Aviation – Ray Arnold Back Country Mail Pilot
Backcountry mail pilot helps preserve way of life
In this April 15, 2009 photo, Ray Arnold pilots the Cessna 185 airplane he uses to deliver mail and other supplies to the remote Idaho backcountry, over central Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Arnold flies the only backcountry air mail route left in the lower 48 states, delivering mail to nearly two dozen ranches on a stretch of land larger than Indiana. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
By Jessie L. Bonner, The Associated Press June 28, 2009
Frank Church-River Of No Return Wilderness, Idaho — In the small airport lounge, his former wife and business partner rattles off the weather report and frowns as a surge of wind blows open the door and invites in the morning chill.
Ray Arnold slumps in a chair holding the side of his mouth. The 72-year-old pilot had a root canal the day before. Staring out the window, he weighs years of flying experience against an uneasy sky.
Finally, he lifts himself from the chair.
At his signal, Arnold Aviation employees wheel cardboard boxes into the hangar on dollies and stack them next to the plane, the wish lists of those who live and work along the only backcountry air mail route left in the lower 48 states.
Bananas. Eggs. Canned fruit. Flour. Frozen fish fillets. Oranges. Ice cream. Stripping wax for floors. An 18-pack of Coors. And bright yellow mail bags, stuffed with everything from bills and letters to magazines and Netflix movies.
“I got to get rid of the ice cream first,” Arnold says.
The pilot ticks off the items to be loaded first, guiding the workers like a backcountry Santa Claus. In the back of the plane, the parcels are arranged in the order they’ll be delivered.
Deep in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, folks are waiting.
For 34 years, the pilot has served as an ambassador to this tiny segment of Americans who prefer isolation over convenience, the roar of a river over the bustle of traffic, a sky dusted with stars instead of the fog of city lights.
Arnold crawls into the Cessna 185 and uses a pillow to position himself above the controls. The hands that learned to fly nearly a half century ago, when the pilot was young and his hip was real, adjust knobs and crank levers until the small plane lurches to life and lumbers toward the runway.
Every week, the mail plane lands on river banks and grassy cliffs scattered across remote parts of the Salmon River country, a stretch of land bigger than Indiana.
In a place where time seems stuck in a bygone era of the West, the sound of the plane reminds the wilderness dwellers they are not forgotten.
But on this blustery day, Arnold finds himself preparing good-byes – the U.S. Postal Service sent notice in March that his approximately $43,000-a-year contract was being canceled.
He flew the letters announcing the decision into the backcountry himself.
He could not know a former executive he flew into the backcountry decades ago, a businessman elected to Congress from Idaho last year, would attempt to wrangle a reprieve at the eleventh hour.
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Mail has been carried over the mountainous terrain on sleds and horses; and in the unforgiving cold of a central Idaho winter, carriers in the late 1800s crossed the wilderness on skis and snow shoes.
Lafe Cox signed a contract to deliver mail to mining camps, ranches and homesteads along 45 miles of backcountry in 1942, the same year he moved into the wilderness with his young wife, Emma.
“It was a way of making a living,” Emma says.
Her husband, the backcountry letter carrier, also carried out the sick, the dead and one winter, a pregnant woman who had to be tied down to the dog sled as Lafe drove over avalanches to bring her to the nearest doctor.
That was just part of the job, she says.
At 89, Emma now lives in a nursing home in the southwest Idaho town of Emmett. Her memories of the backcountry make brief appearances, like visitors she cannot persuade to stay longer.
The family moved here in the 1950s, when the mail route was contracted to Johnson Flying Service in McCall.
About 20 years later, Arnold noticed an advertisement at the local post office. They needed an air taxi operator to deliver mail to one of the largest blocks of primitive and underdeveloped lands left in the United States.
Arnold Aviation, the lowest bidder to take over the mail route, signed the contract in 1975.
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At Shepp Ranch, the roar of the plane from above nudges Mike Demerse to jump into a battered blue Jeep. At a sanded strip, the Cessna’s wheels screech to a stop.
Arnold climbs out and helps Demerse load eggs, oranges, fish and frozen vegetables into the Jeep before they head back to the ranch to visit.
The air mail route includes about 20 ranches scattered throughout the wilderness area, and this stop alone serves about 30 people, says Demerse, who with his wife Lynn organizes hunting, fishing and outdoor trips from a ranch property that straddles the Nez Perce and Payette national forests.
The Salmon River runs through their front yard.
What would losing the mail service mean? “I can’t order tractor parts. I can’t get a magazine subscription,” he says.
The couple sifts through their mail. Lynn Demerse sorts the doctor bills and magazines, grins when she finds the Netflix movie she rented.
They’d survive without the mail, but that’s not the point.
“The point is, is it a basic government service or not?” she says. “Is getting the mail a privilege or a right?”
A delegation of Idaho lawmakers were asking the Postal Service the same question.
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From the cramped cockpit, endless forest rolls out over the mountains like carpet. Living here requires a certain inclination for quiet, and stillness, a lifestyle built from grit and determination to outwit a seemingly uninhabitable terrain.
The roads are impassable for about six months of the year. The backcountry radio used to provide the only source of communication, but now people also access the Internet through satellites.
“With the world the way it is right now, it’s a good place to be,” said Sandra Alley, who lived off and on in the Idaho backcountry for about a quarter century with her then-husband, Jack Badley.
The vast landscape could be terrifying, especially for a 22-year-old carrying her first child in the 1970s.
About two months into the pregnancy, Alley was sick. Walking to the ranch outhouse, the pain ripped through her stomach and she dropped to the ground. Her husband heard her screams and rushed to her.
They called for the pilot, and Arnold landed 45 minutes later, helping Badley carry his wife to the plane.
Her right ovary had exploded. The baby would not live. But Alley, now 57, still chokes on her gratitude to the pilot who flew through a storm to help. She can’t speak for several moments through her tears.
“I should have died,” she says.
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The U.S. Postal Service faces a potential $6.5 billion loss this year. Postmaster General John Potter says thousands of carrier routes have been eliminated as mail volume declines.
A March 24 letter notified the Idaho backcountry residents the air route would be cut. If they made the trek to the mountain town of Cascade, a daylong affair for most of them, a mail box would be available at no cost.
“The initial decision was made with the thinking that there was going to be an acceptable alternative,” said Al DeSarro, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service Western Region in Denver.
Arnold delivered the letter to the Yellow Pine Bar caretakers on April 1. They thought it was a joke, partly because it was April Fools Day, but mostly because they couldn’t imagine sustaining their livelihoods without Arnold.
As the plane circled above the property, Arnold peered down for a landing spot that would avoid deer. Sue Anderson pushed a wheelbarrow carrying muffins and coffee to the landing site.
“I guess it might seem to some people as selfish, to want to get your mail,” said Anderson, 45, who helps maintain the ranch with Greg Metz, 46.
Arnold ate a muffin while the couple listed their frustrations with an outside world that couldn’t understand Cascade was a million miles from nowhere to those who live along desolate stretches of the Salmon River.
They grumbled about the postmaster general’s remark in March during a House subcommittee hearing:
“We must serve every customer and every community. Rich or poor, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns, we must provide the same high level of service. We must provide the same access. We must make our services available – in both easy-to-serve locations and locations so remote they can only be reached by mule, by swamp boat, or by bush plane.”
The comment became a battle cry in the Idaho wilderness.
A month later U.S. Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, visited Arnold’s small hangar. The lawmaker remembered the pilot who flew him into the backcountry more than three decades earlier, Arnold says.
He wondered if Minnick’s visit might bode a change in the postal service decision – and indeed in May, the agency ditched the plan to sever the backcountry mail contract. “There was no other alternative” for mail delivery, said the agency’s DeSarro. Minnick hailed the decision as a victory.
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Actually, the postal service is exploring alternatives, requesting quotes to find out if the service could be provided at a cheaper cost. Arnold is bidding for the first time since he took over the contract in the 1970s.
On a rainy Monday morning in mid-June at the Arnold Aviation office, Carol Arnold prepared for the Wednesday mail route and jumped to answer a customer who called in over the backcountry radio to place a grocery order. Food and hardware requests also come by e-mail.
“It would take a special person to live in their world, I don’t think I could,” Carol says.
The postal service will have a hard time finding another pilot to deliver the mail for less money, said pilot George Dorris who dropped by the office and sipped tea with Carol. They could probably find one who is more efficient, doesn’t stop to visit, he quipped. “But the people back there won’t bring them rhubarb and cookies,” he added.
Arnold, who estimates he flies about 17,732 miles a year, has been paid $2.45 a mile for the past several years. He carries passengers and freight with the mail to break even.
He asked the Postal Service for $2.95 per mile, a yearly contract worth $52,309. After weeks of negotiations, he says he and the agency have agreed on a number, $2.85 a mile, for a $50,536 yearly contract.
“I’ll give em’ the dime,” Arnold says.
He has not received an official contract for the next year, he says, nothing has been finalized. He’ll most likely deliver his first mail route in July on faith.
source: The San Diego Union Tribune
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Flying the Mail in Remote Idaho
Neither tight canyons, nor wildlife on runways… The postman’s creed is slightly different for pilots delivering mail in the mountains.
By Debbie Gary October 2017 Air & Space Magazine
Ray Arnold
Ray Arnold has flown his mail route along the main Salmon River for 40 years. (Debbie Gary)
Badley Ranch
Ahead of the Cessna parked at Central Idaho’s Badley Ranch airstrip, the peaceful canyon doesn’t reflect the difficulty of takeoff and landing here. The strip climbs from a 10- to a 17-degree slope. (Debbie Gary)
When we approached the first mail stop, Ray Arnold rolled his Cessna 206 up on its left wing and spiraled down inside the narrow canyon that funnels Big Creek past Taylor Ranch. Bare ground the color of a cougar’s hide filled the front window. The airspeed was slow, the bank was steep, and my senses were on high alert: One bad turn and we could hit the mountain, or fall into the creek. But Arnold’s hand was steady and he rolled out just above the rushing water. Another turn revealed a smaller creek and the twisted grass strip of the University of Idaho’s Taylor Wilderness Research Station.
Arnold touched down and rolled toward the bend in the runway where caretakers Meg and Peter Gag waited for us by their mailbox with their six-year-old daughter Tehya, their dog Bitsy, and a pile of cargo: the recyclables they were sending back; a cooler, for transporting perishables from the grocery store; and a few pieces of luggage for their day trip to Boise, where Tehya had a doctor’s appointment.
Arnold and the Gags off-loaded the bright orange mailbag, a stack of eight-foot lumber, a furnace, a week’s groceries, and other supplies. Gag strapped his daughter’s car seat into the Cessna as she rooted through the mailbag for birthday cards and presents from grandma.
Taylor Ranch
Ray Arnold loads recyclables aboard his Cessna 206 at Taylor Wilderness Research Station (Debbie Gary)
To reach Taylor Ranch from Cascade, we flew 70 miles above central Idaho’s nine- and ten-thousand-foot peaks, snow-covered national forests, and fire-ravaged slopes. Arnold pointed out backcountry landing spots as we passed; some snowy white stripes in a sea of evergreens, others no more than dirt scratches on the face of bare hills.
Each time he indicated a landing site, he recounted a close call some pilot had experienced there: a ski plane upended in deep snow, a nosewheel grabbed by a gopher hole. But the mail must go through.
The U.S. Postal Service contracts with Arnold Aviation to deliver to U.S. Forest Service outposts and some two dozen ranches in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness Area of south-central Idaho. The USPS has negotiated with contractors since before the stagecoach days, and it operates like a restaurant owner who knows that waiters can live off their tips. A mail pilot survives not on what the postal service pays him but by using the mail run to also carry passengers, cargo, and weekly deliveries.
Arnold’s route is unique in the United States. Alaskan bush pilots also fly the mail to remote villages, but they give it to postal representatives or lock it in sheds for pickup. They do not deliver to individual homes or boxes.
The Idaho route is run by the U.S. Postal Service. “These deliveries are part of the postal service’s universal service obligation to cover the nation, ensuring that all users of the mail receive a minimal level of postal services at affordable prices,” says John Friess, a USPS spokesperson. “Arnold Aviation delivers mail twice a week—once a week in the winter—to ranches scattered across more than two million acres of wilderness. The area is designated a primitive area, and no vehicles can be driven on it.”
Arnold has been flying this mail route for 40 years and has taken off and landed at each strip more than 2,000 times. At the Taylor Wilderness Research Station, where he flies in and out with scientists, students, and, sometimes, specimens of the wild wolves and mountain lions that they study, his arrivals and departures have numbered closer to 4,000.
The country around the mail route (Rainer Lesniewski/Shutterstock)
On one of those flights he had a close call with a departing caretaker who insisted that a planeload of her books had to fly out with her. “Before Taylor Ranch had a snow blower to clear off the runway, they used to just pack the snow down,” Arnold said, “and that day it was slushy. I took off in the Cessna 185 on wheels with a load too heavy for the conditions. Before I had flying speed I flew right off the bank and put the nose down to accelerate. I felt the tailwheel hit the water. Big Creek is not that wide, and there was a tree across the river. I could not get over it, so I stayed low. When I got to it, I had to lift my wing to get past it.”
Ranch owners and caretakers who live on private land in the remote region count on Arnold’s weekly mail delivery. He picks it up from the Cascade post office and delivers it to individual mailboxes on a rural route much like ones along country roads elsewhere in the United States. Except here there are few roads. For much of the year, flying is the only reliable way in or out.
Mail has been flown into backcountry Idaho since 1928, but in the 1950s two mail routes developed to serve isolated Idaho ranches, hunting camps, U.S. Forest Service stations, and mining locations. In 1975, Arnold Aviation consolidated the two routes into one and assumed responsibility.
He and his then-wife Carol started Arnold Aviation in 1972. Before that, Carol had taught home economics at Cascade High School until their daughter Rhonda was born; Ray taught math and science there. But he traded the classroom for the cockpit, where lift vectors, crosswind components, density altitude, and weight and balance calculations were not just variables in theoretical problems but matters of life and death.
During the days I spent at Arnold Aviation in February 2015, parcels arrived from FedEx and UPS. Meat and groceries piled up in the cooler and walk-in freezer. Carol Arnold, now divorced from Ray, manages the office, makes appointments for folks who come in off the river, and takes orders for things they want delivered. Carolyn Smith, the company’s shopper, runs errands and fills the orders. Everything is weighed and marked with initials for the various ranches: Yellow Pine Bar, Mackay Bar, Badley Ranch, Shepp Ranch. At daybreak Arnold collects a large bin full of mango-colored mailbags at the Cascade post office, and everything is carefully distributed in the airplane for balance and convenience.
In the spring, summer, and fall, when the ranches are humming with guests, the loads are full and the hours long. Passengers fly in and out with the mail, and everyone is too busy to chat. There are 20 stops along the two flying routes, flown on alternating days; 13 stops the first day and seven stops the second.
The winter run is more leisurely, a one-day, five-stop trip to the few caretakers and owners who live along the rivers all year long. Approaching our stop at Yellow Pine Bar, we flew down low and followed the S-turns of the Main Salmon River. The airstrip was a snowy blaze among tall pine trees at a bend in the river midway along the section most popular for river rafters, a swift-moving 80-mile stretch with rapids from Corn Creek to Vinegar Creek. The strip was slushy and icy.
Mackay Bar
From his Cessna 206 descending upon Mackay Bar, Ray Arnold looks down on the Salmon River’s South Fork where it flows into the main “River of No Return.” (Debbie Gary)
Yellow Pine Bar is a private ranch that’s been owned by the same family for more than 60 years. In the summer, it’s a stop for rafters and jet boaters, who buy drinks and snacks and sometimes knives or tools from caretaker Greg Metz’s blacksmith shop.
Sue Anderson, who has worked at Yellow Pine Bar as a caretaker since the 1980s, rode up on a four-wheeler, its tires wrapped in chains. She gave Arnold a hug, a kiss, and homemade fudge. Jim Mozingo, from nearby Allison Ranch, was visiting. After they unloaded mail, groceries, water jugs, and garden mulch, Arnold sat between the Cessna’s open cargo doors, eating fudge and chatting.
As we headed back down the snowy runway, Arnold said, “This is where a deer jumped out of the woods, onto the runway and through my propeller one day on takeoff.” In a split second the deer was sliced to pieces and a propeller blade was knocked loose. Arnold shut down, then sent for a mechanic, and a new propeller. “That was a $12,000 deer.” He took off, turned upriver, and flew over the snowy strip at Allison Ranch. “Another deer ran out here and hit me when I was already in the air,” he said. “That was a $700 deer.”
In summer Arnold picks up the mail at 6 a.m. and gets going right after breakfast. In winter he takes off when it gets light, but fog kept us grounded that day until nearly one o’clock. It was well into the afternoon before we got to the last three stops. Mackay Bar, like other river ranches, thrives on guiding and outfitting hunters, fishermen, trail riders, and ranch guests. Its caretaker, Buck Dewey, apologized for having turned off the coffee pot as the hour grew late. “Next time there’ll be coffee and cookies,” he promised.
Our next stop was the Badley Ranch airstrip, on the side of a hill that climbs from a 10-degree slope to a 17-degree one. At the top, Arnold pulled off onto a semi-level rocky spot, and Luke Badley rode up on a four-wheeler, chased by his black and tan coonhound Danner. The dog sniffed my legs while the men unloaded. Badley opened his groceries and handed a Fat Boy ice cream bar to Arnold, who accepted it and ate it as if it were the reason we landed there.
“All these strips are private,” Arnold said. “You can’t land on any of them without permission.” I looked down at faint tire tracks sweeping up the hill and imagined learning to land on a slope like this. Arnold made it look easy, but I’ve landed on a few, much more gradual up-slope strips, and I knew it was difficult.
Once we were airborne again, we stayed just off the water. At Shepp Ranch, horses scrambled over the end of the runway. We circled and waited for them to clear off.
“One day a backhoe was in the middle of the runway and the driver never budged,” Arnold told me as we circled. “So I landed short and rolled right up behind him, put on the brakes, and ran the engine all the way up. The backhoe driver nearly jumped out of his seat.”
While Mike Demeres rounded up the horses, Arnold explained that the postal service calculates his pay by a flat-map rate. They are unmoved by complaints about extra miles flown around fog banks, the added cost to climb out of valleys, minutes tacked on waiting for heavy construction equipment, dogs, or horses to clear the runway.
When I flew with Arnold two years ago, he was 78, but when he spoke of retiring it did not sound imminent. He loves flying in these mountains, seeing sunsets, lakes, snow-covered peaks, elk, bighorn sheep, and the rivers. Mostly he loves the people.
Mike Dorris
Mike Dorris at the Willey Ranch 2015 Debbie Gary
Mike Dorris, whose father Bill was one of Arnold’s airmail-flying instructors, is one of the pilots who sometimes flies mail for Arnold. He lives in McCall, where he has his own delivery route, usually driven by truck. But in the winter months, when the highest mountain passes are snowed under, he takes to the air.
One morning Dorris took me on his mail route in his polished silver Cessna 170, landing atop two feet of snow. To get the landing skis down prior to takeoff, he’d pumped a broom-like lever up and down 53 times. You only use them when absolutely necessary—the skis have no brakes.
In Warren, the elevation is nearly 6,000 feet, and the snow there lingers. From the air, most of the 20 or so buildings looked tidy and well kept, but next to the airport, rusted roofs and missing boards gave Warren the look of a ghost town. Postmistress Jan Munsen rode over from the town’s tiny post office with mail cartons strapped to the front of her four-wheeler, followed by a tall, thin man looking for groceries we did not have.
Dorris grew up in a family of 13 kids, flying and skiing. In the 1970s he was a two-time member of the U.S. Ski Team. He raced in Europe, coached, went pro, then came back to start a flying company with his father. Now he and his wife Leslee own Sawtooth Aviation in McCall.
“My dad always cussed the mail route,” Dorris recalled. “Planes slide off the hill, the ski plane especially. You can retract the skis, but it’s time-consuming. So you start out visiting with someone and the next thing you know your airplane’s slid backwards into the bushes.”
His father taught him and three of his brothers to fly, often reminding them that his own 10 worst flying experiences were on skis and sometimes urging them not to use them. Still, every pilot learns the hard way.
Using skis on the steep Badley Ranch strip one day, Dorris turned around at the top of the hill. “Then the nose got pointed downhill and started tracking toward a yellow pine,” he said. “I blasted the tail up, turned it left, went through tree branches, got going downhill, missed a big rock, hit a pile of backpacks and ski equipment, and tore up a guest’s skis, but got airborne.”
At the South Fork Ranch, we dropped off supplies, mail, and a case of beer that caretakers Tim and Judy Hall had won in a Super Bowl bet from their fellow caretakers at Yellow Pine Bar. Dorris and the Hulls swapped local lore, including the tale of an old-timer who ordered whiskey jugs every week until he went blind and shot himself—in the heart instead of the head, to leave less mess for the friend whom he knew would likely be the one to find his body.
Warren Idaho
Warren Post Office
Warren Airstrip
At the McClain Ranch we chatted with Tom Roberts, whose grandmother Sylvia McClain bought the ranch in 1946. Roberts moved there with his mother when he was nine and recalled the long-ago day Arnold landed with a strong wind on his tail and hit two lodgepole pines off the end of the strip. The airplane stopped so suddenly that the engine flew off. Nobody was hurt, but a man in the back seat panicked, climbed over Arnold, and jumped out the window. The trees were later removed and the runway extended.
Before we flew back to McCall, Dorris landed at Willey Ranch, the steepest runway in Idaho—550 feet long at a 23-degree incline. One day his wheels got stuck in snow there, halfway up the runway. He and his passenger took turns holding the brakes to prevent the aircraft from sliding backward while the other man dug a path through the snow for the wheels.
Dorris used to deliver mail to Willey Ranch until someone burned the house down smoking in bed. He’d taken me there just to share the thrill. Imagine flying toward a mountain, then instead of turning, crashing, or climbing, you pitch the nose up just enough to land on it.
Dorris was a teen when Arnold took flying lessons with his father. When Arnold had to step down for a year and a half for medical reasons, Dorris flew his route for him.
Dorris told me how you need strict rules for yourself flying in the mountains. “You have to be 110 percent sure before you turn up a canyon. If you get complacent and lose track of which drainage you are in, all of a sudden the ground climbs real steep and goes up into an overcast. The river you were following turned a different way back behind you and now there’s no room to turn around.”
I thought of the first, dramatic turn in that canyon with Arnold the day before, and the skill it took to make it, and the sacrifices these pilots have made throughout their lives to see that the mail gets through. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, reads the U.S. Postal Service creed. Arnold and Dorris don’t fly when it’s snowing, but they live up to the sentiment.
source: Air & Space Magazine October 2017 (Smithsonian)
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The Last Interview: Ray Arnold retires from backcountry mail route
Unusual profession spurred dozens of news stories
By Max Silverson for The Star-News November 2, 2017
After 42 years of delivering everything from daily junk mail to a duo of belligerent llamas to residents in the backcountry, Ray Arnold has retired from flying what is the last U.S. Postal Service air route into a wilderness area in the continental US.
Arnold, now 80, delivered mail from Cascade to far-flung stoops in and around the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. Walt Smith, who has worked for Arnold Aviation for 15 years, is now flying the route that covers several hundred miles of territory.
Arnold’s unusual delivery route has been reported dozens of times in publications ranging from the New York Times, to National Geographic and the CBS Evening News.
“It’s unique in that it’s the only route left like this in the lower 48 states,” Arnold said. “But there’s only so much you can write about.”
Whether interviewers came from Boise or from the East Coast, Arnold made time for them – The Star-News included – to go over the same questions and found space in the plane for an extraordinary ride-along.
What is likely the last interview with Arnold appears in the November issue of Smithsonian Air & Space magazine.
Ray and ex-wife, Carol, who remains his business partner, are completely unimpressed with the media attention. They keep no scrapbook of famous articles or list of celebrity TV hosts who have covered their business.
General Nuisance
Some interviewers over the years have done a good job, being thorough and factual, whereas others presented a general nuisance, she said.
“I had a guy from NPR call me on the phone, and he’s being real sarcastic, and he says ‘so what kind of mail would those people get anyway?’ Carol said, offended by the question.
“Well, they’re people just like you, what kind of mail do you get?” she said in retort.
“They get junk mail just like anybody else,” Ray said, laughing at the absurdity of the question. “People out there have Amazon Prime; I’ve got two boxes in the back of the car going out on tomorrow’s flight.”
Ray and Carol will eagerly list the backcountry ranches and airstrips to which they deliver mail, noting their friends and memorable characters that live at each location.
But they laboriously sort through shelved memories of Katie Couric and Dan Rather mentioning their business on national news broadcasts.
“After a while, it’s kind of like, ‘well, there’s been so many stories now,’” Carol said. “Everybody that calls, it’s like they’ve just discovered it thinking, ‘wow, this would be a great story.’”
“But you know, where have they been?” she said. “That’s kind of how it strikes you after a while.”
Lucrative offers have been presented to the Arnolds from The Discovery Channel and other networks to feature the route in a reality TV program. They have consistently declined.
“We’ve just absolutely refused, it’s such an invasion of privacy for us and our clients,” Carol said.
“Usually they don’t even get past Carol,” Ray said. “We asked the people, and nobody wants that, that’s why they moved back there in the first place.”
Arnold was never in the job for fame, glory or riches, but genuinely enjoys flying and providing a much needed service to friends that have become family in the backwoods.
“We do it for the people on the route, not for any sense of duty to the post office,” he said. “If they could get the service cheaper, they’d switch.”
The route was nearly cut from the budget in 2009 due to the high cost of delivering mail to so few. The contract was preserved, however, and Arnold Aviation recently renewed the contract with the Postal Service for another eight years.
“I don’t think there’s anyone else interested in doing it,” Arnold said. “It’s a lot of work, and it ties you down all year long.”
source: The McCall Star-News
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Further Reading
Link to Aviation Work Horses of the Backcountry
Link to Pioneers of Idaho’s Aerial Mail Routes
Link to Bryant Ranch (Johnson Creek airstrip)
Link to Old Yellow Pine Airfield
Link to The Loon Lake Bomber Crash 1943
Link to Idaho History Index Page
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The Yellow Pine Times 