Words, Photos and Captions Emily Sullivan FROM the passenger’s seat of Leighan Falley’s 1957 Piper Pacer, the granite peaks of the Alaska Range loom large. Buzzing past heavily crevassed glaciers, the bush plane cuts through the narrow walls of the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier with intuitive precision—an extension of its pilot, an artist in flight. Climbers and skiers pepper the slopes below, punctuated here and there by colorful tents. Leighan deftly wraps a banked turn around a steep peak, relaxed as she inspects a hanging serac to her left. The jumbled ice feels close enough to touch, as do the granite walls to our right. To ride with Leighan through her backyard mountain range rede-fines the concept of joy in motion. As we bob and weave through unforgiving terrain, it’s clear that for Leighan, flight connects her to the surrounding peaks. But her creativity extends well beyond the skies—an accomplished skier, alpinist, painter and mother, she’s become an integral part of Alaska’s mountain community, a natural force all her own. IT’S A SUNNY MONDAY in late March and the sleepy town of Talkeetna, AK, remains buried under three feet of snow. On a frozen lake on the outskirts of town, Leighan stacks our skis into the back of her two-seater plane and grins at me. “I think ski flying is my favorite thing in the world,” she gushes. “It’s a combination of the two things I love most.” Leighan is striking, with hazel eyes that reflect the morning sun. The 41-year-old laughs as she shows off the hair dryer that keeps her plane’s engine oil from freezing and points out that her engine blanket is sewn from an old mountaineering tent fly—a relic of past expeditions in the Alaska Range. During her early days as a Denali guide, Leighan earned the nickname “the Raven” thanks to her uncanny imitation of a raven’s call. Her dark hair and clothing reinforce the moni-ker, which took on new meaning when she left guiding and began flying. Her now-thriving career as a glacier pilot for Talkeetna Air Taxi has earned her a fabled reputation among Alaska Range climbers and skiers, who she shuttles to various base camps throughout the range each spring. Born into a flying family, one of Leighan’s earliest memories involves her dad’s plane. “I remember being strapped in a car seat in the back of the plane and loving it,” she says. But as a child, she never imagined becom-ing a pilot. “I was a very timid and unmechanical child,” she admits. “So I never thought I was pilot material, but I always had a burning desire to fly.” Growing up in Fairbanks, AK, Leighan was drawn to the imposing Alaska Range. An artist from a young age, she was obsessed with the jagged form they cut across the horizon and was inspired by the “power of the land-scape.” She skied Nordic until picking up downhill skiing in college and spent the next decade working as a liftie and ski patroller in Colorado and Utah. Summers were spent guiding Denali climbs and rafting trips in Alaska, but those two worlds collided over a few springs spent living out of a van on Thompson Pass, where she cut her teeth among heli guides and pro skiers in the steeps surrounding Valdez, AK. During this formative period, Leighan racked up a long list of impressive descents across the state, skiing off the summit of Denali and ticking off a solo mission to ski Meteorite Peak, which is listed in Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America . Climbing and skiing big, remote lines under human power became a tenet of her identity. “It made me feel alive and connected with the mountain,” she says. “I felt called to ski off the zenith features. They’re these beautiful, hostile expressions of nature, and I just wanted to find out what they were made of and what I was made of.” Leighan Falley 077
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 2: Page 77
