Side Mission #5
That's a whole lot of caps lock for a place that looks like the neighborhood hill for the annual soapbox derby.
Admittedly, this soapbox derby has spectacular views. Unfortunately, it also has big brother and sister mountains all around it, which I realized very quickly when I began to head southwest:
Cape Newenham is an isolated area, and the airport is unmanned. It's here pretty much just for site maintenance, and as you can see above, there's a whole lot of paperwork you need just to land here. I'm here picking up the poor handyperson who had to come out here to fix up the radar system. Turns out the place used to be part of the early warning system looking out for Russian attacks. Not really a big issue anymore, thankfully, so barely anyone ever comes here anymore. Shame.
For some reason the posting mentioned flying southwest; I can only assume it's because of the amazing shot of the landscape, because otherwise there's nothing out there until you hit the Aleutian islands. This was supposed to be a short hop, though, so I turned the plane all the way around and headed northeast to my passenger's next destination: a private access airfield connected to a mining facility in Platinum, Alaska. I couldn't tell if the mine was a platinum mine or if they named the nearby town Platinum for other reasons; the handyperson wasn't really a talkative person, so I didn't really get anything out of him. Maybe that's why they send him on these fixer uppers out in the middle of nowhere all the time.
Coming in to land, it was clear that the "runway" was really just a large stretch of wider-than-usual road. Still, better than some of the places I've had to land, and neat geology to boot.
I looked it up later, and it turns out this was indeed a platinum mining operation. Emphasis on "was"; the site was shut down in 1990 and later sold to another company intending to process the platinum tailings left behind from the original operation. The whole thing ended up being a debacle;
the company and its officials were indicted for conspiring to violate the Clean Water Act and submitting false statements, only to have the government later ask for the charges to be dismissed because
they were still trying to extradite its Australian owners and no longer believed the company to exist.
But if that's the case, what was my passenger there to fix? I didn't really pay a lot of attention at the time; he just left the plane and walked over to where I assumed the mining operations were. He had to be a legit repairperson, because if he wasn't, how'd he get on that military airfield on Cape Newenham, and why would I have had all that paperwork approved to pick him up? But it WAS kind of weird that someone tasked to repair a radar system would then move on to fixing mining equipment, right? All complete mysteries to me, but hey, the check cleared. I was pretty sure it wasn't dirty money.
Probably.
