In July of 1966, on a Friday evening but with twenty-four hours of daylight ahead, I set out alone from Fairbanks with tanks full and a five gallon can of aviation fuel in the baggage hold behind me and another strapped into the seat next to me. I had read Bob Marshall’s Arctic Wilderness, his account of a year living in the mining community of Wiseman and exploring Alaska’s Brooks Range in 1930-31. Crossing swollen rivers and slogging through sedge swamps did not appeal to me […]
She was only sixteen, but her paint was faded, her tailwheel smashed, and mice nested in her belly. She had suffered a hard landing in a farmer’s field near Delta Junction, and there she lay for three Alaska winters until my father rescued her in 1963. Fourteen months of his loving attention restored the 1947 Aeronca Chief to like-new condition. That fall I was off to college in Seattle, where I started flying lessons. The following summer, 1965, I worked […]
When he was a young man, Alan Barber borrowed his father’s plane, a 1947 Aeronca Chief, and flew toward Barrow from his parents’ house in Fairbanks, Alaska. He was nineteen, home from the summer from University of Washington, where he was earning an electrical engineering degree.
Read more (opens in new tab)…