Here’s to the heroes of the Last Frontier

How would Alaska be different without small airplanes and the tenacious men and women who pilot them?

For any new invention to catch on, it needs both a creator and users. In this case, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first flying machine on Dec. 17, 1903. About 10 years later, the technology debuted in Fairbanks after a group of merchants there shipped a plane from Seattle on a steam ship.

It’s doubtful those men had any idea how this new-fangled flying machine would forever alter life in Alaska.

Before the airplane, many areas of the state were only accessible by water in the summer or sled dog teams in the winter. Even without an airstrip nearby, Bush pilots like Cliff Hudson and Don Sheldon would land on gravel bars or clearings in the woods to deliver supplies to remote homesteaders, miners and trappers.

Sheldon’s daughter Holly Sheldon Lee recalls how her father used to tie the seat belt to her ankles when she flew with him to drop supplies out of the plane to the climbers and families below.

Hudson, Sheldon and his father-in-law, Bob Reeve, also changed the sport of mountaineering when they experimented with glacier landings and putting skis on airplanes.

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of flight in Alaska and the year the first team of mountain climbers reached the summit of North America’s tallest peak, Mt. McKinley.

Sheldon was a pioneer pilot who is said to have crashed 38 planes between 1947, when he started Talkeetna Air Service, and his death in 1975 while pioneering landing areas in the Last Frontier. He used his plane like a truck, fastening guns to it for hunting wolves and lashing timber to it to haul load after load of timber up the Ruth Gorge to build the Mountain House.

But without pilots like Hudson, Sheldon, Doug Geeting and David Lee, many more climbers would perish on the mountain. Untold numbers of adventures from around the world owe their lives to these men who fly into the face of the impossible and accomplish the improbable time and again.

If you’ve lived in remote Alaska for any length of time, no doubt you have your own Bush pilot heroes. Maybe it’s the pilot who buzzed your cabin before sending a drop bag down filled with Christmas gifts. Or maybe it’s the pilot who snuck in and out through a hole in the clouds to fly you to the hospital in time for the birth of your first child. You wouldn’t be alone either if a pilot also helped deliver your child after weather delayed your departure.

When Holly Sheldon Lee and David Lee opened Sheldon Air Service in 2010, it braided together proud histories from three families with many chapters in the Mat-Su Borough. Two generations of the Hudson and Sheldon families have served their communities and made their livings as Bush pilots. Holly is the third generation of Bush pilot in the Sheldon family, counting her grandfather.

For us, there just aren’t enough words to justly sign the praises of these heroes of the Last Frontier.