.

„You OK?“ I scream at her from inside my helmet, and over the rumble of my idle.

„What?“

„Are you OK?“

„Oh,“ a flood of relief resolves her face. „Yeah.“

I accelerate. Feeling good.

The Sad Side of Woke

In my motel I see a very cute pair of leather moccasins the size for my grandson, Milo.

Some stops back I sat with a First Nation person in an indigenous-people cultural center, and she demonstrated how the beading is done. Having the usual German affinity towards Indians, and having personally observed the work process, I think of buying the pair. The artist is local, her name is shown.

But I check with my daughter, and I‘m glad I do. In contrast to me, she is bound into the suffocating morality constraints that her generation has woven around itself in recent years.

„Milo would be a white boy in Native American moccasins. I‘d feel uncomfortable putting these on him.“

Cultural appropriation. I understand her. She is right, given her situation.

And there goes the opportunity for a First Nation artist to earn a living from her work.

Kluane Glacier Flight

I just returned from my one hour flight in a five person Cessna 207. Remember the Bering land bridge that brought animals and people from the West? Mountains on the Alaska side of that ‚bridge‘ accumulated ice on the ocean facing side, and created a precipitation shadow beyond their Eastern slopes (reminder in the photo top left).

The mountain range, whose cross section is shown in the schematic, is what we see in the top-center photo. In the photo top right, we are crossing one of the constituent summits. The lower two photos are on the Pacific side. Remember, this was a one hour flight, round trip. Very small distances.

The glaciers here are special in that they surge, which few glaciers in the world do. Surges here are unpredictable, and they move the glacier at speeds up to 100m/day. Such an event happened in 1852. The glacier had earlier dammed a local river into a large lake. In one catastrophic glacier surge, that dam was broken, draining the area. The photo above is the former lake‘s bottom. We usually read something like „Five million years ago something-or-other was a lake.“ This landscape transformative event occurred ~200 years ago.

This part of the Yukon is amazingly active and interesting.

Laid-Back Airport

I stopped by the airport a day earlier on an electric bike, and met my then future pilot Stu:

In High School he was an Air Cadet, the Canadian Luftwaffe‘s recruiting program. Rather than the RCAF, he joined the airlines, flying cargo and passengers on 737 type planes. He disliked it a lot.

„Up above 400 feet, turn on autopilot. Down below 400 feet, turn off autopilot. You are not really flying an airplane“

Now, in the Summer, he flies tourists across those mountains to the ice fields. In the Winter he does substitute High School teaching. You don‘t need credentials, because the government is so eager to have someone teach up there.

During my past two days, several flights were canceled for weather. Today, my 10am flight was the last of the day, though several more had been scheduled. Stu is paid by the flight. So whenever flights are cancelled, he does not earn. Yet, he says, he still makes more than with the airlines. That surprised me a lot.

Other than the pilot, the plane seats four. The rear space is taken by sleeping bags, food, a satellite radio. Who knows why…

For flights to happen, they require at least two paying passengers. So I needed to be paired. My group of three were…from Menlo Park, where I live…

The day before the flight I visited the airport on the Motel’s eBike, just for fun. Before entering the office to seek out Stu, I snuck a photo of the parked plane through an open door in the fence. I was prepared for being challenged as a terrorist.

In the office, Stu instead encouraged me to check out the plane, then bicycle down the runway. At the end, there is still trash from the American Air Force during the Alaska Highway construction period in the 40s. Someone found a box of dynamite there, plus empty soup cans from the period.

„If someone comes, just scoot over,“ Stu says about my use of the runway.

So the runway is mine. Apparently, in the woods just beyond lives a female grizzly who has been with them for a decade. Also, a family of Coyotes with a new litter. One of the young likes to chase the plane. Which is what Stu looks for before landing, as he overflies the runway before his landing approach: the grizzly, and the coyotes.

Flight Summary

Here just a few photos from the flight. The pilot knew a lot of history. For example, twenty British explorers set out to explore the ice fields early on. Porters carried wireframe beds for the leaders. What the expedition did not know is that the ice field is the largest outside the polar regions. And that Mount Logan here is the highest mountain in Canada, and after Denali the second highest in North America.

Only five of the explorers returned.

Nothing grows up here. Just some worms in the ice. First Nations did not explore into the ice fields. There is no food. Several times a summer helicopters need to rescue climbers. Often sudden weather issues.

My headset was an odd mix of the pilot’s explanations, and air traffic. All the pilots of the area seemed to know each other; fixed wing or helicopter. They kept each other informed of their whereabouts, the tower only occasionally chiming in.

“I’m approaching South entrance of disappointment valley. 4000ft”

“I’m behind you, Jim, same altitude. Will keep a lookout. Stop on in later.”

This was an impressive excursion!