Bob Reeve, the Valdez Glacier Pilot, and the 1937 Landing on the Walsh Glacier That Put Two Climbers Under Mount Lucania and Nearly Left His Airplane There Forever

In the summer of 1937, Alaska bush pilot Bob Reeve landed a ski-equipped Fairchild 51 on the Walsh Glacier at roughly 8,500 feet to drop climbers Bradford Washburn and Bob Bates below Mount Lucania - then a warm spell turned the snow to slush and nearly trapped the airplane there forever. Reeve escaped by a hair, told the climbers he could not return, and the two men climbed the mountain and walked nearly 100 miles to safety. It remains one of the defining stories of both glacier aviation and mountaineering.

Who Was Bob Reeve, the Valdez Glacier Pilot?

Bob Reeve arrived in Alaska in the early 1930s with almost nothing. By legend he stowed away on a steamer out of Seattle with about two dollars in his pocket and landed in Valdez, a town that already had a pilot and saw no need for a second one.

So Reeve took the work nobody else wanted: the mines. High in the Chugach and out toward the Wrangell Mountains, gold and copper prospects sat on glaciers and mountainsides where no wheel plane or float plane could reach. The only flat white surfaces up there were the glaciers themselves - tilted, crevassed rivers of moving ice.

Conventional wisdom said you could not land on a glacier. It sat too high, the snow went rotten, and the abrasive surface would tear the skis off an airplane. Reeve decided the conventional wisdom was wrong.

How Did Bob Reeve Invent Glacier Flying?

Reeve’s breakthrough was the skis. Standard aircraft skis of the era used wood or ash bottoms and worked fine on cold powder at a frozen lake. On a glacier they failed, because gritty summer ice behaves like sandpaper and drags a wooden ski to a stop.

Reeve faced the bottoms of his skis with stainless steel - reportedly pried off a shipwreck - and polished them slick. Now they slid across the abrasive surface instead of grabbing it. That single idea, stainless-shod skis, is the foundation on which all glacier flying was built. A generation later, pilots like Don Sheldon at Talkeetna were expanding on a technique Reeve had worked out alone, with a hacksaw and no money.

His second breakthrough was the takeoff surface. Reeve’s home base was a tidal mudflat at Valdez. At low tide it left a long, flat sheet of slick mud, and he discovered his stainless skis slid on wet mud nearly as well as on snow. He would launch from the mudflat at low tide, fly to a glacier, land uphill to slow down, unload, then take off downhill to gain speed, and slide back to the coast.

His entire operation ran on the ocean’s schedule. Miss the tide, and the runway was underwater.

Why Did Washburn and Bates Need to Fly Onto a Glacier?

By 1937, mountaineer and pioneering aerial mapmaker Bradford Washburn and his climbing partner Bob Bates had set their sights on Mount Lucania, in the Saint Elias Mountains on the Alaska–Yukon border.

Standing better than 17,000 feet, Lucania was then the highest unclimbed peak in North America - and famous less for being hard to climb than for being nearly impossible to reach. It sat behind 60 to 80 miles of broken glacier. Walking in would consume a month and most of a party’s food before the real climb even began.

Washburn’s solution was to skip the walk entirely: have a pilot land the team on a glacier directly beneath the peak. There was exactly one man on Earth with the skill to try it - Bob Reeve. He had never been near Lucania, but he had landed on more glaciers than any pilot alive, so he agreed to attempt it.

What Happened on the Walsh Glacier in 1937?

The plan was to shuttle the party and its supplies onto the Walsh Glacier at around 8,500 feet, in the basin below the peak. Reeve flew in the first loads, the stainless skis biting into cold morning snow, and set men and gear onto ice where no airplane had ever landed.

Then the weather turned warm - and it rained, at 8,500 feet on a glacier. The firm snow softened into deep, bottomless slush.

When Reeve came in with the final load, carrying Washburn himself, he got the airplane down and unloaded. Then he tried to leave, and the Fairchild would not move. The same slick skis that glided over cold snow now simply plowed. The wet slush sucked at them and held on. He would firewall the engine, waddle a few yards, and mire down again.

He tried everything. He packed a runway. He attempted takeoffs at night when the surface froze slightly. He stripped every spare ounce from the airplane. For days, Reeve and Washburn wrestled a machine that would not fly while the weather closed in around them.

How Did Reeve Escape - and Why Is It a Lesson About Density Altitude?

Reeve found his only way out by pointing the airplane down the one downhill pitch he could find - a slope dropping toward a crevasse field. It was all or nothing: either the skis would break free and the airplane would fly, or it would go into the ice.

He ran her down the grade, tail up, skidding and bouncing and gathering speed as the crevasses rushed up. At the last possible instant she came unstuck and staggered into the air, mushing just above the surface until she found enough speed to climb. He got out - barely - and flew straight home to Valdez.

This is the part every pilot should sit with, because it is not really about mountains. It is about density altitude and a soft surface - the same combination that can trap an airplane at a grass strip on a hot afternoon. A warm, soft surface, a heavy load, and a high field elevation rob an airplane of performance regardless of the terrain.

Reeve did the arithmetic and made the hardest call in aviation: he told Washburn and Bates he would not return. The glacier was rotten, the airplane had nearly failed, and no one else would be flown in. The climbers were on their own.

What Happened to the Climbers After the Airplane Left?

Washburn and Bates were stranded at 8,500 feet beneath the highest unclimbed mountain on the continent, with a fraction of their planned food and gear, and the nearest person the better part of 100 miles away across some of the most heavily glaciated country in North America.

Instead of waiting for a rescue everyone knew was not coming, they decided the only way home led over the top. They stripped their loads to almost nothing and climbed - completing the first ascent of Mount Lucania, almost as a necessity on the way out rather than a triumph.

Then they crossed the shoulder of neighboring Mount Steele and began the long walk out: across glaciers, fording meltwater rivers, running desperately low on food, until weeks later they staggered into a small settlement near Kluane country, gaunt but alive. That escape became a mountaineering legend in its own right.

Why Bob Reeve’s Judgment Mattered More Than His Flying

None of it happens without the pilot. A broke stowaway looked at ice everyone called un-landable, proved them wrong with stainless steel and a runway of ocean mud, and effectively invented glacier flying - the technique that would later put climbers on Denali and help map much of Alaska.

Just as important, Reeve knew the technique’s limits. That last flight off the Walsh Glacier taught him when to say no: when to look at a soft surface, a heavy load, and a high elevation and admit the airplane simply could not do it, even with men counting on him. He would rather deliver a hard truth than fly a load he could not fly out.

That judgment carried him a long way. Reeve went on to found Reeve Aleutian Airways, flying some of the worst weather in the world along the Aleutian chain for decades. He got to be an old pilot rather than a bold one. And in one of history’s rarer endings, he was right that he could not come back - and the climbers made it anyway. Everyone lived.

Key Takeaways

Bob Reeve pioneered glacier flying by facing his ski bottoms with polished stainless steel, allowing them to slide on abrasive glacier ice instead of grabbing it.
His Valdez operation launched from a tidal mudflat, landing uphill on glaciers and taking off downhill - all on the ocean’s tide schedule.
In 1937, warm weather and rain turned the Walsh Glacier to slush and nearly trapped Reeve’s Fairchild 51 at 8,500 feet; he escaped only by committing to a downhill run toward a crevasse field.
Reeve refused to return, and Bradford Washburn and Bob Bates climbed Mount Lucania (the highest unclimbed peak in North America at over 17,000 feet) and walked nearly 100 miles to safety.
The core lesson is timeless: density altitude plus a soft surface and a heavy load can defeat any airplane - and knowing when not to fly is a pilot’s most valuable instrument.

For deeper reading, see Beth Day’s Glacier Pilot: The Story of Bob Reeve, the firsthand accounts of Washburn and Bates, and David Roberts’ retelling of the Lucania escape.