Expedition
Reeve made several modifications to his plane, which he tried to keep from the local inspector. When questioned about these, his answers resulted in official approval from the inspector for the modifications.
Reeve received a letter from Bradford Washburn in January 1937 asking if he could fly a party of climbers to the glacier at the base of Mount Lucania in Canada. Reeve agreed to undertake the task. In April, the bulk of the supplies were flown in. When he flew Washburn and Robert Bates to the site, the weather had turned unseasonably warm and the plane sank up to its belly in slush. It was over a week before Reeve could take off, after the temperature had dropped sufficiently for a crust of ice to form over the slush. The trip was described by Reeve as the "most hazardous" of his career, but he had set a new world record of 8,750 feet (2,670 m) for the highest landing on skis, more than 1,800 feet (550 m) higher than any in either the Arctic or Antarctic.
The day after the Washburn trip, the engine of the Fairchild 51 quit. Reeve spent eight months repairing the Wright Whirlwind engine, but never put it back in the aircraft. He was now back to only one. Reeve made his last glacier landing in 1938, when he flew Brad Washburn to the Mount Marcus Glacier. His brother Richard was killed in a plane crash in 1938 and in the spring of 1939 a storm overturned the Fairchild 71. He spent all summer repairing it, only for the hangar to burn down with the aircraft inside. Reeve bought another Fairchild 71 and spent a further month repairing it. At this time, the CAA came in to regulate flying in Alaska. Pilots were assigned routes under a "grandfather rights" scheme based on the territory they had served for four months prior to August 22, 1938. Reeve was given a small area around Copper River. The work available wouldn't support a growing family (at this time they had two children, Richard and Roberta) so they left Valdez in January 1941 for Fairbanks.
Read more about this topic: Robert Campbell Reeve
Famous quotes containing the word expedition:
“It is a sort of ranger service. Arnold’s expedition is a daily experience with these settlers. They can prove that they were out at almost any time; and I think that all the first generation of them deserve a pension more than any that went to the Mexican war.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)