Locals Take to the Skies at Gulkana Airport Day
Photo by Anna Somers
Iris (9) and sister Azalea (2) smile in front of a small planes on display at the 2025 Gulakana Airport Day.
June 26, 2025
Anna Somers - CRR Staff
On Saturday, June 21, hundreds of locals and visitors braved the heat and the haze to attend the fourth annual Gulkana Airport Day. This event, organized by Copper Valley Alaska Services, offered $10 flight-seeing tours, live music, food and vendor booths, and the feel of a neighborhood block party.
The event organizer, Rebecca Boniek, manages the day-to-day operations for Copper Valley Alaska Services offices, a business she runs with her parents. According to Boniek, “the whole family has a really big heart for aviation,” since it provides such important community services like med-evacs, mail runs, and transportation for troopers and state workers.
Boniek’s goal is to make the Airport Day an outreach event, bringing awareness to the life-saving and life-improving services provided by pilots, maintenance crews, and air traffic controllers.
“There’s a big need in Alaska right now for youth to get excited about aviation,” Boniek told me. She hopes that by attending Airport Day, younger participants will see that jobs in aviation are not only important but accessible.
Many of those who took advantage of the Airport Day’s $10 flight-seeing tours were children and teens, like Glennallen ninth-grader Preslyn Thompson, who attended the event with her family.
“You can see a lot in ten minutes,” Preslyn said, mentioning all the lakes she spotted from the air that aren’t visible from the road.
Each flight traveled above Glennallen, circled over to the hardware store, crossed above the Tazlina River, then returned back to the Gulkana Airport. Although there was a wait for ticket-holders to get up into the air, they could pass the time at one of the vendor booths, visiting with neighbors and friends, or listening to live music by Rheannon Williams and her grandfather Billy Joe Williams.
Rheannon, a singer in her twenties, has been performing with her grandpa for as long as she can remember (and probably, she jokes, even before that). The folk sound and oldies music added to the feel of a neighborhood party.
In spite of the heat and the long wait times for flights, the 2025 Airport Day was a fun summer get-together celebrating aviation in the Copper River Valley.
Copper Valley Air Services is a Copper River Record advertiser. This did not impact our decision to run this story or influence our reporting.
