Mt. McKinley

Robert, Saturday, August 23

It rained like the devil last night. In the trailer, the roof is right over your head so you hear the pitter-patter of rain drops. I thought this means another rainy, gloomy day. And I thought we would have to reschedule our flight seeing. When we got up, it was cloudy but soon the overcast started breaking up. Sunshine! Maybe not all is lost after all. We ate lunch and headed into town to see the open air market. That was a bust. Six booths were selling homemade jewelry. We had seen it all in about two minutes. We walked down to the river to see if we could see Mt. McKinley from there. The river is one of the places in town that you can get a view of the mountain. The reason is that you look across the river and so the trees don’t block the view. We could see part of the mountain but the top was blocked by clouds. Having checked out the shops downtown, we walked back to the campsite. Leslie has one shop picked out where she wants to back to for the hand-knitted sweaters that are on an end-of-season sale. That will be on tomorrow’s agenda. The trees are starting to turn so I guess the fall is almost here, at least in Alaska. We walked to the airport for the flight seeing. To the southeast there were dark clouds that were approaching. When we checked-in, we were told that there was a good chance that the top of the mountain would be visible so we set off with our pilot to go see. As there was just Leslie and I as passengers, we were in a Cessna 185. They also have two larger aircraft when they have more passengers. The 185 has six seats but the back two are for midgets and the middle two aren’t much bigger. I sat in the right front seat and Leslie had the middle seat all to herself. As we climbed from the airport, we went through rain but on the other side it was looking pretty good. Our pilot knew a lot about the area and pointed out sights on the way. We all had headsets with microphones so it was easy to talk. As we got closer, the mountain came into view. The sun was shining and we could see the entire mountain. The top of the mountain is more than 20,000 feet and the base is 2,000 feet. The highest we got was 11,000 feet so we were looking at the side of the mountain. We flew between several of the nearby peaks and the mountain and it was very scenic. As it was late in the afternoon, the sunshine coming almost horizontally made it more so. Our pilot told us he had climbed McKinley three times and also some of the surrounding peaks. We had signed up for an around-the-mountain flight but the north side was solid clouds so we made several U-turns and passed up the north side. All of the pilots who flying around the mountain announce where they are located every 3-5 minutes. This is in lieu of having air traffic control. They also tell each other about weather conditions. One told our pilot that to go around the north side of the mountain we would have to go above 14,000 feet. In a small plane without oxygen that is not a great idea. Also, losing sight of the ground in a small plane not advised. Soon we were on the way back to the airport. Our landing was one of the smoothest I have ever experienced. Some commercial pilots slam it on the ground but this was smooth as silk. The flight lasted an hour and a half. After that we walked into town and ate in the restaurant where we had drinks yesterday. When we came out of the restaurant, it was sprinkling, As we walked the half mile back to the campsite it kept coming down harder and harder. By the time we got here, we were soaked. Turned up the heat and changed clothes and soon we were warmed up. I crashed soon afterward.