taxonomist busy for days, but I didn’t want to offend the homeless old coot so I took it.
“Now git yer ass on that freight car there.” He pointed down the tracks. “And don’t hop off ’til ya see McKinley. It’s the biggest mountain in North America,” he hollered after me when I was some distance down the tracks. “Ya sure as hell can’t miss it!”
I sure as hell did.
At that point in my life I wasn’t much of a freight-train hopper, and my jumping-off point turned out to be the tiny interior community of Talkeetna. Denali (the Great One), as I was told the Athabaskan Indigenous peoples had long ago named what later became Mt. McKinley, was clearly visible from Talkeetna, but Mt. McKinley National Park was still a long way off.
A man with a broad grin, a limp leg and a gaggle of adoring dogs spotted me on the single dirt road that ran the three-block length of this log cabin frontier town. “Need a job?” he said warmly without bothering to ask my name or anything else about me.
“Sure,” I responded.
“Fine, then. I need someone to clear the brush beside my hangar over there.” He pointed to a dense thicket of young poplar trees beside a rusty red airplane hangar. “There’s food, and a dry place to roll out your blanket inside, if you like,” he offered kindly, obviously recognizing my need.
I soon discovered it was the legendary Don Sheldon, a celebrated bush pilot who first mapped the Alaska Range and had survived a half-dozen bush plane crashes after being shot down in World War II. He was one of the nicest people I could hope to meet given my circumstances.
The hangar was full of mountaineering equipment and freeze-dried food left over from McKinley expeditions—these would be my rations. The contents and instructions were usually written in German or Japanese, so every meal was a genuine surprise.
While clearing the brush for Sheldon’s new hangar site I somehow became his right-hand man, pumping gas for his planes, packing gear and grub for his expedition drops, and occasionally flying up with him to base camp to deliver supplies. He loved to airdrop gallons of hard ice cream on top of McKinley climbers struggling with the continent’s coldest and loftiest heights. He loved to tease me too. “Look, ptarmigan tracks in the snow,” he was fond of saying while circling the plane from an absurdly high vantage point. A quick drop and a ski landing on a snowfield would always prove his point.
“Look Thom, ptarmigan tracks,” legendary bush pilot Don Sheldon was fond of saying to me from absurdly high elevations above the Alaska Range as we’d fly in supplies to climbers on Mount McKinley. The “bad-ass bush pilot,” who had survived multiple plane crashes and mapped the Alaska Range, befriended me in Talkeetna and employed me as his right-hand man in the summer of 1970. Grey Villet photo, The Life Picture Collection, Getty Images
Sheldon kept trying to get me to go up for a weekend at his tiny one-room hut on the Ruth Amphitheater—one of the largest and highest glacial fields in the Alaska Range. Some Talkeetna folks cautioned me, however, telling of the time he forgot a guest and left him stranded in that hut for nearly a month without much food. “He’s a bit absent-minded, you know,” they’d say, sitting around the communal dinner table at Talkeetna’s iconic Roadhouse Inn, kicking back coffee that would make your hair stand straight after the best homemade dinner in Alaska.
One week I shared the hangar with a Japanese man, seven years my senior, named Naomi Uemura, who never let on that he was Japan’s greatest hero. We’d fish for grayling together at the confluence of the Chulitna, Susitna and Talkeetna Rivers where the great sweep of the Alaska Range was stunningly visible, at least during the rare times the clouds parted. Naomi always seemed more intent on watching the clouds veiling and unveiling the continent’s highest summits than watching his fishing lure. He had such a sincere honesty, unassuming nature and genuine interest in what I was doing that it never occurred to me the guy could be famous.
Naomi Uimara took this self-portrait atop Mt. McKinley. He was the first person to reach the top alone. Wikipedia photo
One day finally dawned cloudless. Denali (Mt. McKinley) was clear from its base to its 6,190-metre (20,310-foot) majestic summit, and both Sheldon and my Japanese friend flew off so early I was still in my sleeping bag in the hangar. I hope Naomi’s not going for the Ruth Amphitheater offer, I thought as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Ten days later on August 26, 1970, I read the banner headlines in the Anchorage Daily Times: “McKinley Climbed Solo!” There was the grinning picture of Naomi taking a self-portrait with a timer on the highest summit on the North American continent—a summit he reached in half the normal climbing time with an ultralight pack and his indomitable spirit. It was the first solo conquest but not Naomi’s first record-breaking achievement. I learned later that he was the first to reach the North Pole solo and the first to raft solo the length of the Amazon. Tragically, Naomi returned to Alaska fourteen years later to attempt the first winter ascent of Denali, but he disappeared and perished in a storm while descending the summit on February 13, 1984. His words always served as an inspiration to me: “In all the splendor of solitude … it is a test of myself, and one thing I loathe is to have to test myself in front of other people.”
While my hangar buddy was glowing in the publicity of the first solo climb of Denali, little did I know the long arm of the law was starting to reach out for me from Michigan. In the meantime, the state of Alaska had opened land for settlement along the railway, and I joined other back-to-the-landers rushing to stake and claim a five-acre parcel—for free!
Nineteen kilometres up the tracks north of Talkeetna, I found an old abandoned trapper’s cabin that I restored to habitable condition while I searched for the perfect homestead site. In late September I was cutting my winter supply of firewood when the passing train hurled the bag of mail for our little community out the door of the baggage car. It landed close enough for me to walk to it. A letter from my parents marked “Urgent” told me that my summer of love was over: the Michigan Draft Board had sent me an unanswered Notice of Induction while I had been travelling. “The FBI know you’re in Alaska. Get out!” my parents warned. The FBI had questioned some friends and two of my younger brothers as to my whereabouts after my departure from Michigan, but it wasn’t until my aunt Ruth inadvertently gave information about my cabin in Talkeetna to an informant posing as a friend that my life underground began.
I packed and headed south just one step ahead of my pursuers. My nearest neighbour and friend Steve Rorick, who lived just over a kilometre south on the tracks, was taken in for questioning by the police. They thought he was Thom Henley, and it took him some time to convince them otherwise.
I’m on the left, sitting beside my mom (Agnes), older brother (Mike) and dad (Victor) in our Lake Michigan summer cottage. I posed for this photo shortly before hitchhiking to Alaska for a backpacking trip in the summer of 1970. It turned out to be an unexpected one-way journey for life.
It was, for me, a rather shocking transition to go from being an honours student, Boy Scout, altar boy, Junior Rotarian and Ford Foundation Science Award recipient to suddenly becoming a felon wanted on two criminal charges: refusing induction and interstate flight to avoid prosecution. Although my parents, both World War II veterans, did not initially support me in my antiwar stance, they weren’t about to betray me.
More than a little dumbstruck by my sudden predicament, I caught a train south to Anchorage and found myself sharing a coffee with a wino on the city’s notorious Fourth Avenue. He had been hitting
