It was spectacular. The Snake, its water shining like silver scales in the sun, curled and coiled back on itself, a convoluted journey from source, One Lake, to outflow, Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay in turn stretched two hundred miles between Port Molar on the Alaska Peninsula to Cape Newenham on the mainland. She stood on the Nushagak Peninsula, a southwesterly thumb of land that hitched a ride on weather originating from the vast blue expanse of water that stretched west of the Aleutian Peninsula to the Bering Strait.

A region one fifth the size of Texas, its winds blew hell for leather across Bristol Bay out of the northeast from October on, and then in March turned around and blew from the southwest for the next six months. It made for interesting air time. Wy flew daily over the remains of planes whose pilots had not paid proper respect to Bristol Bay's weather. What really gave her the creeps were the wrecks she couldn't see, the planes and boats lying at river and sea bottom, slowly silting over, providing housing for anything with a shell or a fin that cared to move in. Wy, like many of her Alaskan generation, couldn't swim. Not that it would matter, as the water was too cold to survive in for long. “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots,” Bob DeCreft had declaimed once, “but there are no old, bold pilots.” She also remembered him saying that “any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” but Wy had always found it more prudent to stay in the air until you had a runway in front of you.

Bristol Bay's topography ran anywhere from tundra that often seemed to lie lower than sea level to the five-thousand-foot peak of Mount Oratia. Keep going three hundred miles farther north and fifteen thousand more feet up and you'd find Denali, the highest mountain in North America. In between lay icy glaciers, narrow, windy passes, grassy plateaus, heavily wooded bays, thousands of springs, brooks, creeks, streams, rills and rivers, lakes that ranged from shallow ponds to narrow fjords, sandy, soggy, silty river deltas and hundreds of miles of beaches. A cartographer's wet dream. The only stop between Newenham and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia was the Pribilof Islands. The Pribilofs, where German tourists made Kodak moments of the seal harvest, horrifying Europeans and infuriating the islanders.