A Flight into the Wrangell - St Elias

       Truly one of the absolute highlights of this adventure was the actual flight into the wilderness of the Wrangell - St Elias National Park.  There are no roads into the park, and very few trails through its wilderness, but we were headed for four days backpacking in the middle of it all.

       At the small airfield in McCarthy, we loaded into a small, bright yellow, 4-seat airplane, with our backpacks and hiking sticks stuffed behind our seats.  The canisters of bear spray were strapped to an outside support post, as it would be bad news if the changes in air pressure caused any issues with these inside the plane.
 
       After takeoff, we quickly ascended into the dramatic mountains east of McCarthy.  The pilot looped up the Nizina Valley, through the University Mountains, and eventually over the Chitistone Pass, giving us a view of the area we were hoping to hike in the coming days.  There was clearly still a lot of snow on the pass, but it did appear there would be areas of dry ground that we could explore safely in the days ahead.

      As we descended from the pass into the Skolai Valley, the pilot pointed out a small, flat area in the valley that he interestingly referred to as a “landing strip”.   No way…. that?  Sure, there weren’t any bushes or large boulders… but we were looking at maybe a quarter mile of grassy tundra tucked next to a hillside, marked with a small orange windsock propped up on a piece of driftwood.  That couldn’t possibly be where we were going to land, could it?

      Sure enough, we cleared one last creek and a set of bushes, and used less than half of that quarter-mile landing strip to bring the plane to a stop.  In a matter of about three minutes, we deplaned with all our gear, grabbed our bear spray from the support post, and waved goodbye to the pilot - carefully confirming the pickup time for four days later.  The pilot whipped the plane around, drove to the end of the “runway”, and took off again - leaving us completely alone, miles from anywhere.  This is exactly what we had sought, but we were both still a little bit daunted by just how “real” everything had just gotten.