On May 16, 1932, pilot Jerry Jones was in trouble. One of his company's customers, a member of a climbing party on what was then Mount McKinley, was desperately ill in a tent on Muldrow Glacier and needed immediate transport. Unfortunately, the snow was gone in Weeks Field in Fairbanks. Jones needed skis to land on the glacier; but couldn't take off with them.
Someone suggested that the fire department turn their hoses, pump and water wagon on the airport and transform the dirt runway into mud, according to a Daily News-Miner report. The experiment worked, Jones was able to take off, the sick man was rescued.
"His splasho return landing is probably the only one on record ever accomplished in a man-made mud pie," Grant Pearson, who later became superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park, wrote in "My Life of High Adventure."
Meanwhile, after a stint of flying in South America for PanAm, Bob Reeve had arrived in Valdez a few months earlier and gone about establishing the same sort of business as other bush pilots: flying anything and anyone to anywhere. Though the area contained mineral riches, Valdez struggled to support mining operations. Geography was the big problem; miners could not get necessary equipment up into the mountains. Reeve destroyed that barrier to economic development when he landed Jack Cook at his Big Four Mine 6,000 feet up on Brevier Glacier in 1933.
The Valdez Miner reported, "For the first time in the history of Valdez an airplane was used today as an aid to opening up the vast treasure vaults in the hills in the immediate vicinity of Valdez."
Soon Reeve had more business than he could handle, as mining activity exploded. When the snows melted in town he changed out his skis for wheels and began air dropping to the mines what he could as glacier landing was no longer an option. He also began looking for a claim of his own and in the summer of 1934 spotted a strata of quartz. He was unable to land there on wheels, however, and when there was finally enough snow in Valdez to depart in skis, the quartz was buried under several feet and inaccessible.
As Beth Day later related in "Glacier Pilot," her biography of Reeve, "He turned his inventive imagination to figuring out a way to make a landing when he could see the quartz." Just like Jerry Jones two years earlier, Reeve needed a way to takeoff when there was no snow at the airport.
About 2 miles from Valdez, he found a tidewater area about 600 feet long that, between the tides, offered, as described by Day, "a slick surface of fine clay silt and wet goose grass." Reeve became a quick learner at getting his Fairchild 51 off the the mud on skis. "Mud is a little more critical than snow," he told Day, "but that can be easily rectified by yanking the stick back faster."
Keeping the skis on year-round allowed Reeve to contribute even more to the Valdez boom. Although he never hit it big in the lode that prompted the mudflat innovation (though his son David Reeve noted in a recent phone conversation that he and his siblings all received some quartz from the mine), Reeve's name became significant in the annals of American aviation.
"Due to his time in South America," explained David Reeve, "my father was not unfamiliar with dealing with all sorts of problems that he had to solve. But in Alaska," he continued, "the way they used aircraft was beyond anywhere else at that time."
Weeks Field in Fairbanks was never flooded again and eventually the invention of skeels (ski/wheel combinations), made the issue moot for Denali operations. Bob Reeve continued to fly on the mudflats in Valdez until World War II when he was pulled away to his record-setting operations supporting the military in Northway and the Aleutian Islands.
But the use of skis on mud remains an important historical footnote, a significant example of creative thinking that is often overlooked but had a tremendous impact on the lives of many and on one town's future in particular.
Contact Colleen Mondor at colleen@alaskadispatch.com.