Alaskan Bushwheels, the Tundra Tire Row at AirVenture, and the Backcountry Fliers Who Haul a Piece of the Idaho Gravel Bar Into Oshkosh

Alaskan Bushwheels are oversized, low-pressure tundra tires that let backcountry airplanes land on gravel bars, sandbars, and rough ridges where no runway exists. At AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, dozens of these aircraft park wingtip-to-wingtip in a grass corner far from the main showline, most of them flown in from across the country on the very tires that let them touch down where nobody else can. The tires work because they run at extremely low pressure - single digits, sometimes 5 to 6 psi - so they deform around rocks instead of bouncing off them.

What Are Alaskan Bushwheels?

An Alaskan Bushwheel is a big, oversized, low-pressure tire built for landing where there is no pavement. Some of the common sizes are what bush pilots call “thirty-fives” - 35 inches tall - and some run even bigger. The largest can come up to an adult’s chest.

The defining trick is air pressure, or rather the lack of it. Where a Cessna 172 might run 28 to 30 psi in its mains, these tires float on as little as 5 or 6 psi. You can push a thumb into the sidewall. That softness is the entire point.

The tires are built by Airframes Alaska, the company behind the Alaskan Bushwheel name, and they were developed out of the real Alaska bush - country where the ground is unforgiving and the nearest paved runway might be a hundred miles away over the mountains.

Why Do Backcountry Tires Run So Little Air Pressure?

Low pressure lets the tire deform and swallow the terrain. When a backcountry airplane touches down on a gravel bar in the middle of an Idaho river, a rock-strewn ridge, or a sandbar exposed at low water, the soft tire wraps around the rocks and soaks up the impact instead of transmitting it into the landing gear.

A normal, hard tire would bounce or fold the gear. A Bushwheel rolls over obstacles that would otherwise be unlandable.

Notably, these tires have almost no tread. The sidewall is smooth. Tread isn’t the goal out here - give, float, and cushion are. The tire’s job is to forgive the surface so the pilot can concentrate entirely on flying.

Which Airplanes Use Tundra Tires?

The backcountry row at AirVenture reads like a catalog of STOL aircraft. Common types include:

Piper PA-18 Super Cub - the airplane that essentially wrote the book on backcountry flying, with tandem seating, a high wing, and big flaps that let it hang in the air at a crawl.
CubCrafters Carbon Cub - the modern take, stuffing the same Cub shape full of light carbon fiber and a strong engine. Some will get airborne in a couple hundred feet - less runway than the wingspan of an airliner.
Kitfox, RANS, Highlander, and Scout aircraft, ranging from bright homebuilts to bare-aluminum machines dented and patched from hard use.

The trade-off is real: big soft tundra tires add drag and cost cruise speed. But backcountry pilots take that trade every time, because the entire purpose of the airplane is to reach places nothing else can.

How Do You Land on a Gravel Bar?

Backcountry landing comes down to airspeed control and energy management. Here’s the technique in practice:

Fly the approach slow, right on the ragged edge, power on - dragging it in behind the power curve where the throttle controls your descent and the stick controls your speed.
Cross the threshold at a walking pace of airspeed. On a gravel bar there may be no threshold to speak of, and a bend in the canyon you have to fly around on final.
Don’t flare and float. Plant it firmly on your chosen spot rather than floating down a mile of pavement.
Get on the brakes and the stick immediately and stop - sometimes before the airplane reaches water on the far side.

The takeoff mirrors it: the correct flap setting, the tail comes up, and the airplane is off before you’ve had time to think, clawing for altitude to clear the trees at the end of the bar. This is precision flying at the absolute edge of what the airplane can do - what pilots call STOL, for short takeoff and landing. Some of these machines take off in the length of a tennis court and land in less.

Why Backcountry Access Matters

The backcountry is where general aviation gets to be pure: no control tower, no Class Bravo airspace - just a pilot, an airplane, a chart, and a strip someone carved out of the trees generations ago. But many of those strips are disappearing as public-land access tightens and old airstrips get abandoned and grown over.

That’s the work of the Recreational Aviation Foundation (RAF), whose volunteers fight to keep backcountry strips open and usable. They partner with land agencies and organize work parties where pilots fly in with shovels and rakes, clearing brush and filling ruts by hand so the next pilot can land safely. They’ve built and rebuilt strips across the mountain West.

Every pilot on the tundra-tire row knows the Foundation by name - because without those strips, even the biggest, softest Bushwheel has nowhere to land.

The Culture of the Backcountry Row

What sets these airplanes apart is that they are genuinely used. There’s mud in the wheel pants, a fishing rod strapped inside one, a dog bed in the back of another. These aren’t hangar queens polished for the judges - they’re working airplanes that flew in and will fly right back out.

One pilot, who gave only the name Denny, flew in from western Montana - two and a half days of flying, camping under the wing. Asked about the smallest strip he’d ever used, he described a gravel bar on the Salmon River shorter than the AirVenture parking rows, with water on both sides. A family from Wyoming flew in aboard a four-seat backcountry machine; their youngest, no more than seven, sat atop one of the giant tires like a chair. As the mother put it, the airplane is how they reach a cabin with no road: the family minivan that happens to fly.

That’s the heart of it. The airplane isn’t the hobby - it’s the door to the wild place on the other side. As Denny said of all the spots he’s landed: “It’s never the landing. It’s what’s there when you shut the engine off. The quiet. You can’t get to that quiet any other way.”

Key Takeaways

Alaskan Bushwheels are oversized, low-pressure tundra tires - commonly 35 inches tall - built by Airframes Alaska for landing where there is no runway.
They run at single-digit pressures (around 5–6 psi), versus roughly 28–30 psi in a typical Cessna 172, so they deform around rocks instead of bouncing off them.
Backcountry landings rely on slow, power-on approaches and planting the airplane firmly on a precise spot - STOL flying at the edge of the airplane’s capability.
Popular backcountry aircraft include the Piper PA-18 Super Cub and the CubCrafters Carbon Cub, some of which take off in a couple hundred feet.
The Recreational Aviation Foundation works to keep backcountry airstrips open, without which these aircraft would have nowhere to land.