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Not by coincidence, Don happened to be married to Roberta Reeves, daughter of Bob Reeve, also another "Legend of the North," with a best-selling book about his life—Glacier Pilot
Bob Reeve, besides all that stuff about helping save the Aleutians from the Japanese during World War II, etc., happened to be a prospector at heart. He was a crony with my Dad, so I introduced myself on day in the 1960's, interrupting this millionaire airline owner while sweeping his own sidewalk in front of his Anchorage office, to chat about what was happening with my latest prospect. That was not an unusual happenstance about town is those days. Ward Gay of Sea Airmotive didn't let just-out-of-the-bush passengers get away without a thorough grilling as to what they had been looking for before accepting payment on his bill. His office looked a museum for all the ore samples lying about.
Reeve also used clients to give him an idea of what to look for from the air. During the depression, broke, in Valdez, he took on customers that no other flyer wanted. Prospectors. They were always requesting to be landed in the middle of impossible. But, as the value of gold and silver where in an upswing, when paper money wasn't, Reeve took a contract to fly supplies into the Big Four mine.
Bob flew up Brevier glacier, where he skimmed in low and slow over an inclined snow shelf to smash-land into a snow bank. After digging the plane out, unloading cargo, he took off down the slope, making aviation first!
Reeve soon had a reputation among miners and got contracts with other operations. Then to do gold prospecting of his own in the snow-capped mountains during the summer, Reeve made aviation history when he took his snow ski-equipped plane off a mud flat in Valdez Bay. The technique later enabled him to land on Columbia glacier and discover gold.
Way north in the DeLong Mountains of the western Brooks Range, 600 miles north of Anchorage, and even 90 miles past Kotzebue is one of the largest zinc mines in the world. The aerial pathfinder here was what is now called Dog Creek that used to run through massive Zn-Pb-Fe sulfides.
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