Every once in a while, I get a flight that will stick in my mind forever. Yesterday would qualify as one of those. The mission was to deliver a passenger, her baggage, and the mail to Port Protection. It's the furthest-away destination we fly to on a regular basis, and also one of the most challenging to land in, as it is fairly confined, can see large swells, as well as high winds.

The flight up was fairly uneventful, save for the 40kt winds and 500' ceilings in a couple spots enroute. Upon arriving and unloading the mail, however, I overheard some of the village's residents talking about a recent litter of puppies having no home in town. They apparently had come to the decision that the only way to solve this problem was to euthanize them by drowning! It was at this point where I'd determined that this was about the worst possible solution for dealing with any potential pet, let alone some puppies...so I told them to grab a box to put them in and I'd fly them back to Ketchikan--and ultimately to the local humane society. They were all very well-behaved and loved peoples' attention--no doubt they'd find a good home somewhere other than underwater.

Into my plane they went, and I was off on the hour-long flight back to Ketchikan. Now you are probably all thinking at this point that this was the end of the story...but one problem that had arisen during the puppy debacle is that the weather was beginning to deteriorate rapidly all along the route back to Ketchikan. Rather than an hour of trouble-free flying, I was now encountering low visibility (<1 mile), low ceilings (200 feet most of the time), heavy snow, trace amounts of ice, and headwinds anywhere between 30 and 50kts for the majority of the flight back. To make a long story short, my trip back wound up being 1 hour, 45 minutes--primarily because of the headwinds, but also because I slow waaay down when the ceiling/visibility gets low in preparation to duck into a cove somewhere and wait out the weather. There were at least 2 points in the flight where I was preparing to double back to the nearest village and spend the night there.

In the end, however, I made it all the way back to Ketchikan. Save for one of the puppies vomiting all over the box they were in (it was a rough ride...), they were in the same health as they were when I took off from Port Protection. Considering what they'd just gone through to avoid being drowned, I'd consider them some really lucky dogs...and as a result I was very close to taking one home with me. In the end, however, I'd determined that I wouldn't have time to properly care for a puppy at this point, so off they all went to the humane society.

The happy ending to all of this is that, despite these puppies arriving at the humane society just yesterday, all three of them have already found families who are ready to adopt them. Despite the challenges, hearing that my efforts resulted in an ending like that makes me absolutely love this job!