Clouddancer's Alaskan Chronicles Volume Iv

CloudDancer’s Alaskan

Chronicles

Volume IV

CloudDancer

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

CLOUDDANCER’S ALASKAN CHRONICLES VOLUME IV

Copyright © 2012 by CloudDancer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-8220-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-8223-2 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 02/22/2012

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Handy-Dandy List of

Acronym Meanings

The Baron

and

The Bootlegger

1

Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout

2

Show Me the Money

3

The Only Things that

Count in This Bidness

4

Your Tax Dollars at Work

5

Hippies ’n Skeeters

6

Lightning’s Striking Again…

and Again… and Again

7

All You Know

WHAT Breaks Loose!

8

Meanwhile… Back at the Ranch

9

A Victim of Friendly Fire

10

The Baron… Missing in Action

11

Second Verse… Same as the First

12

All Points Bulletin

13

Grandpa CloudDancer’s Wisdom

14

Mike Hammer, P.I.

15

A Done Deal

16

You Always Remember

Your First Time

17

Now We’re STYLIN’ Baby!

18

Al Capone Would Be SO Proud… .

19

The Long Arm of the Law

Epilogue

Catch Us If You Can

1

Boss Hogg and Enos

2

Distant Early Warnings

3

Is That Big D or Little D?

4

Go West Young Man

5

But… HONEST…

The DOG Ate My Homework!!

6

Now You See Him…

Now You Don’t!

7

What Goes Up Must Come Down… Somewhere

8

I Call… Show Me Your Cards

What’s Good For the Goose…

Is Good For the Gander

1

FEDs Are People Too

2

A Bad Case of Get home-itis

3

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

4

If Today Wuz a Fish…

I’d Throw if Back

5

I Caught ’em Fair ’n Square

6

Life is Like a Game of Monopoly

It Was Okay I Guess

1

Oooh… The Wheels on the Plane Go Round n’ Round

2

Well Now… .

Doesn’t THIS Just Suck!

3

When Yer’ Up to Yore Eyebrows

in Alligators…

4

If at First You Don’t Succeed…

5

On the Wings of Angels

Just Me and an ol’

Country Boy

1

A Good First Impression

2

The Best Laid Plans… (Sigh)

3

Here He Comes to Save the Da-a-ay!

4

Fa-a-a-a-r Out!

5

I Wuz Tha-a-a-at Close!

6

The Second Time’s a Charm

Epilogue

Reflections of an Aging Bush(ed) Pilot

Prologue

A Short Story

Epilogue

Closing Comments

Dedication

Since this may well be the last volume of my CloudDancer’s Alaskan Chronicles series, I think it quite important that I take this opportunity to dedicate it to a very special group of people. So it is I labor over this book, with true love and devotion, for the people of Alaska. All of them.

It is dedicated to the grizzly old Alaskan miners at Cleary Creek and Bornite and Candle and dozens of other mines across the state. You, even moreso than those living in the villages, welcomed the arrival of my airsheen at your digs with undisguised glee and joy. Starved of human contact with the outside world, your gratitude was abundant for the simplest of things, even a three week old newspaper. Gentlemen, it was a privilege and honor to serve you.

To the men and women of our armed services, past and present. Arriving often unwillingly and mostly dumbfounded by what appears to be at first an alien planet, you sacrifice(d) part of your life to guard the most remote flank of our great nation, far from your homes and families. You lived for a year or two in, what I’m sure seemed to you, to be some of the most Godforsaken places on earth. Cape Lisburne, Cape Ramanzof, and Barter Island come to mind. But you did your time, and stood watch for us. You guys and gals were almost as happy to see our little single and twin-engine mail planes swoop down into your lonely outposts as were the miners. But hey, at least you folks had bars and a juke box.

And not surprisingly, when your Alaska military commitment was up, some of you found you had fallen in love with the Great Land. And so you stayed. I was often treated to the best food and accommodations your facilities had to offer. Unbidden, and with nothing expected in return. You were so glad to see your mail and your replacements. Thank you for your service to us all. It was a privilege and honor to serve you.

Most importantly, it is written just as much in gratitude to all those who live in every far-flung village across the sprawling and vast regions of the 49th state. Especially the NANA Region, the Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound area and the Yukon Flats, where I spent most of my Alaskan life.

White and brown, Eskimo or Indian, cheechako or sourdough. Every one of you were so kind and wonderful to always make me a part of your families, in so many different ways.

I was invited to share the joy of your weddings and the arrivals of your newborn children. And you also allowed me as well, to share the sorrows and pains of your personal losses. One of you was born on my airplane, as I rushed your mother to the hospital in Kotzebue one night. And two of your children died on my airplanes, as I frantically raced through the arctic skies in an unsuccessful attempt to outrun the Angel of Death.

You gave me other treasured memories. Bringing a jar of mayonnaise to a village that had none, needed for a special dinner dish for a birthday feast. Shooting hoops with your kids at the village school or getting fresh biscuits hot from the oven, from the cooks in the cafeteria, while I often waited long hours for my charter customers. Spending the night in your houses when stormbound. Sharing coffee or meals at your family tables. Just visiting for hours.

Although I was already nineteen when I arrived and began flying in the country, I always give the same answer when I meet someone new, and they ask Where’d you grow up?

I answer with great pride… ALASKA! Alaska… it was a privilege and honor to serve you.

Foreword

If, like me, you’ve read each new installment of CloudDancer’s Alaskan Chronicles with growing astonishment and admiration, it’s time to climb aboard and buckle in for what may be our last ride with one of aviation’s last great iconic figures—the Alaska Bush pilot.

For that’s exactly how CloudDancer got his start in aviation, in an era and a part of the world where the business was still run by cowboys in Sorel boots rather than CEOs in three-piece suits, where pilots rode the skies on a wild mixture of caution, caffeine, nerve, adrenaline, terror, humor, and pure passion for flying. They’d put in a full day at the controls, spend their nights drinking, gambling, and womanizing, then show up the next morning and start all over.

In the process, they provided a vast array of indispensable services that knit together the small and far-flung communities of Arctic Alaska. They hauled the newly born and the newly deceased, they carried cops and criminals, they delivered Christmas presents and Thanksgiving turkeys, they moved mail and they moved muktuk.

Without Bush pilots, in short, Arctic life as lived in that day would have been unimaginable.

But the life and the business wasn’t always kind to Bush pilots. While some of the men with whom CloudDancer flew went on to the sort of ordinary existence familiar to the rest of us, some died in their planes. Others fell into the bottle and never managed to crawl out again.

CloudDancer himself moved on after almost two decades in the arctic, and now flies an Airbus for a major airline. Still, he, like many others, paid a price for his time in the North, for the emotional scars left by too many searches for downed flyers that ended in funerals rather than rescues. A couple of years ago, he was forced to face the fact that the alcohol he had once considered such a good friend, such a reliable anesthetic, had become his worst enemy, the source of more pain than relief. He entered rehab, completed it, and has been dry ever since.

What’s ahead for CloudDancer? Maybe a move back to Alaska, where he still feels more at home than anywhere else on earth. And someday—let’s hope!—maybe we’ll even be reading CloudDancer’s Airline Chronicles.

Meantime, this admiring reader thanks CloudDancer for sharing an extraordinary personal and professional journey through a time and place so improbable as to seem, on occasion, like another planet.

Stan Jones, Anchorage

Fellow aviator and author of the Nathan Active mystery series: White Sky, Black Ice, Shaman Pass, Frozen Sun, and Village of the Ghost Bears.

Also, co-author with Sharon Bushell of The Spill: Personal Stories of the Exxon Valdez Disaster

www.sjbooks.com

Handy-Dandy List of

Acronym Meanings

ADF—Automatic Direction Finder (a low frequency navigation radio)

AGL—Above Ground Level

ANC—Anchorage

A/S—Airspeed

BRW—Pt. Barrow

BS—Sometimes it means Blowing Snow

CDI—Course Deviation Indicator

CHT—(Engine) Cylinder Head(s) Temperature

DG—Directional Gyro (think electric or vacuum operated gyro compass)

FAI—Fairbanks

FED/FEDS—F.A.A. Flight or Maintenance Inspectors (O.K. guys… mostly)

FSS—Flight Service Station (a division of the F.A.A.)

GCA—Ground Controlled Approach (radar operator talks you down)

HF—High Frequency communications radio

IAS—indicated airspeed

IFR—Instrument Flight Rules

KIAS—indicated airspeed in knots

MAG/mag—Magneto (Think distributor on your car’s engine)

MAYDAY—International radio distress call

MSL—Mean (above) Sea Level

NM—Nautical Mile(s) (About 7/8’s of a regular mile)

NWS—National Weather Service

OAT—Outside Air Temperature

OME—Nome

OTZ—Kotzebue

RPM—Revolutions Per Minute

TAL—Tanana

SLED/sled—Sometimes Author’s disrespectful term for a Cessna 207

VFR—Visual Flight Rules

VHF—Very High Frequency

VOR—Very high Omni Range (a high frequency navigation radio)

The Baron

and

The Bootlegger

1

Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout

In the summer of 1977 northern Alaska was heating up in more ways than one. It had started early in May. The eighth of May to be exact. For that is the day when a number of my good friends found themselves carrying picket signs instead of flight bags. What was destined to become the second longest pilot strike in the history of the Air Line Pilot’s Association began when my friend Red Hotchkins and almost 200 of his fellow Wien Air Alaska airmen exercised their right to self-help under the Railway Labor Act.

The strike would last for almost two full years. For the next 653 days, swatting at mosquitoes in the summer, and breaking small icicles off their beards and moustaches in the frigid winters, they would walk their picket orbits. Every time a Wien Air Alaska jet landed, flown by replacement pilots (i.e. SCABS!), my friends were there to greet it with picket signs held high and proudly.

While not specifically a story about their battle, the events in this Alaskan Chronicle would likely not have occurred had the Wien pilots not gone on strike. For you must remember that in places like Nome, Kotzebue, Barrow, and other even smaller Alaskan towns; the Wien pilots with their blue, gold and white Boeing 737’s were the only lifeline to the outside world. Hence the temporary drastic reduction in service affected everything including our mail deliveries and the freshness and quantity (or lack thereof), of the products on the shelves of Kotzebue’s three grocery stores.

Business was booming for Kotzebue’s air-taxi companies as well. Now, over three years after the start of construction on the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, petro-dollars were flowing wildly all over the state. Even the most remote and tiny villages such as Kobuk, Birch Creek and Atqasuk (at-kah-sook), each with populations of less than 100 people at the time, supplied workers for the high paying pipeline jobs. On many occasions the workers might actually make it ALL the way back to their home villages with some money still left in their pockets. This was no small accomplishment given the temptations of Anchorage and Fairbanks in those days.

Resembling more of a cross between Tombstone and Dodge City or, as some would say, Sodom and Gomorrah, the big villages on the banks of the Chena River and the Cook Inlet offered every possible diversion designed specifically to separate pipeline workers from their hard earned petro-dollars.

One couldn’t walk ten consecutive steps down the sidewalk on Two Street in Fairbanks or 4th Avenue in Anchorage without being on the receiving end of yet another sales pitch. Any hour of the day or night, summer or winter, deals were on the sidewalks to be made. You need a watch? How about a little somethin’ special to smoke? Fresh from Maui dude! And those two girls over there… hey… . they’re SMILING at me! They must like me. Oooooh. I bet they’d like to go inside somewhere and warm up a little and get a drink… THUNK… (darkness).

Yeah, in those days of $100 table dances (no, that is not a misprint); you could wave a fifty all night long at the Bush Company and attract nothing more than the cocktail waitress. You want a table dance you’d best be waving a C-note. Two would tend to get you immediate attention. And remember, this was 1977!

But as I said, on the occasions where the village pipeline workers actually made it past the last obstacle (the airport bar) and successfully arrived back in Kotzebue with money, that is generally where it got spent. Before heading back to Noorvik, or Deering or Noatak it was off to the local stores in Nome, or Kotzebue or Barrow to buy (depending on the season) a brand new three wheeler or snow machine. Maybe a sofa… or even a refrigerator!

Cabs and delivery pickups would pull in and out of our parking lot all day dropping off cash customers ready to head for the villages and surprise their waiting families. We were flying just about as much as we could stand. Busy busy busy.

And then there was the weather itself.

In June that year the temperature in Kotzebue hit 63 degrees! There were several days, about half the month, that hit 55 degrees or higher. And the tourists would be bewildered by the sight of a skinny liddle boy (me), clad only in cut off jeans, sun tanning my brilliantly white body under the Arctic sun whilst catching a snooze lying atop the wing of my Cessna. But after months of frigid temps close to zero, this felt like sun tan weather to me, and I didn’t care what they thought.

July was going to be a record breaker too, with temps soaring into the eighties in Kotzebue. And one other significant event was soon to bring REAL heat to the summer of ’77. All that and more lay ahead in the not too distant future as Tim Lay, the senior Gunderson pilot, and I hoisted our second cuppa’ joe one late morning in the Gunderson Flying Service office. It was the third week of June 1977.

2

Show Me the Money

Tim has been around Kotzebue at least as long as I have, and I think maybe slightly longer. It’s kinda’ hard remembering all the details that far back. But I clearly remember that this was round two for me working offa’ the Gunderson ramp.

Although the petro-dollars showed up a little too late to save Dan’s flying operation from going belly up; brother Rod was raking in his share of the pipeline construction economic fallout. Truly trickle-down economics in action long before the term became a household catch-phrase.

The newfound influx of loot was financing a real expansion of the Gunderson empire. This was evidenced by the completion of a recently self-constructed two story structure in which Tim and I now lounged, perusing the latest flying periodicals.

The Gundersons were nothing if not innovative. To help earn our keep during the rare times when we were not flying, we were used as apprentice carpenters, electricians, drywallers and roofers. This work of course, was done under the strict supervision of Dan and (mostly) Rod, who was much more toolman oriented. Indeed, we had literally built the walls up around ourselves over the previous eight weeks.

The building offered upstairs offices for the big man (Rod) himself, and a slightly smaller adjacent office for Rod’s wife, wherein she did the accounting and kept the company books. By now, the Gunderson accounting procedures had evolved somewhat beyond Dan’s pencil stub and brown paper sack method. Unfortunately, as I would find out later (again to the disappointment of my creditors) they hadn’t really progressed that far. An early version of an electric adding machine had much in common with today’s latest computers. Garbage IN! Garbage OUT! But alas, I digress.

There was an upstairs pilot lounge and flight planning area as well. This of course being the ubiquitous floor to ceiling, wall covering map, constructed of taped-together sectional maps.

Downstairs our passengers were treated to the luxury of a carpeted waiting room. This waiting room had all the necessary amenities one could possibly want. Cold colas of every sort in the fridge, and metal shelves lining one wall held a zillion different kinds of candy, chewing gum, Hostess Twinkies and cupcakes and Ding Dongs. Add in a few racks laden with different variety packs of chips and (relatively) fresh loaves of both white and wheat breads. We shoulda’ had a dang 7-11 sign on the front of the building!

It was the same game sorta’ as was played in A Good Day’s Work. Nonstop charters to Fairbanks arose frequently in those days, as it was the jumping off point, or more accurately the jumping on point (for the Wienie Bird) to get to Prudhoe Bay. Sometimes the charter originated right here in Kotzebue, although many times the request came via phone to Come get me in Selawik (Kiana, Shungnak… wherever) and drop me off in Fairbanks… quick! This generally being the result of a villager missing his or her scheduled flight for any number of reasons, combined with a fistful of cash and more waiting on the other end.

Therefore, whenever those charters came up, most often Dan or Rod would take them. Upon discharging their passengers at the main terminal, it was a short taxi across the field to their waiting pickup truck for a trip to Fred Meyers. And the air machine would later return from Fairbanks stuffed to overflowing with whatever was on sale cheapest at Fred’s that day.

Upon taxiing into the Gunderson ramp on arrival back in Kotzebue, the propeller would have barely stopped turning over before a swarm of a dozen or so Gunderson family kids materialized out of nowhere. Pressed into forced labor for the summer, they emptied the airplane and carried the haul into the combined waiting room and convenience store. Minus of course however many Ding Dongs, Twinkies, and packs of Bubblicious they could surreptitiously slip into the pockets of their coveralls before Rod’s wife ended the profit sharing with dire threats to their posteriors. I swear it looked just like a horde of ants dismantling a carrot cake and marching off with pieces three times their size and weight.

Once inside, Dan or Rod would consult the store receipt for the itemized prices paid in Fairbanks and instruct the kids how to price the merchandise. Most times just doubling the Fairbanks price would still leave a five or ten per cent, if not larger discount from the prices in Kotzebue’s three major grocery stores. And since the stores in the outlying villages had even larger markups, if they had the same items at all, business was always brisk. Particularly since many of the families would always travel with one or more of their young children.

Even upstairs in our crew lounge we could hear the plaintive shrill wails of the young children who were waiting to embark in their winged taxicabs for home. M-O-O-OM! BUY ME! MOM! BUY ME CANDY! MOM! BUY ME! I WANT POP! MO-O-O-OMA-A-A! BUY ME! Thus ensuring decades of work for Kotzebue’s newly minted Public Health Service dentists.

But even more amazing, was the composition of flying equipment that now called the Kotzebue ramp home base. All five of Kotzebue’s on-demand Part 135 operators were investing in newer and updated equipment. There were even some brand spanking new Cessna 206’s and 207’s scattered among the various operators, as the flow of oil money allowed for the very first time, a comfortable buying climate.

After decades, since the beginning really, of most Alaskan aircraft operators living hand-to-mouth, hoarding scarce cash, this was Nirvana! No longer constrained by having to try to make all their summer flying receipts carry them through slow winter flying months as well, operators could finally begin to run like a real business. There was money for spare parts, airplane loan payments, payroll and… money left over!

Hoarding cash, partial paydays, and being grounded for weeks because we couldn’t afford to buy a cylinder, were now just memories we could laugh at… . forever we hoped.

From our perch above the continual mayhem downstairs we could gaze out southward over the Gundersen ramp and survey our fleet of various workhorse aircraft. There was one seemingly for every job. Rod had acquired an almost new Cessna 207 to add to brother Dan’s slightly older model. It was all that remained of Dan’s former hodgepodge fleet and he operated it on Rod’s certificate, though we all flew it. We had a zippy new Cessna 185 which was fast becoming my favorite single.

There were three recip twins. One was a German built Dornier SkyServant and the other two were Beechcraft. N624Z was a Twin Bonanza (often called the T-Bone) which I first flew for Dan a few years earlier. This reliable and rugged plane was the forerunner of the Queen and thereby the KingAir series of Beechcraft. With a big bench seat in front seating three across and a big throwover yoke, this (to me then) huge airplane was rock solid with a load in it at only 85 MPH on approach. The original Airworthiness Certificate was dated three days before my birthday in 1954.

But it was November 966 Mike that stirred my juices just as quickly as the comeliest young maiden in any village anywhere.

Resplendent in a shimmering virginal white base coat, she sported horizontal trim lines of evergreen and gold. She was hot. She was SEXY. She was obviously a fast mover and a pilot couldn’t be in a warmer embrace than when wrapped in her confines. But she belonged to one man alone. The boss, Rod Gunderson. I wasn’t even allowed to approach that babe with a gas hose! Oh, there was the extremely RARE occasion where, due to some circumstance or other, Rod was backed into a corner and forced to let brother Dan dance with his lady. When that occurred, Rod would pace back and forth in complete irritated consternation until he hear Dan’s voice on the scanner calling Kotzebue flight service for traffic advisories.

Then his face would be glued to the western or easternmost window depending on which runway Dan was to land on. Only after watching Dan’s landing would he then scamper downstairs and out on the ramp to await Dan’s arrival to begin a complete and thorough inspection from nose to tailcone. For, as I’ve detailed elsewhere in the Chronicles, Rod and Dan have two completely different flying styles and Rod considered his brother to be a great pilot, but somewhat ham-fisted and abusive with the aircraft. Once, the two of them locked themselves in the back of the Dornier and… . well… I don’t know if any actual blows were thrown, but that big plane was rocking on her struts a couple of times. Inside Dan and Rod were screaming at each other. Seems Rod didn’t like the way Dan was goosing the geared Lycs while swiveling the aircraft on her tailwheeel and parking her. Rod owned the DoorKnob too!

Yeah. I figured I was never gonna’ get to fly the Baron. Oh well. I was never gonna’ nail a Playmate either, but that never stopped me from buying Hef’s magazine every month!

3

The Only Things that

Count in This Bidness

Now I haven’t mentioned the new Queen not only of the Gunderson fleet, but actually the whole Ralph Wien Memorial Airport.

When I showed up in Kotzebue there was only one turbine engine airplane based there. It was a DHC-6-200 model deHavilland Twin Otter bearing the registration N4901W. And on occasions, she might be joined for a brief time by one of Wien’s few Shorts Skyvans, commonly referred to as the box the Twin Otter came in.

There is something so… addicting about the smell of burnt kerosene in the morning. Watching as the free spinning propeller blades start their slowly increasing rotation just about two seconds after the turbine compressors are heard to start theirs is so cool. Cool. Way cool.

Bart Mason was a Pennsylvania oil field man who had come north and started his for hire flying career with a short stint flying for Leroy and Velma. Short, for Bart was not one to put up with any too much, actually ZERO bullshit. And Velma could dish that out just as easily and quickly as she’d whip you up a steak dinner after a hard day’s toiling in the skies. The BS came around a lot more frequently than the steak dinner, and without Leroy to back you up, well… . hell. Now you know why I worked there twice too.

So Bart was smart and figgered out early on that the real money was in operating your own airplanes. So he started a company of his own down at the east end of the small Kotzebue ramp. With a piston Beech 18 and a DHC-3 Single Otter, Bart took on some of the most desolate and dangerous flying in the Arctic for some tough customers. That would be the oil service industry. But he was really good, and gained a nationwide reputation as the go to man in Alaska’s arctic for moving awkward loads into some of the most hair-raising excuses for landing strips you can imagine.

As his business grew, someone had developed a Pratt & Whitney PT-6 turbine conversion for the old Beech 18’s. Now Bart had two of the re-engined Beech 18’s, now called WestWinds.

But the aforementioned Wien Air Alaska strike had brought the PT-6’s to the Gunderson ramp too. One on each wing of a relatively low-time and mid-life BeechCraft 99 Airliner. Yep. It even said Airliner in a silver metal plate riveted to the fuselage to the right of the passenger door integral mounted airstairs. The passengers couldn’t miss seeing it as they boarded.

Many of Alaska’s dozens of on-demand air taxis and charter companies were trying to capitalize on the Wien strike. With their existing hodgepodge fleets of single and twins engines planes holding nine passengers at most, the Gundersons went another direction. As I’ve said many a time, the Gunderson brothers were never short on original thinking and creativity when it came