Connie Tibbitts

That's what we were doing… The revolutionary thing was when we learned that if one person stayed still (laughs) the other person could fly in. That was when it went nuts for us. That's when we realized how to do it, one person goes “base,” and everybody else just flies in. The one person just has to go base…
Anyway, Myron Cook called me from the hospital. He was skydiving in Salt Lake, and called me out of the blue because I had a little apartment with a telephone. He said, “You don't know me, but I'm a skydiver and I'm hurtin' in the hospital. I need a hand. They won't let me out of the hospital unless somebody comes to pick me up.” He had tweaked his back, bad opening shock. Back then we had those old round parachutes and those old sloppy harnesses that would beat the crap out of you…
Anyway, he just needed somebody, and would I be interested in helping him? He was living at the bat caves in Marble [the old Hatch warehouse], which I knew nothing about. He asked me if I'd come and get him out of the hospital. He had heard through the network back then… I used to let everybody passing through town crash there at my house, my apartment—anybody. You know, skydivers just would come through and it was an open house.
So, I said, “Yeah.”
The next day I went up and got him out and took him to my place. He stayed there, I don't even know how long, it might have been a week, maybe more—I don't remember. But that's how I learned about Grand Canyon and the boats. He was telling me he was a motor boatman, and he was telling me about trips. I'm going, “I think that's pretty disgusting going camping with twelve people you never met before.”
No, it didn't sound good. As a matter of fact, I teased him about it all the time. I just made fun of him for doing it, 'cause he was so into it. Then he decided to pay me back—would I be interested in coming up and seeing Marble Canyon? He turned me on to some pretty country.
It was winter in Marble Canyon and everybody was closed down. It was so incredibly quiet. I just fell in love with the place. “Mouldy” [Dave Moulton] was caretakin' v.c. [Vermilion Cliffs] and when you wanted gas, you'd just pull up and start wandering around until you found Mouldy. He'd be out back watering trees or inside keeping the fire going. They had a big ol' fireplace in there at v.c. Anyway, so I drove up there. I remember driving my little Datsun station wagon up across the Res for the first time, and seeing that road after you turned off. You didn't go to Page, you went straight, and you see these two cliff lines about to collide, and I'm driving along, thinking, “Where am I going? This is the most incredible scenery I've ever seen.” I just loved it, I just fell in love with the place. I thought it was beautiful.
Myron spent a few days driving me around on the Paria Plateau. He put me on the roof of his International. He had a rack up there that was flat, and he gave me a little headset, little stereo, and I just sat on the roof of his rack and he just drove around the Paria Plateau. He just turned me on to Marble Canyon in like, the most incredible way you could ever show somebody the place. I really, really was turned on to it.
Then I went back to work in the bar [in Flagstaff]. The lady that owned the bar took me aside and she said, “Connie, you're getting pretty hard. This life is not good for you. You ought to do something else. You're too young to be confined to a bar. I've got these friends that own a....” She didn't tell me what they did, but she said, “I've got these friends that need somebody to work for 'em in their trading post in the summer, and you ought to meet them.” Kathy Johnson introduced me to Fred and Carol Burke [who founded Arizona River Runners], and I waited on their table….
I don't know, but I doubt if I was very impressive. But they, over the course of the night, I remember them asking me—I'm not sure how it came down, but eventually they asked me if I'd be interested in working for them. And it was like, “No way man, I am so happy with my life, I'm not going to leave what I'm doing.” Then they said they owned Vermilion Cliffs in Marble Canyon. That just totally turned my life around, when I said, “Yeah, I'll do that.”
***
Connie Tibbitts has been a part of the Grand Canyon community since the mid-seventies and is still going strong. She started out a bartender at good old Vermilion Cliffs and worked her way up first to ace Mercury motor mechanic, then on to running her own boat for Arizona River Runners. She ran a zillion motor trips for Fred and Carol Burke and has since branched out to motor and row for arr, gce, Hatch, azra, Moki, CanEx, and oars, to name just a few.
In her spare time she became, among other things, a commercial airline mechanic and pilot with multi-engine and instrument ratings. In order to unwind and have a bit of r&r after those grueling river seasons, she flew off to haul cargo in the wilds of Alaska, Guatemala, and South America.
This interview was conducted in 1999.
I was working all day cleaning houses for people and all night in a bar. I was saving money, and every time I had money for a lesson, I would drive to Sedona and take a flying lesson there. Then I got my pilot's license—I just decided I wanted a pilot's license. I got that license the day before I loaded everything in my car to move to Marble.
Yeah. I loaded everything in my little Datsun station wagon. I just remember coming home from taking my check ride, I was so excited and I went up to Bruce Mills', Peter Weiss, and Irv Callahan's house—those three lived together—and drank some beers with them and went home and packed my car, and left the next day for Vermilion Cliffs. I took on a summer job, working in the store with Pam [Manning, now Whitney]. Me and Pam to run that little store, keep all the trees growing, (laughs) feed Boots, and just do the river trip deal.
Steiger: Do you remember taking me and Dave Koch for a ride? (laughter)
Tibbitts: We're lucky we lived through that! (laughs) I mean that was a classic student pilot. _________ (laughing obscures comment)…. Yeah! Yeah! I had just gotten a license and I went up to Page and they let me rent one of their airplanes. I was lucky to live through some of that. You guys were pretty stupid to get in that airplane with me. Wasn't Whale in there too? I mean that airplane was heavy.
Steiger: Yeah! Me and Whale and Dave Koch and you, and I don't know if there was anybody else or not.
Tibbitts: What did we decide to do? Fly under the bridge?
Steiger: Well, I remember it was like “Wahoo, let's go for a ride!” and we took off from Marble Canyon. There wasn't a plan, it was like, “Let's fly under the bridge.” So okay, we did. You got right down in there, and boom, we're under the bridge. Then we're going upstream.
Tibbitts: [Most people] fly under the bridge going downstream, because you might need all that extra room.
Steiger: That extra room, yeah. But we flew under the bridge and that was amusing and then we said, “Well heck, let's go buzz Lees Ferry.” (laughter) I remember that. We were right on the deck going around Lee's Ferry, and that was extremely amusing. Then we turned up Glen Canyon.
Tibbitts: That was a mistake.
Steiger: What I remember is that everything was pretty fun and all that was great, (Tibbitts laughs) and then we were flying up Glen Canyon and all of a sudden that little horn kept coming on. I didn't know what that noise was—your stall warning or somethin', 'cause you were tryin' to pull it up and it didn't have the power.
Tibbitts: I wanted to go up, and that little plane didn't have much power with all of us in it.
Steiger: You figured it out, though. I remember the horn was beeping, and I remember sitting in the back seat frowning, going “I don't think this is a good thing that that horn is beeping.” (laughter)
Tibbitts: I remember the stall warning going off, and I remember being really scared.
Steiger: We flew up. I remember we silently calculated as we're going along, this thing doesn't want to [climb], and we've got fifteen miles and then we are going to be at Glen Canyon Dam. You just sort of leveled it out and kept low until you got enough speed and then kind of slowly…
Tibbitts: I think we just got over the rock. I think I figured it out to get up off of the river and next to the cliffs.
Steiger: Oh, and got the lift that way? That was what it was?
Tibbitts: I don't know if I figured that out, or if it was just an accident or what. Providence protects fools and drunks and stupid pilots.
Steiger: Boy, those were the days.
***
Tibbitts: I remember that I got to do one trip that first year—two trips—one early and then one later in the summer. Because we were answering the phone a lot, it was a very small operation. It was a big family. Remember? Everybody answered the phone.
Steiger: Everybody did everything.
Tibbitts: They wanted me to know what was going on with the river so I could answer questions and be helpful. So, they sent me downriver, and I remember swamping for—who was boatin' that year? From California, a guy with his wife, she swamped: Chris Hogan and Barb Hagen. Chris Hogan was one of the boatmen, and I think Dennis Mitchem was the other. I sat behind a rock almost every night and cried because it seemed they were always asking me to do things I couldn't do…
One of them was pull up the beer bag—they'd send me to the boat for a beer. And they'd put two cases of beer in a gunnysack and hang it from a rope off the back of the tube. I wasn't strong enough. For the life of me, I couldn't pull that thing up, and I didn't want to fail on my mission. I remember sittin' on the back of the boat crying my eyes out, and I couldn't get the bag up, but I couldn't go back and tell them I couldn't get it out. Maybe I was trying to pull it up between the doughnut and the tube, and jammin' it. Maybe they had five cases in it, and I couldn't physically do it, I don't remember. But I finally did get them their beers. I wasn't going to go back and tell 'em I couldn't get their beer up. (laughs) I don't remember who I swamped for the second trip that summer, but that was when I just said, “Hey, I want to come back, and I want to swamp next year.”
You know, I don't think I did have a good time, but I fell in love with the river and the canyon.
Remember, that summer I was working in the store. At night I'd go over to “Wide Load,” and I'd change the lower units on them old Mercs and the saddles and stuff. I really didn't know what I was doin'. I was making motors out of spare parts. (They usually worked).
Steiger: 'Cause somebody had to do it, and probably nobody else wanted to.
Tibbitts: And I did. I mean, I loved it! I think that's what helped me with Fred.
Steiger: That you were a good mechanic.
Tibbitts: Because remember those Merc 20s, you had to know how to rig a boat, and you had to know how to patch 'em, big time; and how to put motors together when you've broke all your motors, and you still had to make one out of all the pieces.
Steiger: What I remember was everybody got their own set of equipment. My recollection was, “Here's your two motors, here's your boat, here's your side tubes, here's your frames.” That was it, and that was yours, and you had to take care of 'em on your own. If anything went wrong you had to fix it. That was it. Motors, I do remember the “Wide Load…” just a little construction shack—it said “Wide Load” on it, and they had gotten a deal on it, and plopped it down, and then all the motors were on a rack in there. There were a bunch of 'em. I remember growing up that we were supposed to fix our own motors. (Tibbitts: Yeah.) But I do remember you workin' on 'em. We all knew that you were a good mechanic.
Tibbitts: I liked to… Remember how we hoarded the brass reverse and throttle gears out of the older models and put 'em in the new ones in lieu of the plastic ones? … So I'd go dink with 'em, change out plastic parts, save the old brass parts and put em in. But then I wanted to swamp the next year, and Fred just said, “No, I can't have....” You know, remember we'd just all sit around that table where we all ate dinner in the back room there? (Steiger: Yeah, uh-huh.) Fred said, “No, Connie, I can't have you swampin' on the river.” I pushed really hard.
Steiger: What was Fred's theory on that? Because you're not strong enough or somethin'?
Tibbitts: I don't know if I wasn't strong enough, or because I was a girl. He did say at one point—and I don't mean this to belittle Fred in any way. I totally honor the man. It was just he said, “I can't have a girl on the river.” They just didn't do that. You were somebody's wife or the girlfriend, but there were no just single working girls down there.
Steiger: Yeah, I remember. I think you were the first woman that ran a boat for arr, weren't you?
Tibbitts: Well, yeah, probably. (Steiger: I think so.) But there were other women doing it—Sue Billingsley… Juan Leachman was swamping for her husband, Greg. Remember her? She had fifty trips on a motorboat before I even came on the scene. Once, she got to run a boat. But they wouldn't put any passengers on it. (laughter) She could only run a boat with gear. It's the way it was. But she was a hot boatman.
Steiger: Well, how did you make the jump from, “Connie, I can't have a woman on the river,” to running a boat?
Tibbitts: First, somehow, they let me swamp. I mean, my heart was in my throat the day Fred said, “Okay, you can swamp.” I remember saying, “I want to train to be a boatman,” and he said, “No, don't, I'm not going to let you be a boatman.”
Steiger: “You can just forget it.”
Tibbitts: But, I was lucky and I got to swamp for you and Whale. (laughter)
Steiger: Real lucky. Then you did all the work! (laughter)
Tibbitts: Yeah, but you guys let me drive your boats.
Steiger: I remember that year. You did all the work.
Tibbitts: Anyway, the end of that summer, remember, Fred had four boatmen and five boats. Once in awhile, he'd put a fifth boat on. And he needed a fifth boatman, and it was the last trip of the summer. Fred sat down at the table and said, “Who do you guys want to hire for the fifth boatman for our last trip?” He had a whole list of names. Somebody said, “Fred, you're chicken shit if you don't hire Connie.” And Fred just went (spluttering) And he hired me… So then I got to drive a boat, and then he couldn't take it away.
My first trip was with Steve Viavant. He gave me a patch kit. He especially packed it, and I didn't rip my boat so I didn't use it, but I looked in it at the end of that trip, it was just a bottle of tequila. (laughter)
Steiger: Are you kidding? (Tibbitts: No.) He said, “Here's your special patch kit.”
Tibbitts: “I packed it for you.” He made this big deal about it, you know, because we had to pack our own boxes and stuff you know, and I'm scared and I'm takin' off on my first boat and any help is appreciated and “Here's your patch kit.” (laughter)
***
Steiger: So, what's memorable about those years? I wonder what we need to say that's historically significant.
Tibbitts: I wish there was some way that we could bring back those years at v.c., all the boatmen that used to come through that place in between trips, the parties, and the people, the characters—from Ken Sleight to the Quist brothers to… who's the… Oh… Kloepfer! Dave Kloepfer. And Paco [Jack Kloepfer], too, would come down with his black bag full of prickly pear wine that he made (laughs), that would just make us all drunk and then sick for a couple days.
Steiger: Yeah, it really was a little Shangri-La, wasn't it?… So tell me, did you have any wild adventures in those days that we can put on tape? (laughter)
Tibbitts: That we can talk about? Oh, you know, I was pretty careful. Plus, I had a nylon boat… I had the only nylon boat in the world. It was a really good boat…. I did work on [the seams and valves a lot] too, but it was worth keeping that sucker floatin', because all the other boats were cotton… What a lifesaver… You just touched a rock with those cotton ones [and you were toast].... And I had all the leeway and the room with that nylon boat—I could bounce off of stuff.
***
Connie worked for Arizona River Runners through the mid ‘80s, until Fred and Carol sold the company to Bruce Winter and Bill Gloeckler. Along about that time she hooked up with a one-man-band named Jim Blumenthal who had a big old four-engined C-54 cargo plane. As Connie puts it: “He just had one airplane, and the shirt on his back, and enough money to buy gas one more time to get to Alaska.”
Together, with Jim's plane and piloting skills, and Connie's mechanic and co-pilot credentials, they became a two-person airline. They had six or seven years worth of adventures, hauling fish in Alaska, bridge-building materials in the jungles of Guatemala… all kinds of crazy stuff. Connie moneyed-up and bought herself a dream piece of property halfway up the base of the Paria Plateau, overlooking all of Marble Canyon. With Jim's help she built a house there. It's a stunning location, with a two-mile driveway straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon.
The flying was swell, but in the end, the river kept calling her back. She missed the Canyon and the boating world so bad she had to come back and make it a bigger part of her life again.
Today she free-lances for all those companies named above and commutes to Page in her little plane—a tiny old Luscomb out of a ‘50s movie—in order to do mechanical work for the air tour companies up there in between river trips.
***
Of course I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. One way or t'other…
I like to call myself a boatman. I don't want to be a “guide.” I don't want to take responsibility for somebody's everything. I want to run a boat and keep everybody safe, feed 'em good food, show 'em everything I can think of that will work. But this thing about bein' a doctor, and a psychiatrist, and a nurse, and a best friend… To me, I've ended up makin' a lot of friends with passengers—don't get me wrong. But, I prefer the title of “boatman” over “guide.”
Steiger: Are you able to pull that off in this day and age?
Tibbitts: Yeah. Maybe. I like people and I think that they know that. I think I can pull it off because I can be a boatman… I've become a lot more human, as a boatman, guide, whatever you want to call it. Because, when I was younger, I had to play games, I had to pretend I knew what I was doin' sometimes when I didn't. Now, when I don't know what I'm doin', I just tell 'em, “Hey, I don't know what I'm doin'.” (laughter)
I just say, “Hey, we're in this together.” It's not like “I'm gonna carry you through.” This is an adventure. “We are embarking on an adventure, and we are on an adventure together.” That kind of thing…
You remember what Pam Whitney used to say? Pam taught me this, she'd just say, “There's a whole trip goin' on, on the beach, that we don't know anything about”—that the crew doesn't know anything about.
***
Steiger: Are you still skydivin'? What are you doin' for excitement these days? What about that time, you ought to tell me real quick about when you guys went and jumped off El Capitan. Or was that even that unusual for you?
Tibbitts: (laughs) …Al Arnold. He's back. He's a skydiver that's workin' for oars now. Al and me and Vern, the three of us were in between trips, lookin' at each other at that kitchen table, back behind V.C., and someone came up with the idea to jump off El Cap. So, we said, “Okay!” We all piled in trucks and started drivin' that way, Stuart [Reeder] wanted to go see his girlfriend in California. So he thought he'd just tag along... He was gonna be our getaway vehicle, because it might not be legal. He ended up helpin' us find the top.
Steiger: Because he had been there. He knew the way.
Tibbitts: Oh, because heck, if you're ever walkin' somewhere in the dark that you've never been, take Stuart Reeder. That guy is good. We ended up climbin' that waterfall in the dark with our parachutes disguised as backpacks so we wouldn't get caught. And so we ended up spendin' the night up there, and Stuart just decided to stay and watch us go. He was supposed to be our getaway driver, he was supposed to be down there with the truck, but for some reason I guess we decided we didn't need it… I had a magazine that said how to jump off El Cap, with me. (laughs) I had the instructions. (laughter)
Steiger: Oh, yeah?! And what were those?
Tibbitts: Well, jump out as far as you can, without tippin' over—you know, you want to stay stable—and count to ten, get into a track as soon as you can, so you fly away from the rock. The important thing was to count to ten, because in a track, that would get you far enough out, because you had the sheer face and then a bunch of talus. If you didn't get out past the talus, you didn't have enough altitude to get…Well, if you had a malfunction, theoretically, lookin' at it, I felt that if my first parachute didn't open I had a chance—not a good one—but there was a chance I could get my other one out and open. If you didn't get out past the talus, you didn't have a chance if your first one didn't open, you're puttin' all your eggs in one basket.
Steiger: So, get runnin', take off…
Tibbitts: But the rock was only the size of this table. You could only go like three steps, you know, launch off, and then....
Steiger: And then it was Straight-off-Adolph?
Tibbitts: You wanted to go like a swan dive, because you are in dead air, you want to keep your head up. Skydivers aren't used to dead air. (Steiger: You're comin' out of the plane.) Yeah, at a hundred miles an hour of air to work with. So, goin' off in dead air was the concept to make sure you stayed stable.
Steiger: And so, it obviously worked out okay for everybody.
Tibbitts: We all lived, and no one saw us.
Steiger: And so, it was so much fun, you ran right up there to do it again, huh? (laughter)
Tibbitts: Well, you know, I don't think we had it in us… Yeah, that was wild. It's hard to tell that story because I've told it so much.
Steiger: Well, it's a good story, it's an amazing thing to even think about doin'. It's scary.
Tibbitts: I got a lot of adrenaline. Probably the greatest thing I've done since then was that winter in Antarctica….
Steiger: Antarctica. What the heck?
Tibbitts: Once upon a time, in a land far away… Well, I was home and decided I wanted to go work in Alaska flyin' the DC-6s for Northern Air Cargo, and they hired me. I went up there and worked for the summer, and all of a sudden they just said, “We're furloughin' you. There's no more work.” It was August. So, no problem, I ran down and I got on a river trip. It was a science trip, a really fun one. Just before I left on that trip, my phone rings and it's this voice from far ever away. It was a lady in the southern tip of Chile, Punta Arenas, calling me up and sayin', “Northern Air Cargo gave us your name. They told us they just furloughed you. We called 'em lookin' for an engineer, and we wondered if you would be interested in working for us.” What Northern Air Cargo trained me to do is be a flight engineer. Actually, I wasn't the pilot or the co-pilot—I sat between the two and operated the airplane. The airplane is complex enough to require one person to operate it, to keep the fuel systems—there's like ten gas tanks on the plane, four engines and lots of systems. One person runs all that. (Steiger: Wow.) And that's my job, and I loved it because it fits right in perfectly with my mechanical interests. So, I thought that sounded pretty cool! “What are you doin'?” She said, “Well, we're flyin' down into Antarctica and we're haulin' mountain climbers into a base camp down there.” The only privately-owned anything in Antarctica. We're not talkin' a state or a country, we're talkin' a friggin' continent. (laughs) Huge! And so, I got all the information and I said, “Yeah, I'll do it.” And she said, “By the way, we're not really flyin' by the book.” This is all in one phone call, right? I mean I just was out diggin' in my yard and I pick up the phone and all of a sudden I'm talkin' to this.…
Steiger: To Chile!
Tibbitts: And she goes, “You know, I would like you to talk to the captain and let him fill you in, and see if you still are interested.” I said, “Sure, put him on.” So this guy gets on the phone and he was just tellin' me what they're doin', and they're flyin' down—it's an eight-hour flight down, and we're landin' on this patch of blue ice. He said, “It's pretty okay, you know, and then we load up the same day and come back. It requires a long day because it's sixteen hours of flying, not countin' the four hours on the ground there and the few hours before to get the flight ready, and blah, blah, blah. So, it's a long day, you've got to be into long days and once in awhile we might, you know, stretch some rules.” I said, “Well, are you keepin' it safe?” He said, “Sure.” So, I said, “All right, send me a ticket.”
Steiger: And they wanted you for a season, or just for one....
Tibbitts: Yeah, for three months. There's only three months that you can get in there, that the weather permits,.
They wanted me as soon as possible, and pushed hard, but I was committed to that river trip and Georgie's birthday party was comin' up. I got off the trip, and there was a day, and then Georgie's birthday party. So, I agreed that I would fly out the next day after Georgie's party for Punta Arenas. I got all loaded and geared up and I always take my toolbox when I take a job like that, because you usually do a bit of field maintenance I kind of guessed what I was gonna take, and it was such short notice, I told 'em I had to bring my dog. So Spark went.
Steiger: Your Dalmatian?
Tibbitts: (laughs) So off we went…
Spark and I go on, and we get to this little town on the southern tip of Chile, right on the Straits of Magellan. They pick me up at the airport, and I'm pretty rummy from flyin' for days and days. They take me out to the airplane and they just look at me and they go, “Hope you can keep it runnin', here it is.” And they walk away. And I said, “Keep it runnin'? I'm a flight engineer, what do you mean ‘keep it running'?!” I mean, it was just the way they said it, it wasn't right. And I sort of questioned the guys that were there who were the co-pilot and the flight engineer already hired. They said, “You're a mechanic, aren't you?” I said, “Well, yeah, I'm a mechanic, but this is a four-engine plane, and I'm not capable of maintaining a four-engine airplane by myself. Besides I've never even uncowled this particular engine.”

Steiger: What kind of plane was it?
Tibbitts: It was a Douglas DC-6. It was very similar [to Jim Blumenthal's C-54.] That's what saved my butt, because I knew the airplane and similar engines. I'd gotten some really good training up in Alaska from those guys. But I didn't feel competent to take on a job as the only mechanic. What it was, was the people that hired me were Canadian. Canadians called airplane mechanics “engineers.” In America, a flight engineer is a person that just operates the airplane. There's mechanics, engineers, pilots and co-pilots. So, they thought they were hirin' a mechanic. They brought me all the way down there, and I'm a flight engineer. Not really, I mean, yes I do a lot of airplane maintenance. But, one person. It takes a hundred people to maintain one of those things correctly, much less…
Steiger: But you [had done that before with two people]…
Tibbitts: We did, but we started out with a known airplane on a maintenance program so that we knew what we had and we worked with. But just to show somebody an airplane and say, “Keep it runnin',” when I don't even know anything about the history or anything, and no one did. That was quite a handful. Anyway, as flight engineer, I'm sittin' there and goin' on and on, “We got a problem, there's a communication problem here. I don't feel capable of takin' on the maintenance of this airplane.” And the flight engineer guy says, “Well, are you a flight engineer?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Do you have a good luck charm?” I said, “Yeah,” (laughter) “My little split twig figurine.” He goes, “That's good because I quit. I'm gonna get killed if I stay doin' this shit, and I'm leavin'.” Since there was now a replacement for him, he just went and got on a plane and left. He never even said goodbye, he didn't even take his clothes. He just got on the next plane and left.
Steiger: Oh my God! Did he show you what was what with it?
Tibbitts: No, unt-uh. People that own the company are goin', “Oh boy, now we have a mechanic and a flight engineer.” And I'm goin', “No, you guys don't understand.” But they're just lookin' at me, and they couldn't understand how come because I had the certificates, I didn't just have the confidence to just bullshit my way through or somethin', which blew me away. You know bullshit and airplanes, it goes together.
Steiger: Well, you're only flyin' down to Antarctica. (laughs)
Tibbitts: So, anyway, I quit a few times. I talked to the captain, you know, tried to figure out how he was justifyin' some of the stuff he was doing.
Steiger: What made you decide to stay?
Tibbitts: Well, it was turning into an adventure. (laughs) Besides, I really wanted to go to Antarctica. (laughs) Well, it became quite a moral issue with myself, because I didn't think it was very safe and we were takin' passengers that didn't know what they were doin'. But, the more I got to know mountain climbers, man, those guys are risk-takers.
Steiger: They didn't care.
Tibbitts: Yeah. I mean, they wanted to climb this mountain. So, we worked on the plane. We hired another guy from Alaska: I said, “I need help.” The co-pilot wasn't very competent at all, so we got another co-pilot from Alaska, from Northern Air Cargo, too. So I had somebody I could work with. The two of us worked on the plane, and worked on the plane, and it took about two or three weeks before I felt it would make its first flight.
Steiger: It took two or three weeks to go over it, and make sure it was all good?, or you had to fix stuff too?
Tibbitts: Oh, we had to fix stuff. We never even knew what was wrong, right? We're just lookin' at it sayin', “Well, this is fallin' off” kind of thing. We didn't even get into anything. I mean, we were just doin' the most obvious stuff. So, we fill it up with gas finally, and we take off. We did, we got it off the ground and we took it down to this runway in Antarctica. It's not a runway, but right on the lee side of this mountain, the wind had blown the snow off a patch of blue ice. It's like eighty-one degrees south in Antarctica. It's just like, nowhere.
Steiger: They had just found, “Oh here's this spot where there's not too much snow.”
Tibbitts: Or “You can land your plane on wheels here,” because to put a C-130 on skis would be your only other option. That is quite expensive. Okay, go back to the runway. This is a long story.
Steiger: It's okay, it's a great one.
Tibbitts: This lady that I was workin' for, that hired me, had just gotten back from Antarctica. Her husband, who had bought this plane and who had brain-childed this idea of—he was the mountain climber, and also a pilot—he had brain-childed this thing. And so he had been flyin' around Antarctica in a little gyrocopter tryin' to find a route for a bunch of climbers that were stuck in a crevasse field. Something went wrong. He crashed and was killed. So she had just returned from this incredible adventure of riding on a boat down to the ice shelf.
Steiger: This is after she called you?
Tibbitts: Before she called me, we're goin' backwards.
Steiger: She'd already lost her husband?
Tibbitts: This is some company history. She hired me right after she'd gotten back from goin' down to the ice shelf, crossin' the ice shelf, gettin' to the continent, finding her husband. With her she took a carpenter, and some wood. They built him a box and they put him in it. They made a little crude grave for him. And she comes back from this determined she's gonna start this company. And she was the toughest little lady I ever met in my life.
Steiger: How old was she?
Tibbitts: I'd say she was in her early thirties. Beautiful little girl. I don't want to belittle her in any way, but she was small. She was just an incredible woman. Annie Bancroft was her name. She had just buried this guy, who was a phenomenal hero, Giles Kershaw, he did a lot of work with National Geographic on Antarctica… Anyway, she and some good friends were determined to make this thing go. They had taken a bunch of money down, and if they could get through this one season, they'd have the profits enough to continue the thing. But, if they just had to refund everything, well, they couldn't do it because they had already spent a bunch.
Steiger: It was disaster. They would be bankrupt.
Tibbitts: Well, yeah. And so she just decided to do it, and she had a lot of really good people supporting her.
Steiger: So, she had a good recommendation for you from that Alaskan outfit.
Tibbitts: Yeah, she had called Northern Air who has the best reputation for those kinds of planes.
Steiger: And she obviously didn't have any qualms about dealin' with a woman.
Tibbitts: None! And no one did. None of those mountain climbers ever batted an eye twice. None of 'em gave me any flack. It was a little hard, a little difficult with the Chileans, the Latin men. We hired two of 'em to work under me. They were like my crew. (Steiger: For mechanical stuff?) Yeah, I would just line 'em out on stuff to do every day. They were in charge of fueling and oiling and stuff like that. They were good, but I knew it was hard on 'em, takin' orders from me. They tried hard and did well. I tried to be as gentle as I could. So what we were doin' is taking this old beat-up plane, and loading it up heavy…it was a barbecue. Every trip, me and that Alaska co-pilot would look at each other and go, “We're goin' to a barbecue today.” (laughs) It's gonna be our own. Because, behind us, behind the bulkhead from the cockpit, were fifty 55-gallon drums of gas. Chilean drums, and they all leaked. But only on top. The gas was kind of dancin' to the vibration of the airplane.
Steiger: Oh my God, you're kiddin'?!
Tibbitts: No, fifty of 'em! Have you ever tried to tie an upright barrel down so it won't move?
Steiger: Not to mention, one that's leaking, full of gas!
Tibbitts: (laughs) Didn't know they were leaking till we were up in the air! (laughs) And we had fifty of 'em, and the wings [are] full.
Steiger: Was that gas to get you guys back?
Tibbitts: Yeah, because we had to fly eight hours on an average of two hundred gallons an hour over, and then eight hours back.
Steiger: And they figured by the time you got over there, your original gas load would be about empty. All you had to do was get off.
Tibbitts: We'd use up the wings, and we had to pump from the barrels. We had enough to get there, but we didn't have enough to get there and come back in the wings. So, we had a point…
Steiger: You had to land to refuel?
Tibbitts: Yeah.
Steiger: And there wasn't any other place.
Tibbitts: There was no other place to land.
Steiger: You mean you're flyin' eight hours over the ocean?
Tibbitts: Over ocean full of icebergs.
Steiger: Over nothin' but ocean.
Tibbitts: Well, pretty soon you hit the ice shelf and you're flyin' over ice.
Steiger: Big deal.
Tibbitts: (laughs) That's what I mean.
Steiger: How flat was that?
Tibbitts: Who knows, the definition was terrible… Both the Chileans and the Americans came to the airport to tell us, the crew, that if we went down, if we had any trouble out there, they would not come help us.
Steiger: They took it upon themselves to come and tell you that? Why was that?
Tibbitts: Because if we went down, that's the first thing we were gonna do is call the U.S. government and say, “Hey, you have some Americans that are gonna freeze to death on the ice down there.”
Steiger: And so they saw you comin' and they said…
Tibbitts: “You guys are too screwy. What you're doin' is too far out there, and we are not gonna support it.” They only had one plane at that time that could go to the South Pole, and it was too expensive to risk. I mean, they couldn't afford to. That would put all those people in the South Pole in jeopardy; not bein' able to get in to them. And we were landing on this ice…
Steiger: Who was at the South Pole? You mean like government…
Tibbitts: There's a crew there all the time.
Steiger: A scientific outpost or somethin'.
Tibbitts: Yeah.
Steiger: So, your very first flight, you're way overweight?
Tibbitts: Every flight, we were.
Steiger: Because of the gas.
Tibbitts: Or whatever. I know we had about ten, twelve people.
Steiger: How long were those guys stayin' over there for?
Tibbitts: Two weeks. For $25,000 a piece, they bought two weeks on the ice. The trip down, two weeks there, hopefully they would get to climb Mt. Vincent, which was pretty much determined by the weather, whether or not they could summit or not.
Steiger: Was that a real mountain?
Tibbitts: Yeah, that's the tallest mountain on the continent. Right? And there's the seven summits.
Steiger: So you had these “big bucks” guys that were gonna… Wow! So, how did it work? How did the season work?
Tibbitts: We pulled it off. I think I made ten trips down there in that old thing. Every trip was just an epic. I mean, one little decision made, say the day before the trip left, I'd say, “You know, I just didn't like the way one of these pumps sounded,” or somethin'. And so I'd take it apart and clean it out. We didn't have a whole lot to work with for spare parts. We had some stuff. And I just worked on it every day, and went to bed every night with the manuals. I thought in my sleep. For three months, I just thought in my sleep of things, and came up with ideas that would later be the difference as to whether we came back or not. We worked it out, this co-pilot and I. The captain was pretty much out there, running on ego and very little knowledge. But this guy and I, we did this incredible job—I never worked so hard and put 100 percent into so much. It was just amazing, just one little thing you do.... Like one time I just said, “I don't care what he said, I'm putting in more gas.” And I put 200 gallons of extra fuel on board. Comin' back, we lost access to one of our tanks. One of the controls failed, so we couldn't get gas out of one of the tanks, and we didn't know it until we landed; but if I hadn't been running on that extra 200 gallons in this other tank that I had just put in because I just said, “I want this cushion,” we would have been out in the ocean, swimmin'. It was time after time, it was somethin' like that.
Steiger: Did you have a life raft and survival suits and all that stuff?
Tibbitts: Yeah.
Steiger: It must have been so cold.
Tibbitts: But you're not gonna… I mean, who's gonna find you? There's nothin' out there.
Steiger: And they already said they weren't gonna come get you.
Tibbitts: Yeah. Maybe they'd send a boat, if we could have contacted 'em. I found some wild shit on that plane, in between replacing the parts that fell off, routine inspections revealed awful scary stuff. I suspect it had been previously used for smuggling, flown without regard for future use. By the time I learned how rough it was, the job was over. We had come to an agreement by this time that once the job was over the plane was not to fly again without serious work. I wrote a letter to the feds in regards to this to insure no one else got ahold of the thing and put anyone in jeopardy. Basically I condemned the airplane.
Steiger: So the company didn't operate the next year—they just got out of it?
Tibbitts: No! they did it again! We got 'em through that year, and the following year they somehow came up with a C-130, and they're still in business today, doin' a really good job.
Steiger: Wow. They got it together.
Tibbitts: Yeah, it's unbelievable what they're doin'.
Steiger: So, your flights, though, were relatively uneventful? Nothin' too scary?
Tibbitts: Oh no, they were very scary! We'd have all sorts of disasters goin' on all the time…it was unbelievable, just the landing in Antarctica. There was no way they could mark the landing area . If you put anything black, anything colored down on the ice, the sun will warm it up and it will eat a hole through the ice and then you have a hole. So they didn't want to mark our landing field in any way. They tried to verbally tell us what the winds were.
Steiger: Was is really smooth ice, was the ice good?
Tibbitts: No. No, no. They told me before we landed to just pack everything soft you had, around you. And I did the first time, but not good enough. I didn't take 'em serious enough. It was so rough, that all the overhead—this airplane has a whole panel over here of all the instruments—warning lights, and everything. All the lenses, all the light bulbs, everything just comes… (makes a crashing sound) Everything's a blur. You're gettin' all shook up . And everything falls down, because this plane has bookshelves and racks with thermoses and food. Everything falls down, and you're just gettin' so shook, that I mean even your seat belt won't hold you tight enough—you're just gettin' shook like a rag doll. Meanwhile you're tryin' to control this thing. (laughs) It was so incredible, it was so rough, that you're tryin' to ignore the fact that you are gettin' rained on with debris. My job is to run the engines on landing, and what we do is we throw 'em into reverse to stop. That's the only way, you can't touch the brakes in that cold of a climate.
Steiger: On the ice you mean?
Tibbitts: Yeah, you generate any heat, and you're a dead duck. Because water will form and then you'll never get the brakes off. You just can't touch the brakes. I mean, they're not gonna do any good anyway, because it's ice.
Steiger: So these guys knew that anyway.
Tibbitts: Oh yeah. That's common, when you know you're flyin' on ice, real cold. I learned that in Alaska. You just can't, so you've got reverse. So, you reverse your props. Only on this old plane, right, you pull 'em all in at the same time, but one goes on one wing, and the other one's still in forward.
Steiger: So now you're turnin'.
Tibbitts: We did a 360 in that airplane.
Steiger: Oh my God.
Tibbitts: (laughs) And we're doin' 360s! (laughs) It was so wild.
Steiger: And you made how many flights?
Tibbitts: I think we did ten.
Steiger: (whistles) Ten round trips!
Tibbitts: Eight with folks, and two with just fuel.
Steiger: Did you get to get out (Tibbitts: Yeah!) and run around in Antarctica?
Tibbitts: We had four hours, we figured four hours before it would cool off so much that we could never get it started again.
Steiger: So you would turn it off for four hours, (Tibbitts: Uh-huh.) gas up, (Tibbitts: Yeah.) and then get the hell out of there.
Tibbitts: Yeah, and at the end of four hours it was touch and go. Like one time we couldn't get the door shut. It was a pressurized airplane so there were doors. (Steiger: Because it was so cold?) It had several latches, and somehow some moisture had gotten in there, we flew through a rainstorm when we first left Punta or somethin,' but we couldn't get the door closed. So, we had to just sit there with the engines runnin', to keep them warm, disassembling the door... We're talkin' four engines each with thirty-five gallon oil tanks. If you get thirty-five gallons of fifty-weight oil cold soaked, you'd never move it again. It will congeal. Some oil had dripped on the ground. It drips like a dog turd, it's so cold, by the time…the oil drippin' off the engine built more like a dog pile than a puddle. It was so cool. (laughs) It was so cold. (Steiger: Sounds really relaxin', yeah.) I wrote my mom and dad a letter just sayin' I'm probably gonna die down here, but there's no law suit. I just want you to know that, don't sue these people. I've decided to do this.
Steiger: Why did you decide to, what was it?
Tibbitts: Well, she was just such a great woman. And I quit a bunch of times, I said, “You're gonna kill somebody.” I had some really serious talks with myself about bein' responsible for these people gettin' on this plane. I quit regularly. She would just look at me and say, “Okay.” I'd say, “Annie, we can't do this, you just can't do this.” And she'd just look at me and she'd go, “How can we do it?” And I'd go, “No, you're not hearin' me, you can't do it.” And she'd just look at me back and go, “How can we do it?” She was just so cool. She was just so strong. She was gonna do it. (Steiger: No matter what.) And I just figured I was the best person for the job. I'm pretty good at makin' junk go. (laughs) No one ever gave me a Learjet to fly, I seem to gravitate to the old worn out stuff.…. Every trip was an incredible adventure, and we just made it back in on the skin of our teeth. Then it would take me two weeks, after every trip, two weeks to put the rivets that got knocked out from the landing gear, back in, and just visually lookin' over it, usually had to change a cylinder or two and just always had maintenance problems.
Steiger: Well, that's all you had, right? I mean, you had to go and get 'em in two weeks. (Tibbitts: Right.) And you needed to be on time.
Tibbitts: And they only paid $25,000 for this flight. No, we only needed to be on time within a relative few days. Because of the weather we couldn't guarantee anything. And they had to be aware of that. But there were more people to go in each time. We'd haul people in and take the people in, out.
Steiger: So you had 'em comin' and goin'. (Tibbitts: Uh-huh.) Yeah, that would make sense, you wouldn't fly empty, ever then.
Tibbitts: Yeah. Except we had to make some flights with fuel. They needed fuel down there and the feds got on us. It's illegal to haul people and barrels of gas in the same cabin in an airplane. Especially leaking barrels. (laughter)… So we had to do two trips of just haulin' fuel. They figured every gallon of gas that we could leave on the ice was worth $7,000 a barrel. It cost 'em that much to get it down there. They used it, they had a little Cessna 180 on skis. They had a base camp of about three tents by the landing area, called Patriot Hills, and the Cessna was used to get the climbers as close as they could to the mountain. And so we had to fly in fuel for that little plane, and then they'd be on the mountain, until they'd radio that they were ready to come back and the Cessna would go pick 'em up.
Steiger: So, there was a full-time pilot there all the time, too.
Tibbitts: Yeah.
Steiger: But how did that Cessna get there?
Tibbitts: They brought it in once: hop, skip, and jumped it.
Steiger: Could it land on the water? Well, it had skis though, it didn't have floats.
Tibbitts: Yeah, but I think you can get it across to the [Palmer] Peninsula and land it at McMurdo, and just work down the peninsula. Maybe they used dogs to stash barrels of gas. I'm not sure how they got it in, but it stayed there. They dug a big hole every year and buried it. (Steiger: In the snow.) Then in spring—Antarctica spring, which would be our winter, they would just go back with a metal detector and find it. Anything left above the surface was gone.
Steiger: Because of the winds?
Tibbitts: Yeah, I guess it's just really severe.
Steiger: That's incredible.
Tibbitts: I guess it's really severe.
Steiger: They buried the plane.
Tibbitts: Yeah! Yeah. It was an incredible thing. I mean, it's really an incredible adventure.
Steiger: That sounds like it, my God. Did you ever think about wantin' to do it for another season, or anything like that?
Tibbitts: I said I'd do it, but not with that guy.
Steiger: The pilot? (Tibbitts: Uh-huh.) He was too big of a pain in the butt? Must have been good.
Tibbitts: No, he wasn't good. It was that co-pilot and me that pulled him through. The next year he went back and that co-pilot went back and worked for him, and they crashed. Stupid mistake.
Steiger: They crashed?! (Tibbitts: Uh-huh.) Did they die?
Tibbitts: No, unbelievable. They flew right into the ground. It was flat and they were so low and there is no definition. The sky is white, the ground is white, there are no other colors down there. There's just black and white—if you can find somethin' black. It's pretty much all white.
Steiger: So, it's just ice. Sky's white and the ground's white.
Tibbitts: Yeah, there is no definition. You can't tell a mountain, or a hill, or the ground, or the sky. There's no definition, there's no horizon. And so, they were flyin' really low.
Steiger: You have an altimeter, right?
Tibbitts: What's that gonna do for you? It tells you how far you are above sea level.
Steiger: Above sea level. Well, or sonar, I mean don't you have somethin' that tells you?
Tibbitts: You could have a radar altimeter, but that tells you how far you are off the ground underneath you, so if there's a hill, it won't, you know…
Steiger: If there's a hill comin' up…
Tibbitts: It won't pick that up. It just reads straight down. So, if you're flyin' at fifty feet and there's a little teeny rise… (Steiger: Which is what there was, huh?)
Tibbitts: What did they do? Oh, no! they flew through a wisp of a cloud—and that's what I didn't like about this guy. He would tell me to run with the mixtures lean in a situation like this. And I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't do it. I would just say, “Okay,” and I'd put my mixtures rich. So I had power if I needed it. Well, this engineer that they had didn't know enough, or somethin'. I don't know why he got caught with his pants down like that, but his mixtures were lean, and so they just flew through this little wisp, just put a layer of ice on the airplane and increased it's weight, so it started sinkin'. They threw the power in, but since the mixtures were so lean, they didn't have any power, and they just kept sinkin' in. They just went flat into the ground and ripped the whole plane apart. They got pretty beat up, some broken bones, but they all lived.
Steiger: (whistles) But they lost that airplane.
Tibbitts: Yeah. And that guy lost his reputation.
Steiger: So the little Cessna came and saved 'em? How the hell did they…
Tibbitts: No, they were actually not that far from Patriot Hills. He was on the radio, and the fact that he didn't show up when he said he would, those guys got on snow machines and started to come and look for him. They actually had a snow machine in the plane, that they got out because all the landing gear was ripped off and all they had to do was pry the door open and drive the machine right out the door. They managed to get it out, and head in the direction of Patriot Hills, and they met in the middle.
Steiger: So, when you went, were you wearin' survival suits or somethin'? You must have had to have special clothes.
Tibbitts: I wore expedition-weight long underwear, and then a pair of heavy fleece pants. Then the thickest insulated coveralls that Carhartts make. I could stay out there for a few hours in that.
Steiger: Outside. (Tibbitts: Uh-huh.) And it's like ten below or somethin' like that.
Tibbitts: I don't know what the temperatures were, I forget. I know Spark didn't like it too well.
Steiger: I bet he didn't. (laughter)
Tibbitts: He got out after one of those eight-hour flights…
Steiger: Oh, so he'd go on those flights with you?
Tibbitts: He went on one. He got out after eight hours, that's a long time for a dog to not pee. See, we were peein' in bottles. But this dog didn't pee. He's a good dog. So, I hauled him down the ladder and set him down on the ice, and he took off for one of the tires to pee. (laughs) He lifted his leg and peed for an hour. (Steiger: I bet.) And all of a sudden the look on his face, when he looked around and saw it was just all white and so cold, it was hilarious.
Steiger: Did he jump back in the plane?
Tibbitts: Well, you have to climb the ladder to get in. He tried to stand on two legs, I'll never forget that. One paw came up and then another paw came up, and then he started to tip over so a paw would go down, ‘cause it was so cold. That ice was a lot colder than thirty-two. So, he kept tryin' to stand on two legs. (laughs) I threw him in the plane and wrapped him up. But he thought it was pretty funny.
Steiger: That's an amazing story. Man, oh man. That's wild.
***
Tibbitts: I'm kind of waitin' for my phone to ring with another adventure. I hope it does pretty soon.
Steiger: (laughs) Don't you have a river story you can tell me?… There must have been one or two.
Tibbitts: Well, I suppose there were. I don't think I have one good story… Remember how the water would fluctuate, and we'd be up in the middle of the night, pushin' on them boats?
Steiger: You and me. (laughter)
Tibbitts: Oh, Whale would get mad if we had to get him up. (laughs)
Steiger: I just remember you doin' all the work. Because I never was much on doin' the work. I kind of flapped my arms around.
Tibbitts: I don't remember that. I remember when I got my thumbnail pulled off and Whale's boat got a hole in the bottom of it.
Steiger: I don't remember that.
Tibbitts: I do—first night out, we were all pushin'. All three of us, we had Whale up, too. The water dropped big, we were all doin' “one, two, three, (grunt).” (laughter)
Steiger: Yeah, because I'm too proud to go and wake the people up for some help.
Tibbitts: We finally got Whale's boat to move an inch, and it slid, and there was a stick in the beach that went up in the bottom of it, and we just did this “one, two, three, (grunt)” and the stick went through and just… (air escape sound) (laughs) and we were all standin' there stark naked leanin' on this boat that's sinkin'. So, Whale decides that he's not gonna fix it, which was a good decision. But next morning, he stood on the boat and picked the frame up, I had this piece of tire that I was supposed to stick underneath the frame as a wear pad, and I stuck it under there, and I was just gettin' it right, and Whale set the frame down on my thumb. (Steiger: Oh man.) But before he let go of it completely I yanked my thumb out. It hurt, but I wasn't quite sure why, because it looked normal. Whale reached over, as only Whale could do, with his gentle touch, and he touched my thumb, and the whole thumbnail was ripped out, and it just looked normal until you touched it. Then I went through the ceiling. I had to do the whole trip with my thumb over my head because it hurt so bad. Then when we de-rigged at Diamond Creek, we pulled the frames off, and my thumbnail was still in there. (laughter) Dennis Mitchem took it and made a necklace out of it. (laughs) Remember, he had body parts from everybody.
Steiger: Yeah, he was a little eccentric sometimes.
Tibbitts: I wish I had more stories.