Photo by Whit Richardson
Redrock Bush Pilots
Flying, and landing, in forgotten places
By Christopher Ketchamr
Galen Hanselman tells me, “There's a moment in every pilot’s life when he’s in the air but he understands that he’s not actually flying.” It takes me a moment to absorb the full import of what he’s saying: Not actually flying means falling. A feeling of nausea comes over me, because I’m about to spend a few days in the air with the bush pilots of the red rock.
I want to ask Hanselman about his book, Fly Utah! Hanselman wants to talk about cracking up: He had landed in the cold March of 2004 at Dark Canyon Plateau airstrip, a high, lonesome place at 6,800 feet above the Needles country of Canyonlands National Park. “There are two humps on that strip and when I took off, I hit one of these humps and it bounced me into the air,” he recalls. And then, of course, he wasn’t flying. He was hurtling. For almost 1,500 feet, his plane rode the trajectory of its failure. At the end of the runway was a wall of piñon trees: Their arms reached out and smashed into his wings and tore up his propeller and broke the windows in the cockpit. Hanselman, of course, was fine—they always seem to come out fine, these bush pilots.
Dark Canyon is one of 83 backcountry airstrips in Utah that Hanselman details in Fly Utah!, the definitive tome on backcountry piloting in the state. Most of the airstrips are technically difficult: clinging to sandstone cliffs, sand-pitted, stone-fretted, barely recognizable from the air—places where a pilot with skill and courage can land. Almost all the strips are concentrated in the southern and eastern stretches of Utah where uranium wildcatters carved them out for aerial resupply and for executives who wanted to fly in and survey the claims. The strips bear the names of the history of the land: There’s the Radium King Mine Strip, near Fry Canyon, and there’s the Hole in the Rock Strip near the famous Mormon site of first passage, and there’s the Oljato strip on the Navajo Reservation.
And the best time to fly into them happens to be winter. Most of the year in Utah, heat and high altitude combine into a serious problem for backcountry fliers. Air molecules are already less dense at altitude, meaning that engine, wings, and propellers are less functional because the engine doesn’t breathe as easily, it draws less power, and the wings get less lift.
Heat further pulls the air molecules apart; the awful heat of Utah does this in spades. “You can become overconfident and underperformanced very easily,” reports Alaskan bush pilot Paul Swanstrom, who winters in Moab. Winter and early spring, he tells me, are the ultimate flying seasons in the desert: cold air, dry skies, no thunderheads, no havocky thermals.
Steve Durtschi, the wiry 50-year-old who will drop me in the Utah wilderness for the night, calls to the dispatcher at Canyonlands Field outside Moab: “Departing runway 2 Canyonlands; we’ll be straight out, low-level.” He throttles; the plane shivers, slingshots forward; and in six seconds we’re 300 feet above the domes and palaces of the slick-rock country, bearing west at 115 miles an hour for the canyons of the Green River and beyond.
I contacted Durtschi, who is president of the 400-member Utah Backcountry Pilots Association, because I wanted to fly into the remoteness of my 60,000-square-mile backyard. One strip in particular, 25 minutes’ airtime from Moab, piqued my interest: Mexican Mountain in the San Rafael Swell, near the treacherous canyon system known as the Black Box, which normally would take six hours to reach by Jeep out of Moab.
“Every strip is its own kind,” Durtschi says as we approach. The length of the strip, its altitude above sea level, and the obstacles of rock and rut permute with temperature and precipitation and wind to present an ever-changing complex of conditions. Reading the strip at a glance is the trick. At Mexican Mountain, there is in fact no mountain, just deep canyons and towering buttes that look like sombreros and the San Rafael River surrounded by cottonwoods. The strip itself, at 5,000 feet above sea level, is short and uneven—just 1,400 feet long, 18 feet wide, rough and narrow—and invaded by tamarisk and tumbleweed. Durtschi banks sharply, starts the descent. I mutter a question about the approach, but he tells me, “Let’s be quiet now”—he needs to concentrate, needs to hit the landing just so. “There’s no egress in many of these strips—if you want to abandon your landing, you can’t because the terrain climbs faster than your plane’s ability to climb,” Durtschi later tells me. “It’s absolute precision flying. You are absolutely committed to land.”
Here at Mexican Mountain, he has to clear the tamarisks at the head of the strip but power down enough to brake before we bounce into the stony berms where the strip peters off. We drop in a pleasant slow motion and bounce twice, the rear wheel settling down and sitting our nose high. Durtschi notes that “tail dragger” wheels are best for landings on dirt because nose wheels can catch on obstacles and flip the plane. I thank god for tail draggers, and the plane swings to a halt under the cottonwoods fed by the river.
Next to the runway, there is already a tent with a folding table and chairs and a Coleman stove. Base camp for an airplane camper, Durtschi surmises. Durtschi thinks of Utah’s strips as trailheads. Detractors among conservationists, such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, say bush pilots invade wilderness serenity. “I like to say that only footprints leave the airstrip,” Durtschi rejoins. “When my plane is landed and chocked, it’s as quiet as a tree. I’m not using it as a generator. I’m not going to light it up at night or rev its engines or pop wheelies with it or go off-trail and tear up the soil.” His argument to those who object to motors in the backcountry is that an airplane is “the least invasive form of motorized transport.”
I’m barely finished dumping my own gear when the other tent’s owner bursts from the sky and into the canyon, roaring. The craft, like ours, is a Cessna 185, small and powerful, a classic for backcountry flying. The plane touches down with a whirring flourish, and from the cockpit pops Locky McKinnon, a shaven-headed American Airlines pilot on a lone six-day safari, his first in southern Utah. McKinnon is stopping in to load up gear from his tent—he’s headed to scope out a strip 50 air miles east on the East Tavaputs Plateau. “Maybe I’ll be back tonight,” he says. “Maybe not.” He looks entirely pleased about the uncertainty.
Finally, Durtschi in his own Cessna bids me adieu with a warning as to how I might find my way out of this sun-smashed wilderness sans plane: “If for some reason tomorrow I don’t come back, just start walking up the road”—he points to a Jeep track that I’m almost certain is completely washed out—“and I’ll come and pick you up by truck.” Right, I tell myself. Pick me up. Somehow. With that, Durtschi shudders into the air in a crowd of dust devils, and I squint up at the plane’s disappearance in the pathetic manner with which a stranded man watches the last ship leave the island.
Then, happy as only the willfully stranded can be, I base-camp in the vale of cottonwoods by the river, where more than a thousand years ago a colony of Fremont Indians built pit houses out of mud and grew maize and melons in the rich bottomland, with its 120 frost-free days. Nearby I find a finely knapped flint arrowhead that Durtschi’s wife discovered in the dirt but which Durtschi keeps secreted in the gnarled bark pockets of a cottonwood. Snug under the cliffs are several pit-house ruins, and on the slab faces of boulders there are petroglyphs of tall men, a family holding hands, a bighorn on the move.
To the west is the 2,000-foot tiered wall of Mexican Mountain rising straight from the valley floor like a pyramid. To the east is Horsethief Pass, a craggy crack in the cliffs where Butch Cassidy escaped near-capture and almost certain death after the disastrous robbery at Castle Gate in 1897. His horses drank at the river, Cassidy cleaning off the blood from his wounds. I wander along the river, which to the north feeds out of the Black Box and to the south departs from the valley into the dark slash of the Lower Black Box. There is no chance of people showing up—maybe Locky McKinnon, but I’d hear his engines miles off—so I strip naked in the sun and loll about like a savage, occasionally whooping and listening to nine crystalline echoes bounce off the cliffs. This is what airplane camping is all about: the perfection of aloneness.
When Steve Durtschi swooped down at 8 a.m. and we were off again in the air, the country cut in shadow, he asked: “You make it to the Black Box?”
“Um, not really,” I said.
At 6 a.m., I had headed out to the upper Black Box with water, raisins, Leatherman, flashlight—woefully unprepared and knowing it. I walked for an hour in dawn-patrol light along the canyon floor where the San Rafael River chops the stone in Vs. I dropped down and down the lips of the rock, where nothing grew, and finally fell into the water. My feet shook at the impact of the cold, but the sun shone enough to keep me warm. I scrambled along the bank in the trickery of the tamarisks. Soon there rose a slit of black stone 20 feet wide and 50 feet high from which the river came spinning, gray and bristly. This was the Black Box, gashed out of the 250-million-year-old Coconino Sandstone. The San Rafael River, which falls from the heights of the Wasatch Plateau, was running high and cold; the walls narrowed instantly, the light shut down as the slit closed above—it would have been stupid to go on.
Now in the air, afloat on the light of the sun, my little trek was put in geologic perspective, like those clock timelines that show Homo sapiens occupying the last half-second of 24 hours of Earth time. A man on foot, you realize, is nothing in this landscape. A figment of the imagination of the rock in its hundreds upon hundreds of miles of impossible canyon, cliff, donjon, darkness. We followed the wending way of the Black Boxes at 100 feet in the air: Deep and forbidding, you could not see the water within. No light pierced. The Black Boxes, I imagined, had taken a lot of lives, human and animal, in their time.
Durtschi banks northeast. He has promised today we’ll hit an even more remote strip, one laid deep in Robbers Roost country near the Dirty Devil River as it races toward Lake Powell. With us on this journey are Brianna Ratterman and photographer Whit Richardson. We start by slicing down at Angel Point on a high, flat, salt-bush mesa. We hike along slick-rock domes near a stretch of narrows in nearby No Man’s Canyon. Every strip is its own kind, Durtschi had said. And every strip is a trailhead. We fly to the Happy Canyon strip, which accesses the fluted walls of the Happy Canyon narrows—unsung in the guidebooks, but secretly famous among Utah canyoneers. Then, the finale: the Dirty Devil strip six minutes south. It’s one of the shortest in Utah, less than 1,000 feet long, bookended by sheer canyon rims, and the approach to it makes my sphincter sit up—there is no room for error. Durtschi gets that familiar look of adrenal joy on his weathered face, pegs the landing, brakes sharply, and wheels the plane around to ready for the takeoff. There are no roads into this part of the Dirty Devil River, no roads for 15 miles as the crow flies. If our plane breaks down or fails on the takeoff, we’re stuck on our feet. I don’t think about that.
Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper’s Magazine, GQ, the Nation, and many other magazines and is the author of a book of poems, Notes from September 11. He lives in Moab, Utah.
