Photos: Landing on a frozen Minnesota lake? These Forest Service pilots are cool with it
Snow and ice aren’t ideal conditions to take off or land an airplane, but they’re business as usual for the pilots who fly through the winter out of the U.S. Forest Service seaplane base in Ely — the only Forest Service seaplane base in the country.
Each season when Shagawa Lake reaches around 6 to 8 inches of ice, Ely crews build a runway on the frozen lake, allowing Forest Service pilots to launch cold weather search and rescue missions, wildlife surveys and other operations without having to use the city airport.
Making a runway on the ice takes some ingenuity. Forest Service pilots Justin Etheridge, 36, and Jeremy Harmon, 33, spent an afternoon in late December building a landing strip 1,600 feet long and 60 feet wide with balsam fir tree tops marking every 200 feet on either side.
The pilots drilled through ice and filled the holes with balsam fir treetops provided by local fire crews from the Superior National Forest’s Kawishiwi Ranger District. Once the ice hit a solid 8 inches, the runway was ready to go.
The balsam treetops help define the runway’s edges, a contrast that can be critical when the pilots are flying in gray weather.
“When it’s an overcast day, there’s no sun casting shadows on the ground,” Harmon said. “We have the gray sky and the white snow. It creates what’s called ‘flat light.’” The trees offer “better depth perception to see where the surface is.”
Taking off and landing on snow and ice calls for constantly monitoring weather conditions and data to stay safe. Harmon said the technique is different flying a ski plane and landing on the ice, but it still requires the same standard operations that go into flying any aircraft.
“There’s a lot more critical thinking and decision-making on the go that goes into if it’s safe to land or not,” he said.
When operating off snow and ice, their de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver planes are equipped with 11-foot skis, which displace a lot of the weight. “The skis act like snowshoes,” Harmon said.
Landing on the ice, said Etheridge, is “like you’re landing a pillow.”
The Forest Service has flown out of Ely and across the northern Minnesota wilderness for more than 80 years. When the spring comes and the weather warms, the pilots will trade skis for floats on the airplanes and continue the missions.
