Over the course of his long aviation career, Alaskan bush pilot Don Sheldon flew with all manner of items lashed to the outside of his plane, including the corpse of a climber recovered from a crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier, which, frozen, was too big and stiff to wedge into the cabin of his Piper Super Cub. So for Sheldon, then, the challenge of ferrying a prefabricated, 212-square-foot hut deep into the heart of the Alaska Range and dropping it piece by piece on a glacier in the Ruth Gorge was no problem at all. Especially since the hut was his idea, his design, and his passion.
By the time he started building what became known as the Mountain House in the mid-1960s, Sheldon’s life was already legend. He first went north to Alaska from Wyoming in 1938 at age 17, got a job working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, at a dairy, learned to fly, served in WWII as a B-17
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