As a twelve-thousand-hour professional aviator, Bryce has flown the skies of Europe, Iceland, Greenland, North America and Mexico. As a mountaineer, he has hiked the Alps, the Appalachians, and the Rockies. He is a traveler in search of discovery and adventure, and he is a published freelance writer.
After years of research, much of which was onsite in England and France, Gibby recently finished The Annals of the Heroic, a series of six books: The Princess of Selgovae and the High King, His Majesty and the Prince of Lothian, The Captain and the Dark Queen, The Red Dragon and the Crown of Saxnôt, Knights of the Argoat and, lastly, The Young Knight of Selgovae.
Previously he authored Valiant Young Men—Heroes of Flight, the biographies of three renowned pioneer aviators, Eddie Rickenbacker, James Norman Hall, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Valiant Young Women—Heroines, the true life stories of Joan of Arc, the Lady Jane Grey, Susanna the Hebrew, Maria von Trapp and Irene Gut—incorruptible young women who changed history. His fictional stories and biographies are exceptionally entertaining, thrilling works of high adventure and romance, and remarkably motivating.
Bryce grew up in Riverdale, a small rural farming town on the banks of the Weber River, just east of the Great Salt Lake and west of Mount Ogden. As a boy, he was afforded considerable freedom to explore the countryside, build tree huts and Tarzan swings, and camp, unsupervised, in the expansive wilderness and high mountains of Utah. Bryce’s father, Grant, a golden-era aviator, aircraft mechanic and designer of home-built planes, reared his son on stories of flight. Later, Bryce became his test pilot. When thirteen he was given his first flight lesson in a Schweizer sailplane in Tehachapi, California. At sixteen Bryce soled, at seventeen he became a private pilot, at age eighteen he earned his commercial license and after serving a two-year mission for his church, he became the youngest certificated Airline Transport Pilot in the United States, receiving his ATP on his twenty-third birthday—the minimum age allowed by FAA regulations.
Early in his career, Bryce flew for Coronado Flying Service in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a flight instructor, charter and bush pilot, flying to remote areas in the southwest, often operating off-airport, flying fires for the Forest Service and doing aerial exploration for oil and uranium companies. The inherent danger and excitement of this type of aviation greatly appealed to Bryce—every day was a spectacular adventure, flying low-level over breathtaking landscapes. He survived several emergencies, including a forced landing after an engine failure, ironically barely missing the teeth-like tombstones of an old cemetery.
Later, Bryce partnered with his father in a Beech Aircraft dealership until the mega manufacturer hired him as a factory salesman-pilot. After several years, desiring new opportunities, he flew propjet Metroliners for Skywest, then a fledgling airliner, until he was recruited by Eastern Airlines to captain DC-9 jets out of Atlanta, Georgia. When Eastern was shut down by a horrific strike, Bryce returned to aircraft sales, importing and exporting to Europe. On one spectacular North Atlantic Ocean crossing, he ferried a single-engine Beech Bonanza with his good friend, Rodney Greenway, flying from Augsburg to Odense, to Wick, to Reykjavik, to Narsarsuaq, to Goose Bay, to Mont-Joli, to Peachtree City. This flight proved extraordinary, flying low altitude over the emerald coastline of Scotland, the dramatic volcanic mountains of Iceland, and myriads of icebergs, flows and fjords of Greenland.
Aviation afforded opportunities to do research in far off places, touchstones of the past, the settings of his books, where he found untold stories and unveiled heaven-sent heroines and heroes, in life and legend.
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