Wager With the Wind: The Don Sheldon Story by James Greiner

Author:James Greiner [Greiner, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312853372
Amazon: 0312853378
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 1982-05-14T12:00:00+00:00

Senator Boecher’s White Bear

At midnight, 1958 became history, and the arrival of the new year was celebrated in Talkeetna with the consumption of an inordinate quantity of bar whiskey at the Fairview Inn and with the snow-muffled discharge of various shotguns by those still conscious enough to see what time it was. The shots were immediately answered by the discordant howling of sled dogs on the outskirts of town. Sheldon had celebrated his 37th birthday in the November just past. During the coming year, the first ascent of the Western Rib of Mount McKinley’s South Face would be accomplished, in June, by a four-man party led by John (“Jake”) Breitenbach, a very close friend of Sheldon’s. Jake would later lose his life on Mount Everest. Talkeetna Air Service was still alive and well, and Sheldon’s comings and goings had assumed the almost unnoticed regularity of a ticking clock.

That the presence of the pilot and his airplanes in the village by the Susitna would become a matter of less concern than the daily trains that pass between Fairbanks and Anchorage was predictable. Today, as then, rare is the morning that he is not airborne long before the rest of the town is alive, especially during the summer and autumn months. More times than not, darkness has descended before the plane’s winking, red anticollision light announces his return. The townspeople of Talkeetna, in a somewhat disappointing manner, seldom mention his comings and goings, for they assume that everyone knows he flies an airplane for a living. Yet he is a legend in his own time everywhere else in the state, and in the smaller states to the south, he is, at the very least, known as “that guy in Alaska who lands on mountains.”

Sheldon was busy during the 1959 season, flying many climbing crews to McKinley. By the spring of 1959, the South Summit of McKinley had been successfully scaled 14 times.

In addition to his flying activities for climbers, Sheldon flew for hunters. In 1947, he became a registered big-game guide and had conducted many hunts throughout Alaska, almost always with the aid of his airplanes, but he has also operated riverboats on the Susitna and other rivers for the same purpose. By the winter of 1959-60, Sheldon had flown and guided his share of polar-bear hunts, most of them in the Point Hope area.

Polar-bear hunting, be it with airplanes or Eskimo dogsled, is always a chancy business because the ice pack is a continually shifting mass. With temperature fluctuations, wind, and tremendous internal pressure, the ice pack heaves and buckles, throwing up jumbled ridges 50 to 60 feet high. The floes separate and rejoin in a never-ending northeasterly circuit of the North Pole, and these movements, which often occur over a span of minutes, leave the monotonous white of the ice pack scarred with jagged jade-black leads of steaming open water. This supercooled seawater of the Arctic Ocean requires temperatures well below 32 degrees to freeze. To fall into these smoking

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