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Vice Blog

LAND O' PLANES

Oh here's something: the Planes. Did you know that approximately 2% of all Alaskans (including babies and women and old people and people living indigenously) are registered pilots? That's only like 12,000 people, but still, good haul.

We flew into ANWR from Fairbanks, whose international airport has seven passenger gates and serves five major airlines total. Its light-aircraft field however, is packed with beat-up old Cessnas and Pipers and pontoon planes (which isn't what you're supposed to call them) amid tiny Wingsesque air-travel companies and aeronautically themed diners and pilots' bars and plane-supply shops. It was easily the most hopping place in town after the Sam's Club next to the army base.

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Aside from a single, terrifying "haul road" running through the mountains to Prudhoe Bay, puddle jumpers like these are pretty much the only means of access to the entire top half of the state. The pilot who ferried me and the cameraman up to Heimo's place on the Coleen river even described being chartered by the Secretary of the Navy to take him to submarine exercise grounds their own planes couldn't get to.

As strong as Heimo's survival skills are, there's no way he could pursue his lifestyle the way he does without the bush planes. Obviously, he needs them to get back and forth from town with his year's furs in the summer, but he also relies on a couple intermittent visits from pilots in the fall to drop off essential supplies for the winter, like snowmachine fuel and craisins.

While we were staying with Heimo, he got just such a fuel dump from his friend Rick Schikora, a Fairbanks businessman and amateur pilot who looks like Orson Welles just pre-alcoholism and sounds like the eagle from the Muppets. He and Heimo could have talked about the state fuel tax in depth for 20 minutes (which they did) and I still would have been enraptured by the conversation.

Fortunately, as a man who bow-hunts grizzlies and flies a tiny plane around the Alaskan wilderness just for the fuck of it, Rick has an arsenal of decent stories to fall back on. This business happened a couple months after we were there (and according to Heimo, actually involved Rick replacing his strut with a tree trunk and then flying on that), but it's exactly the kind of tale he'd casually shuck off over a plate of caribou rib.

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Here's his story of how he met Heimo. Try to peel your eyes and ears away.

Our steeds. Evidently commercial bush pilots don't name their planes but we christened ours the Chocolate Sunrise (right) and Peppermint Patty.

I used to have a dumb, embarrassing, completely unshakable physical terror at flying which one day a few years ago I just happened to shake. It was really bad while it lasted though (the adrenaline surge from takeoff once made my body metabolize an entire fifth of whiskey in the space of about five minutes) and sometimes when I'm about to get on a flight I'll get a vestigial twinge of the Fear which makes me worried I'm about to have a full-on pussy relapse, sort of like people who have panic attacks or seizures or other actual medical conditions sometimes get. Anyways, I'd just assumed I'd be a mess through most of our two-hour flight through the White Mountains in a late-70s Helio Courier straight out of the CIA's Air America fleet (literally true), but it was really very nice.

For one thing, taking off in a prop plane that size is significantly more chill than doing the same in a commercial airliner. Instead of hurtling 100 mph up into empty space, our pilot just spun a few dials, pulled back a knob, and the plane lifted Jetson-syle straight up into the air before scooting forward. You can also fly really close to the ground, which is spooky and Alive-esque when you're crossing through mountains, but which also tricks your brain into thinking all you'd have to do to survive a crash is bail out at the last-minute and execute a good tuck-n-roll.

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Most importantly though, you're sitting right next to the pilot who (provided he's not a dick) will either say "Don't worry about that" when the plane suddenly tilts to the left then shoots in the opposite direction and also forward and down for 20 feet, or simply shrug his shoulders and continue the story about the time he had to shit so bad he made an emergency landing on the highway.

Really between the relentless casualness, the buzzing of kids outside in their yard, and the tales of Fairbanks' fake-Heimo who sets out every year to live off the land and makes it about a month before radioing for an emergency pickup (every pilot we talked to knew this guy), bush flights are basically as solid a time as you can have in a plane. Unless your pilot brings up the fact that since less kids are interested in getting a pilot's license, year after year, their numbers get fewer, and some day no one will fly there at all. That part makes us a little misty.

Watch part 3 of Heimo's Arctic Refuge.