Recently, Tom Short, NAC District Manager in San Antonio, contacted me about one of his drivers. He wrote, “If you ever need a suspect for a profile, we have a delivery driver here in San Antonio who was a hunt-fish guide and bush pilot in Alaska for more than 20 years. He is also from Texas. To say he is a character is the understatement of the day — an interesting fellow by the name of Dale Raley. I think he once shot a bear while wearing pajamas.”

Reporters are a curious lot by nature, and I wasn’t disappointed when I dialed Raley and got to know him. It turns out the elusive Raley was rarely wearing his pajamas when he shot a bear. Sometimes, he wasn’t wearing much at all! Those folks from Texas do know how to spin a yarn. The point is, the people of NAC are a wonderful bunch who are full of interesting stories. I hope you enjoy this one.

An Adventurous Job

“When I was in the Air Force and stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, I chartered some bush pilots to hunt and fish, and that looked like fun. It beat working for a living,” laughs Raley. So he returned to Texas after he was discharged, went to college, and obtained a commercial pilot’s license. Somehow, he managed to convince his young wife, Dee, to go back to Anchorage with him, where he was a bush pilot for the next 25 years.

There was no typical description of a day or week for Raley. He’s done everything from flying the Wide World of Sports reporters to the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to hauling hundreds of thousands of pounds of dynamite for building fish hatcheries in Prince William Sound. In between, he entertained comedian Bob Hope, aviation legend General Chuck Yeager, and many other celebrities.

Raley buried 35 of his pilot friends and associates, four of whom were all killed on March 14 — but in different years. “I attributed my longevity to anticipation and attention to detail,” he says. “I tried to anticipate everything that could conceivably go wrong and remedy it before it happened.”

His journal entry reflects this. Raley writes he was scouting for moose and bears and was looking down at a lake. The other plane came out of nowhere.

I was almost killed today at the northeast end of Lake Clark Pass. I almost had a head-on collision with a yellow and black Super Cub on floats. If I had looked up a second later or if my reactions weren’t as automatic to slam the stick full forward and left, I would now be just a gut pile in a tangle of metal and airplane fabric. There was less than 20 feet between us when I passed under him. Everything happened very slowly, and I knew I would miss him. I wonder if things would have happened as slowly and if I would have been as sure of the outcome if we had collided.

I made a sharp and level turn to take a look at him, but he continued on and never appeared to have seen me. There was no time to get scared and afterward, no reason to.

The Bare Essentials

Now about those bears...

“I’ve shot quite a few bears around my homes in the middle of the night,” says Raley. “Most of the time, I wasn’t even wearing pajamas! They were trying to get in the cabin or lodge or already raiding the lodge. Generally speaking, black bears get really upset and are dangerous. I never had any problems with bears that couldn’t be remedied. They are a fact of life up there.”

Ready for Takeoff?

Raley once blew a magneto on his Super Cub at takeoff. “Naturally, it happened in a bad place with a heavy load,” he says. “I was still on the ground when I ran out of ‘runway,’ but after running through about 100 feet of willows and alder brush, I managed to get it in the air with an impressive display of brute strength and awkwardness.”

The “runway” was just a somewhat-clear area. The plane was fully loaded. “I had the hunter sitting on half a moose and all his gear in the plane. We had stuff tied on each wing strut and stuff jammed in the back. My passenger didn’t even know anything was wrong and said, ‘I thought that was the way it was done.’ I guess sometimes it is.”

Heading South Again

After 25 years in Alaska, Raley had two daughters and a son and was approaching age 50. “I thought, ‘You’re 50, and your eyesight and reflexes are going. You’ve run your string out, and you’d better do something else.’ I was invited back to Texas by a former client to manage a fiberglass manufacturing operation and decided to try driving NAC trucks instead.” He’s been driving trucks for NAC for almost four years.

But I bet it’s not nearly as exciting.