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DENALI NATIONAL PARK The sun was about to set as Greg LaHaie sat down in the main room of his lodge to plan for the next day’s schedule of flights for Kantishna Air Taxi.

LaHaie owns this flight-seeing service and lodge, located at the end of the road, 95 miles inside this 6 million acre national park, just 20 miles from the north face of the towering mountain.

Skyline Lodge is a cozy tri-level, solar powered building, nestled into the side of a mountain. It attracts independent travelers from around the world, ready to set off on a variety of adventures.

On a day in late August, lodge guests and employees gathered around the table at LaHaie’s solar-powered lodge to share their day’s experiences.

Outside, in the rapidly fading daylight, the silence was palatable. The mountainous terrain and deep valleys were ripe with the brilliant reds and yellows of autumn.

It was a scene that could have inspired the words of Robert Service’s poem, “The Spell of the Yukon” “It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder. It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

Even now, LaHaie goes into visual overload when he flies visitors around the area.

“It’s standing in awe of the creation and realizing that it hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years, and you are hearing the same sounds,” he said. “It has that prehistoric feel, so much so that you wouldn’t be surprised to see a mastodon or a dinosaur standing up on the hills.

Skyline Lodge saw an increase in the number of guests this year, thanks to an expansion of accommodations. Other lodges in the area saw business decline, from 16 percent to 45 percent. LaHaie’s own air taxi business declined 20 percent in passenger traffic, he said.

“We started out with a lot of empty rooms, but were able to fill up the rest during the season,” he said in a telephone conversation Sept. 13, while he worked to close down his facilities for the season. “There is a lot of fear for next year too, that this is just the beginning of the slow season. But we get a lot of independent travelers, and being a small place like that, we are probably going to survive just fine.”

Skyline Lodge caters to those willing to pack their own lunches and explore the park on their own.

LaHaie said that he prefers “a bunch of people like myself, who I like to get up in the morning and have coffee with. If we talk to folks and think they are too high end maintenance, we suggest they try something else.”

Skyline’s accommodations include four cabins, each furnished with a double bed and two single sleeping pads in the loft. Bathroom and shower facilities in the main lodge are available for guest use.

Self-guided activities include day hiking in the Kantishna Hills, mountain biking on the park road and old mining roads, fishing in Wonder Lake or flightseeing over Denali and the Alaska Range.

Many guests just enjoy relaxing at the lodge with its collection of Alaskana books, and getting a firsthand view of the daily lives of Alaskan Bush pilots.

Most Skyline Lodge customers are avid adventurers who like to hike, “but would like to come home to a warm bed and good food,” rather than camp out in a tent, said employee Matt Unterberger. They are “independent travelers who don’t need their hand held at all times,” he said.

Rates are modest by comparison to nearby Camp Denali/North Face Lodge, Kantishna Roadhouse and Backcountry Lodge, which offer guests guided adventures, more luxurious accommodations and evening educational programs.

LaHaie grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich. and came to Alaska as a college student in the 1980s with a roommate whose brother, Bruce Lee, was a dog musher at Denali.

LaHaie spent the summer backpacking through the park.

“I was absolutely hooked, and realized flying was the only way to see the landscape,” he said.

He returned to Michigan to attend flight school, and later bought a plane with a friend and flew people around for gas money. He returned to Denali and worked his first winter for Dennis Kogl, who ran the dog kennels for the National Park Service.

He also did carpentry work and guiding trips, until the owner of the Kantishna Roadhouse suggested he start a fly-in service for the lodges. He gradually built up a clientele list, and by 2002 had built and opened the Skyline Lodge. Initially it was to be a home office base for employees for the air taxi. “Running the lodging was a second thought,” he said.

The air taxi service is LaHaie’s dream, even though, by his own admission “every landing is a lot of work. It’s not like flying out of a 4,000-foot airstrip,” he said.

LaHaie has had a few harrowing experiences, all of which he emerged from unscathed.

One was a trip in 1993, in the days before global positioning systems. LaHaie was flying back to Kantishna from Anchorage after dropping off clients and picking up groceries. The weather was clear on the south side of Denali, but fog rolled in on the north side. At one point, the weather went to complete whiteout conditions, but he was able to follow one clear column of space straight up to clear sky, and had enough gas to get back to the landing strip at the park entrance.

Nowadays, with GPS, radio phones and assorted other equipment, flying is a lot safer, he said.

Over the past few years, LaHaie has ferried hundreds of visitors through the park, including famed explorer, mountaineer and photographer Brad Washburn, and his wife, Barbara, the first woman to summit Denali.

“He was great,” said LaHaie. “The last time I saw him, he had just turned 90, and he said, ‘Me and the lady are starting to slow down a bit.’”

Washburn died of heart failure in January 2007 at a retirement home in Lexington, Mass.

LaHaie also has transported three surviving members of an ill-fated 1954 Denali expedition for a reunion in Kantishna. It was the first successful ascent of the South Buttress of Denali. Elton Thayer, the most experienced of the party, died in a fall from the mountain, but George Argus, Les Viereck and Morton “Woody” Wood all survived.

Skyline Lodge is already booking for the 2010 season. According to LaHaie, June is great for seeing more wildlife, before there is much traffic on the park road. Spring flowers are amazing and weather patterns are more stable than in later summer.

July is great for 24-hour daylight, and August offers the changing of the seasons, a chance of snow on the hills and even seeing the northern lights, he said.

Just how close does the wildlife get to the lodge? “We’ve had grizzlies right on the deck at the lodge,” he said.

More significant, however were the foxes, martens, wolves, magpies and ravens that camped out inside the main lodge last winter, after the double doors to the kitchen blew open.

Closing down the lodge for the season routinely includes putting plywood across the doors, but in the autumn of 2008, the staff was rushing out to attend an employee’s wedding and didn’t get the plywood up.

Climbers discovered the mess and alerted LaHaie in the early spring.

“We had to do a major cleaning when everything was still frozen,” he said.

Henceforth, that plywood will be up on the doors before they leave for the season, he said.

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