Flying The Yukon\'s Bush Illustrated e-Book Final.indd - Kitcain.com

Flying The Yukon’s Bush

Copyright 2006 Christopher C. Cain All Rights Reserved

Published By: Soulful Stories Publishing Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

www.kitcain.com

E-Book ISBN 0-9780006-4-1

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Preface This story originally read like a Geography lesson because it was written in 1962 for the National Geographic magazine. Having a college degree in Geography and Geology, I naturally assumed that the National Geographic would be a magazine about the geography of the Earth and its unusual places, so I wrote about the geography of the Northern Yukon Territory. Needless to say, they didn’t accept the story. What Senior Editor Nat Kenney—an old friend of my Father’s—said the Geographic was looking for was a first-person adventure story, and if I’d re-write the article as such they might be interested in it. By that time I was on to what I considered to be greater things. Since I never have responded well to rejection of any kind, I realized very early on I wouldn’t make a good writer ... at least not at that age! I did, however, hang onto the story for forty-odd years largely because I knew the written word would stand the test of time better than my memory. I had also kept a written “log” of the more adventurous aspects of the experience along with snatches of conversations with interesting people I’d met, and that managed to stay with me over that period of time as well. Also, Pat Callison wrote the story of his own life in a book called Pack Dogs To Helicopters—now out of print—but I did manage to find a copy for reference. In my older age I marvel at my fearlessness—or was it lack of intelligence—of the venture, but then I remember the old saying: “We spend the first half of our life trying to shorten our life span…and the last half of our life trying to prolong it.” At any rate, what appears in the ensuing pages is a combination of Geography lesson, a brief historical picture of the northern Yukon Territory in 1962, a first-person adventure story, and some memories that caused me to change my occupation from flying airplanes to occupations more “earthly” in nature ……like real estate! The first section is the story in words, and the second section is quite a different story as captions of pictures. They were originally two separate stories, but are combined here for ease of web transfer. Keep in mind that the story was written in 1962 and a lot has changed since then. I have left it largely as it was originally written (with a few date reminders) so that it can function much like a history lesson in the face of a rapidly growing and expanding world.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS Page

WINGS OF GOLD CAMPER ON THE ALCAN HIGHWAY ERNIE AND WASHING MACHINE KLONDIKE HELICOPTERS HANGAR KLONDIKE HELICOPTERS BELL G-2 AND CREW CF-MLL AT TOMBSTONE PASS CF-MLL AT MAYO MOTEL DAWSON CITY DREDGE TAILINGS RIVER-PANNING FOR GOLD PROSPECTOR/EXPLORATION TENT CAMP GOLD DREDGE DAWSON CITY; MAIN STREET DAWSON CITY; PALACE GRAND AND BONANZA HOTEL DAWSON CITY HARDWARE AND Y.O.O.P. DAWSON CITY; MME. TREMBLAY’S STORE STERNWHEELER ‘KENO’ IN DAWSON CITY THE MAMMOTH TUNDRA BUGGY DC-3 ON SKIIS ON LAKEBED DC-3 UNLOADING FREIGHT AT HUNGRY LAKE HUNGRY LAKE; HAULING FREIGHT CF-MLL SLINGING FUEL DRUMS OPERATION PORCUPINE CREW LOADING ON DC-3 SETTING UP TENTS AT HUNGRY LAKE BASE CAMP HUNGRY LAKE BASE CAMP FROM THE AIR CARIBOU ON ROTTEN ICE: HUNGRY LAKE BEAVER AND FUEL DRUMS: HUNGRY LAKE KIT AND ERNIE OUTSIDE HUNGRY CAMP TENT OPERATION PORCUPINE CAMP COOK HELICOPTER LANDING PAD HUNGRY LAKE OUTDOOR SHOWER

44. 45. 46. 47. 46. 48. 47. 49. 48. 48. 50. 52. 51. 52. 52. 53. 53. 54. 54. 54. 55. 55. 55. 56. 56. 57. 56. 58. 57. 58.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS (cont’d.) HORN LAKE BASE CAMP LOADING CF-MLL: KIT & ERNIE ARCTIC ICE FOG MOVING IN ICE FOG SHUT DOWN DC-3 WRECKAGE FLY CAMP WITH CARIBOU NEARBY FLY CAMP MOSQUITO SCOURGE KOMAKUK CARIBOU HERD DROPPING OFF FLY CAMP AMERADA HESS OIL RIG CAMP SAMSON’S ANVIL BUTTE LANDMARK MLL AND ONF TOGETHER IN RIVERBED PEEL RIVER CANYON SPRING BREAKUP MOUNTAIN LANDINGS SIDE HILL LANDING; ARCTIC COAST SAMPLING RIVERBANK GEOLOGY ONF ENGINE FAILURE #1 ONF ENGINE FAILURE #2 KPI FLIES BROKEN ENGINE OUT SLINGING NEW ENGINE IN MLL ENGINE FAILURE SITE ON OLD CROW FLATS ERNIE REPAIRING MLL; STU WATCHING OLD CROW FLATS PERMAFROST INUVIK, NWT MAIN STREET IN OLD CROW 1962 RCMP HOUSING RESIDENTIAL HOUSES OLD CROW SLED DOGS OLD CROW CHURCH MLL WITH CHILDREN IN INUVIK MAP OF NORTHERN YUKON

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Flying The Yukon’s Bush: The Story In Words White knuckles And Sweaty Palms A sudden mountain snowstorm poured over the ridgeline faster than my helicopter could run to avoid it. Its blinding whiteness forced us closer to the ground, compelled us to land. But where? Trees and boulders covered every square inch of ground. "I don't know 'bout you, but it sure scares Hell outa’ me!” yelled the prospector over the engine's deafening roar. I smiled tightly—tried to appear to be the bold and nonchalant pilot all Bush Pilots are supposed to be. He couldn't see the sweat on my palms; didn't notice the whiteness of my knuckles as I clenched the controls. The mountainous, tree-covered ground disappeared into a white cloud of driving snow all around us. Visibility dropped to 300 feet. Snow stuck to the helicopter’s plexiglass bubble making it extremely difficult to see where we were headed……and even harder to spot a large enough clearing in which to land in the solid carpet of Evergreen trees below us. The prospector kept glancing at me, wanting to know how worried I was…… wanting to know if he should worry. I had to look nonchalant. After all, he had faith in me. But who was there for the pilot to have faith in ... myself? ... God? Right at that moment, neither one was very reassuring. The creeping fear of the unknown gripped tighter and tighter. There might not be a clearing. But we had to get down on the ground immediately! We couldn’t just flap around burning up valuable fuel, or we’d never make it back home. "Over there!" shouted the prospector, pointing through the white haze toward a wide spot in a snow-covered stream bed. We descended carefully into the stream bed, the helicopter’s blades just barely clearing the trees along its border, our landing skids resting in four inches of water and sandy bottom. I released a very long breath and wiped my sweating hands one after the other on my pants legs. This is Springtime?" I asked myself. "What an introduction to the Yukon!" The suddenness of that storm taught me a harsh lesson about weather in the Yukon Territory; a lesson in the degree to which the forces of nature control what the land is to man today—a frontier. At every turn of events for the rest of the summer I was to learn that when Nature speaks, Man listens……or he can easily die learning the lesson! The experience gained was more than I bargained 6

for when I signed on to work as a pilot for Klondike Helicopters of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory of Canada, but it proved an invaluable education in judgment and decision making. During the first two weeks of May, 1962, Ernie Sigurdson, the helicopter's engineer, and I flew off on our own with instructions to work on several previously arranged small contracts for the earliest part of the season. From about the 19th of May until October, we were scheduled to work with the Geological Survey of Canada on an expedition to map the stratigraphy (the rock formations below the earth’s surface) of a vast expanse of land encompassing the entire northern half of the Yukon Territory from Dawson City to the Arctic Ocean, and from slightly over the Alaskan border to the west, eastward to the Mackenzie River delta and the westerly portion of the Northwest Territories. Up to that point it was the most ambitious Geological Survey expedition ever held in Canada. A day later, when the Indians had cut the mountain's scrubby pinion pines into threefoot stakes, and had pounded them into the frozen ground on each of the corners of each claim, their job was finished and I again picked them up on the mountain top and flew them out of the bush. Several remained behind to stake more claims and walked the 25 miles out! For this block of claims they were paid well, and the prospector, under contract by a large mining company, was assured of an income for it—not so risky as prospecting alone. After completing the prospector's work, we took off early the next morning from the ball park in the middle of town—waking everyone with the machine's unmuffled roar—and headed for Dawson City. Flying over the meandering Stewart River we could see the old winter road as it sliced its way through the evergreen forests. Abandoned and grown over now, it had once served as Dawson City’s sole link with the outside world during the winter months. Up until 1948, there were no roads north of Whitehorse except winter roads. A winter road is an engineering nightmare to build, at least in the North country above the perma-frost line, but is nevertheless the only way to haul heavy equipment such as an oil drilling rig, seismograph vehicles, drill crew camps, or bulky supplies into the inaccessible bush country. To build one, there must be a month or more of below-zero cold to freeze the surfaces of the ground, swamps, and rivers—after which caterpillar diesels are able to bulldoze their way through to clear the roadway and pack down the snow. 7

The most difficult part of the job comes in picking the smoothest route in cold, 40degree-below-zero weather—which the men do by flying in helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft or by walking ahead on snowshoes. During spring and summer months the roads become quagmires of black ooze where the ground has thawed. The roadways end at the edges of rivers and swamps ... seeming to disappear below the surface where, during winter, there is solid ice on which to cross. During the warm seasons prior to 1959, when river ice had broken up and winter roads were no longer serviceable, sternwheelers churned up and down the Territory's river systems. Not only did these steamers play a vital role in carrying passengers and re-supplying northern trading posts with food for summer and fall, but on return trips they carried out the winter's trappings of Muskrat, Mink, Beaver, Fox, and Marten furs to Whitehorse's railhead. From Mayo, steamers carried high-grade silver ore mined at the Keno Hill mines upriver to Whitehorse where it too was loaded onto the White Pass and Yukon Railway for the trip to Skagway, Alaska, the closest seaport. “Muskeg”, however, is one of the greatest hindrances to transportation in the Yukon and most of northern Canada. It is a silty black earth covered by peaty loam and moss which occurs, in the Yukon, in poorly drained patches of ground as far south as Whitehorse. "Permafrost”, a more general term, applies more to the permanently frozen state of the soil, and may include frozen muskeg as well as solidly frozen gravel or earth. Muskeg is generally always in a frozen state except when the surface is disturbed, such as happens when a caterpillar tractor passes over; and in which case the black silt absorbs the heat of the sun's rays and melts ten to fifteen feet down. The resulting impassable black muck becomes the consistency of pea soup and is known to the local people by a name not printable here! At first, engineers tried to bulldoze their way through the muskeg to lay a roadbed, but most of the time they couldn't find the bottom. When they laid the gravel bedding on top of a disturbed surface, the roadbed sank out of sight! They discovered that the only solution lay in placing the bedding on top of the undisturbed, mossy, surface. Today, there are excellent all-weather dirt roads connecting the three main cities in the northern Yukon. Two hours after taking off from Mayo, Ernie and I arrived in Dawson. We landed the helicopter on a sand bar in the Yukon River and lugged our personal equipment up to the Bonanza Hotel—one of the few remaining buildings of the Gold Rush era still in use. Although it seemed like rustic living at the time, it was later to seem like the Taj Mahal after a summer of living in an eight foot by ten foot wall tent. 8

Dawson City, one of the most unusual “Cities” in North America, lies only 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle, which makes it the most northern incorporated city on the continent (at least it was in 1962). Over half the town stands on frozen muskeg, meaning there are no basements; and the buildings not set on pilings settle slowly and unevenly down, or are heaved up on one or more corners by frost. In an effort to make the ground more suitable for house foundations during the Gold Rush, tons of sawdust, junk iron, steamboat parts, old automobile parts, and lumber were dumped on the muskeg. Today, digging a signpost hole in the middle of town is like going on a treasure hunt. The Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, a private concern which mines gold with huge dredges in the surrounding creek bottoms, produces the electricity for Dawson and sells it for 25 cents a kilowatt (in 1962). Water (also in 1962) cost fifteen dollars a month per house, per bathroom. And until just last year, Yukon Consolidated owned the decrepit old telephone system too, but now the Canadian Government has stepped in and installed new dial phones. Gold is still Big Business in the Yukon. Just outside Dawson's city limits, placer gold miners still hydraulic a meager living from Hunker and Bonanza Creeks in the summer, and Yukon Consolidated's mammoth gold dredges churn over thousands of tons of earth a day. All together, close to two million dollars a year (in 1962 terms) in gold leaves the Dawson area. Most of it comes from the big dredges which creep at a snail's pace down the creek bottoms, floating in a pool of water dug by their chain of monstrous bucket scoops. Moving leisurely from one side to the other, they sluice out only 25 cents worth of gold flakes from each ton of river gravels and leave rows of worm-like "tailings" behind. Ahead of the dredges, crews prepare the ground by bulldozing it level and pounding six-foot-long, hollow iron “points” into the ground. Hoses run from pumps to the points, and water, forced down through them, thaws the frozen ground. An underground glacier or spot where ice is too thick to be thawed by water brings a dredge to a grinding halt until dynamite can blast the ice clear. Inside the dredges, huge electric motors drive gears as alrge as 20 feet in diameter to power the bucket scoops. Once inside, the rocks and boulders tumble down through heavy, sheet-iron sorting devices making a racket almost deafening in magnitude. 9

Many of these million dollar monsters have been abandoned in creeks which failed to produce enough gold; and they sit just as they were left—even the tools still in place. Dawson City’s major importance is as a radio link with civilization, particularly to pilots, prospectors, oil rigs, and exploration crews. In a small wooden building at the center of town, the Department of Transport has set up its aircraft and ground communications systems……lifelines to the bleak and barren bush country all around Dawson. The friendly voice saying, "This is Dawson Radio, go ahead with your message, over", has been a welcome relief to many bush pilots and expeditions who battle the fierceness of the bush country's weather and the un-dependability of man's mechanical machinery. When an expedition leaves Dawson, it maintains a pre-arranged schedule by radio to do numerous things such as order new supplies, send telegrams, call for a plane in case of emergency, or order new parts for broken machinery. Nowhere is man's lack of self-sufficiency brought home as strongly as in the earth's uncivilized extremities. To the pilot when he has engine trouble or his plane goes down, it is an immense relief to know that someone is aware of the problem, and just the sound of another human voice over the radio helps dispel the gnawing fear deep down inside that comes with the knowledge of the North country’s perils—like freezing to death before help arrives. A pilot always tries to anticipate the worst possible situation and take precautions against it, but he never knows. Nature is the most uncanny of all. The efficiency of radio communications fluctuates from hour to hour and from day to day with the result that half the time the HF (high frequency) radio signals are so poor they’re nearly impossible to hear or decipher. Sometimes there’s no signal at all! Other times a voice booms through as crystal clear as though it were in the next room. A radio technician will claim this is due to daily changes of the "Heaviside" layer—a layer of ionized particles in the upper atmosphere which reflects radio waves back to earth, and whose relative position causes a radio's reception to fade or intensify. At one point when I was flying with two geologists out on the Old Crow muskeg flats looking for ancient lake borders, my engine failed just before take-off from a brief landing. We found ourselves stranded on a narrow, low, gravel hump in the middle of several hundred square miles of flat muskeg swamp and 125 miles from even the nearest Indian settlement. There wasn't a tree in sight to build a fire with; the base camp had only a general idea what area we were in; and we only had food for two 10

days. Had we not had a radio in the helicopter, it might have taken much longer for the other helicopter to find us. As it was, I had to set up a portable HF antennae with some wire held up by two persons and called periodically for eight hours before the signals improved enough for Dawson Radio to receive the information on our location and relay it to our base camp. The summer sun shines most of the day in spite of Dawson's short 80-day growing season. Around June 21st, daylight lasts for 24 hours. Portions of the rich, black, river silt that are well drained and haven’t reverted to muskeg make excellent gardens for lettuce, carrots, peas, and tomatoes. Several of approximately 300 people now living in Dawson have their own greenhouses or gardens which help to alleviate their otherwise expensive meal budgets. The whole town could be supplied with local vegetables if there were an economic need for it, but since the summer is so short and everyone attempts to do their outdoor physical work during this period, it becomes more convenient to buy imported vegetables. In other words, a man can earn more hiring himself out as a carpenter than he can growing and selling a garden crop. So, except for private gardens, vegetables are shipped up in trucks by distributors who buy their products from as far south as the Imperial Valley in Arizona. The Dawson Gold Rush Festival is an annual event sponsored by the Canadian Government as a means to promote tourism in the North. Although many Canadian newspapers used the Dawson Gold Rush Festival as a scapegoat to snipe at the Diefenbaker government's expenditures, their claims that the Festival was a complete flop and that the money spent on the town was wasted, are not true! The Festival, in its first year of operation, was far more successful than anticipated. Its attraction doubled the number of tourists visiting Dawson, compared to last year (1961), and increased the income of the Yukon's service industries accordingly. The Federal Government's expenditure, of over $400,000 to have the Palace Grand Theatre completely restored down to the last stick of furniture gives Dawson not only a tourist attraction in itself, but a culture center and a stage for tourist attractions for years to come. The government will more than get its money back in taxes if tourists keep visiting the area as they did last year. Looking back from the year of this writing, 2005, tourism has become a booming business in Dawson City due solely to Government expeditures to develop it. 11

At this early stage of development (1962) the Festival is not for the tourist who drives into town looking for a modern hotel and expects to be entertained during his stay. There are hotels and campgrounds, and many organized activities, but compared to tourist spots in the U.S. and Canada, Dawson is still a frontier. In the Gold Rush days of '96 life was so rugged around Dawson it prompted Robert Service to write the Law Of Yukon: This is the law of the Yukon, That only the strong shall thrive, That surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive. Dissolute, damned and despairful; Crippled and palsied and slain This is the will of the Yukon …… Lo, how she makes it plain! Two miles down the Yukon River from Dawson, the Indian village of Moosehide sits back up on the river bank. A small, outboard-powered riverboat takes you to the village or you can walk the dirt path. Once there, you can get some idea of how the Indians fish; how they build their cabins; what a fish-drying shack looks like -- and smells like; or you can visit with the old minister, who is blind, but knows no end of tales of the northern lights. Opposite Moosehide, the old sternwheelers lie rotting in the mud. Further downstream, Indian fish weirs churn in the current; or abandoned, sod-roof trading posts tell a story all their own. Miles of earthen ditch joined by California redwood sluice trestles that once carried water to the gold sluicing boxes still cross the hills out behind the Dawson Dome. Or, at Bear Creek, home of the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, sits a fifteen foot high Alaska Freight Lines muskeg tractor and its four trailers. The tractor and trailers have wheels seven feet high, and each wheel is driven by an electric motor of several thousand horsepower. It carries its own sleeping quarters built into the main cab in front of the diesel-electric power generating unit, and each trailer is capable of hauling a small summer cottage with ease. The vehicle was originally intended for crossing muskeg barrens to re-supply villages farther north such as Old Crow and Aklavik. However, it proved unsuccessful in its attempts to negotiate the abruptness of river banks, and kept breaking apart at the trailer joints. 12

Once you think you've seen everything, ask some questions. Ask a townperson what goes on in the winter months. Ask about river glaciers blocking the roads; or spring floods washing the roads out. Ask what it's like to walk around the block in 40 degrees-below-zero cold. There's no reason to get bored in Dawson! Being the farthest point north on the main lines of transportation, Dawson becomes a staging point for most expeditions to the coastal and bush regions which lie between Alaska and the Mackenzie River. A large grocery and department store, such as the American-owned Northern Commercial Company, may supply three or four expeditions with fresh food and supplies throughout the summer or winter. The expedition charters a float-equipped fixed-wing aircraft to fly the supplies out to the base camp, which is invariably on a large river or lake for pontoon landings in summer, or in an area level enough for a bulldozed or snowshoe-packed ski-landing strip in winter. Winter expeditions are mostly seismograph trains searching for oil -winter being the only time their tracked house trailers and maintenance vehicles can move across the muskeg. Operation Porcupine On May 19th,Ernie and I left Dawson to work with the Canadian Geological Survey's "Operation Porcupine", whose primary purpose was to make a geologic map of the stratigraphy of the upper half of the Yukon Territory lying north of 65 degrees latitude—an expansive, expensive, and time-consuming job even under the best of conditions. In 1962, it was the most ambitious exploratory expedition the Canadian Geological Survey had ever undertaken. Together on the expedition worked nine Doctors of Geology; their assistants; two cooks; and a radio operator—plus our two helicopters, two pilots, and two engineers. A DeHavilland "Beaver", and its two-man crew were also on constant call to fly in supplies from Dawson City or Whitehorse. Against all of us worked the forces of nature, and the element of time. Certain objectives had to be met in order for the mapping to be completed, and we never knew until the end of the operation if the weather would allow us to meet them. First stop: “Hungry Lake” The first expeditionary encampment lay on the edge of Hungry Lake, 200 miles northeast of Dawson City. Tents, men, and supplies had been flown from Dawson 13

City out to the snow-covered ice of Hungry Lake in a ski-equipped DC-3 several days before we left, so camp was already set up by the time Ernie and I left Dawson. After four hours of navigating our way with topographic maps across the wilderness, we landed on the melting snow at the lake shore and walked up the path, a trickling stream, to the cook tent for lunch. The base camp Ernie and I found on our arrival was set up in roughly the same pattern each time it was moved to a new location. The two cook tents went up first; then everyone pitched in with axes and cut spruce saplings to be fashioned into benches, tables and washstands. Propane stoves cooked the food and the two Swedish cooks kept our bellies full of the finest cooking throughout the summer. After the cook tents came the raising of the office tents where the geologists used folding aluminum tables to examine maps, study aerial photographs, and write up their voluminous notes. Two-man Mount Logan tents went up last to serve as sleeping quarters for the thirty members of the party. Each tent had a Coleman lantern for heat and light, and each man had his own spring-steel "safari cot", air mattress, and sleeping bag. Once the tents were raised, the assistants set to work clearing trees from a point of land in the lake to make spruce-log landing pads for the helicopters. Bright red tengallon and fifty-gallon barrels of aviation gas lay by the pads—flown in the previous winter by ski-equipped DC-3 from the Imperial Oil refinery at Norman Wells, 375 miles to the east in the Northwest Territories. The Pilot’s Biggest daily problem: Fuel Load vs. Rock Samples As the snow gradually disappeared from the ground exposing rocks for the geologists to study and sample, the two helicopters set to work putting two-man teams out in separate "fly-camps" to study the most important single outcroppings of rock or sediment. Other two-man teams flew "traverses", which meant two geologists flying a broad 180 mile loop out from base camp and back again with as many as sixteen stops on different outcrops to sample the rock type and note its approximate age and fossilization. As the helicopter's gas load decreased, the rock-sample load increased. At the end of the season, tons of samples had to be shipped to Ottawa and Calgary laboratories for closer micro-fossil examination and testing. 14

Ernie and I lived in an 8’X10’canvas wall tent which had been set up on a platform made of spruce tree poles to keep the tent floor up off the melting snow and mossy, eternally-wet muskeg ground surface. We slept on folding canvas camp cots in bulky down sleeping bags around which we had wrapped a heavy canvas tarpaulin for additional warmth and moisture protection. Ernie had made an ingenious table with bench on one side out of aluminum “angle-iron” which I had recovered by landing the helicopter on several mountain peaks where survey instruments had once been mounted on stands for land surveying. The table and its attached bench came apart easily for transport when we moved camp. The table top consisted of a piece of ½-inch plywood I had lashed to the bottom of the helicopter at an abandoned exploration campsite. I carried a spinning rod in the hollow tube of one of the helicopter’s side-mounted cargo racks, and decided to try a little fishing one day while waiting for the Geologists to collect rock samples from an outcrop not far from a reed-covered lake shore. On my landing approach I had noticed some large-size swirls in the water indicating the presence of feeding fish. I set up the rod and reel, put a shiny metal spoon on the thin filament line and flipped the lure out into the lake just beyond the line of reeds. It had hardly touched the water and begun its flashy trip back in my direction when WHAM! My rod bent almost in half, and there was a huge swirl where the lure had landed. Just as suddenly, the line went slack and drifted back to me minus its spinner! I thought I had broken the line in my attempt to set the hook……or else my knot had come untied…… so I put on another spinner and damned if the same thing didn’t happen again. I looked carefully at the fishing line. It had been cut as clean as a razor. Not until I later put on a steel leader and hauled in a few of those huge and ferocious Pike, Pickerel, and Muskies of the Northern Lakes did I realize what a wicked set of teeth they have. A Lesson In Critical Path Planning. Planning Operation Porcupine took Dr. D.K. Norris, head of the expedition, and the other eight doctors of Geology over a full year. Dr. Norris spent a period of time the previous summer flying over the country to be mapped picking campsites and getting some idea of the problems he would be faced with. Last winter, in Ottawa, every phase of the operation was planned almost to the hour. During the summer of the actual operation, each day's progress was plotted on graphs to indicate which phase needed more emphasis. The routine day lasted fourteen hours—seven days a week! 15

Geologists moved their fly-camps to new locations approximately every four days. They were so busy they didn't have time for days to wash their clothes; at other times, when the weather turned bad, they often went for a day or two without food until the helicopter could get fresh supplies to their campsite. Even at that, one geologist kept complaining because he couldn't get the helicopters to move him often enough. Unpredictable difficulties threw the time schedule into a tailspin throughout the summer. Weather, an element as impossible to prophecy as to regulate in the far north, constantly threatened the operation's success. Ground fog, low clouds, snow, rain, or extremely high winds limited flight in the helicopters and meant that during these bad periods everyone sat until the weather cleared sufficiently to fly. Several times during summer, the saturated air cooled and suddenly condensed itself into a dense fog bank or low cloud layer which blocked the mountain passes and forced the helicopter to land. One daylight night, after a forced landing to wait for the Arctic ground fog to lift, I woke up to find myself staring through the helicopter bubble into the intense, yellow eyes of a coal black wolf. As I sat up, the wolf slowly backed up to join his several comrades, and they all disappeared into the thick fog. Helicopters are cantankerous contraptions. The helicopters themselves, being still in the pioneering stages of development, had mechanical difficulties that slowed our progress down. For example: my machine had a cooling fan fly apart 30 miles from camp. Another time, a cylinder head went bad 120 miles out. Operations had to cease until we could be flown back to base, and it meant the machine became inoperable until repaired. The second helicopter on Operation Porcupine sheared a generator shaft and later had a connecting rod break while in flight and loaded with Geologists and rock samples. Fortunately, when the engines failed or malfunctioned the helicopters were both either on the ground or over a clear landing spot when the difficulties occurred. The engine failure on the second helicopter occurred over a swampy area filled with kneehigh grass and about six inches of water. It was the only break in miles of solid tree cover and enabled Stu, the pilot, to auto rotate to the ground without damage to the rotor blades or tail rotor. However, in order to change the engine right there in the wilderness, 20-miles from base camp, some extraordinary gymnastics had to be performed. 16

First, a tripod of tree logs had to be built over the central shaft of the engine and a chain hoist attached. A platform had to be built out of logs to keep the two mechanic/ engineers out of the water, and to hold the replacement engine when it arrived. Both blades, the transmission, and all engine accessories had to be stripped off the engine to minimize weight, and then the engine lifted up and slid down a log ramp to one side of the helicopter’s skids and frame. All this while being constantly covered with, and bitten by, mosquitoes so thick we had to scrape them off the top of each cup of tea each time we took a drink. Meanwhile, about 500 miles away in Whitehorse, Pat Callison, owner of Klondike Helicopters and a true legendary figure of the Yukon, loaded his float-equipped Cessna 180 with a new engine, all essential tools, and a second engineer/ mechanic into the tiny area normally occupied by the passenger seat. It was essential to crowd weight forward in order to maintain the aircraft’s proper center of gravity or she would have been unable to control and crashed. Despite the fact that the aircraft was way overloaded and the floats nearly submerged save for about a third of their forward length, Pat managed to fly that load off the Yukon River at Whitehorse and land on the twisting, turning, tree-lined Porcupine River close to base camp. Removing 500 pounds of dead-weight engine from the Cessna onto the river bank with a log ramp was no easy job either. It was my job to hover the helicopter about ten feet above the new engine while Ernie attached a long sling line to it. The helicopter then picked up the engine, flew it to the damaged ship and lowered it gently onto the log platform so it could be slowly chain-hoisted and bolted precisely onto its engine mounts. Then I had to fly out the damaged engine and land it on the log ramp leading into the Cessna, which was still waiting and tied to the river bank. How Pat Callison ever managed to raise that Cessna 180 off the Porcupine River loaded as it was with engine, tools, and mechanic remains a minor miracle to me to this day. Mountain Flying: the pilot’s nemesis. Nine-tenths of the geologists' field work was done in mountainous regions where thick sections of rock had been exposed by erosion and the shifting of the earth's crust. This was largely because in the lowlands and valleys, inaccessible expanses of trees and muskeg covered the rock from the geologists' view and prying pick-hammers. In order to map the underground stratigraphy of the earth, frequent samples of the rock strata have to be taken in order to determine what sub-strata layers have been 17

lifted up, shaved off by glacial action, sheared by fault lines, or forced into contorted positions by the actions of the earth crust movements. The weather in the mountains grew to new levels of unpredictability and ferocity. Clouds formed around landing sites in seconds forcing us as pilots to play cat and mouse games with the weather to get food and supplies to a fly-camp, and return to base camp with the Geologists’ rock samples. Clouds often obscured the geologists' landmarks making it impossible to walk a hundred yards from the tent without getting lost. Navigation by memory, by guess, and By Gosh! As pilots, we had no maps to navigate by. The only maps of the area covered too large an area to be of any value.The Geologists had aerial photos of the entire area to be studied and so they found the way to each base camp site, but we had to navigate outward from base camp locations by memorizing watershed systems, rivers, lakes, unusual mountain formations and landmarks. When the clouds dropped down to near surface level, or the ground fog moved in, it became very difficult to find out where we were going or coming from. I must say, though, that neither one of us ever got lost. We often had moments of disorientation, but always managed to find some familiar landmark which directed us to our intended destination. This was terrible important because every trip was planned with just the right amount of fuel to reach the destination and return. Weight is critical – to the pound, in fact – in a helicopter, so extra fuel meant that rock samples had to be left behind. Needless to say, that was not an option. Too many times I landed at base camp and Ernie would exclaim after looking in the fuel tank: “Hey……Bunky! D’you know you were flying on fumes?” I didn’t want to hear it because I knew only too well what the very accurate fuel gauge had been telling me for far too long! It was because of too many similar situations that I decided not to make a career of bush flying! The Wind is a ruthless teacher! Clouds were not the only kind of problem weather. Wind is as much a part of life in the north as trees, mountains, and mosquitoes! Strong mountain winds are not like the strong, steady winds that blow from the ocean or over flat land. In mountainous terrain they're turbulent downdrafts and updrafts that bash a plane or helicopter around like a leaf in a thunderstorm. When the winds do blow this way, they're the scourge of every pilot who, against his better judgment, is pressured by circumstance to venture forth into the teeth of the gale. 18

I learned my lesson about when not to fly in the mountains in a mild but forceful way. I was moving slowly toward a jagged ridgeline in the Richardson Mountains one day in a strong, gusty wind, approaching the ridgeline from an angle in anticipation of the inevitable downdraft or updraft, when I suddenly felt an updraft grab the tail and wrench it up until the damned helicopter stood almost straight up on her nose! Now, the problem with that happening is that if I were to react a little too quickly and haul the cyclic stick back into my lap, as would be my instinctive impulse to correct for that extreme an action, I would automatically chop off the tail rotor of the helicopter and everything would instantly turn into a real can of worms! The only thing I could do was sit there like an unmoving rock and let the wind do what it wanted with the helicopter and me. When the wind finished with us, we had been blown up a hundred feet and then downward toward the mountain at such an extreme rate of descent that it was almost as if there were no air at all under the rotor blades. By heading down the mountainside like a skier, and remaining no more than just a few feet off the ground, I managed to remain in “ground effect” (wherein the wind had “bottomed out” against the mountainside, so to speak) until I could gain enough forward speed to pull up and out of danger. Gingerly, I turned around and flew back home—my expression more than a little sobered. If discretion is indeed the better part of valor, the message to me was very plain: find some other way to make a living while the odds are still in your favor! Further to a similar subject, determining wind direction as it blows over a bald mountain top or a saddle between two peaks is at times next to impossible, but nevertheless an absolutely essential part of flying a helicopter. The helicopter must be headed into the wind when it lands, especially in the mountains with a load—otherwise all kinds of hair-raising and unpleasant things start to happen! The geologists frequently—in fact, daily—had to be landed in these kind of spots, so I was constantly on the lookout for the direction in which the wind was blowing blades of grass or plants so as to give me some indication of wind direction. Often times I had to circle gingerly across a sharp ridge line to try to feel the wind change or see it in the helicopter’s airspeed indicator. Just as often I had to take my chances, and the landing became a sort of “controlled crash” with full power on and maximum lift to soften the landing impact……but no chance at all of aborting the landing or changing my mind. Sometimes, in order to get back out of such a situation, I would have to ask the Geologists to walk down the mountain side to a safer landing site so the helicopter would be light enough to take off with adverse wind conditions or the lesser power available to the turbo-charged engine at 8,000 feet elevation. 19

The wind was not just a problem to us as pilots, either. Not infrequently, the high, gusty, mountain winds tore tent ropes out of the canvas of fly-camp tents or drove rain through the joints where two layers of canvas tent and wall were joined so that it dripped down and wet everything inside. The Mother Lode: Iron Ore at its richest. Flying along the side of a mountain in the Mackenzie Range just above the Snake River, I was looking for the orange tent of a fly-camp Geologist who had radioed our base camp for a pick-up. As I rumbled along, I spotted several red stakes stuck in rock cairns on the mountainside. Thinking they were old claim or survey stakes, I thought no more about them. When I finally found the fly-camp and squeezed in under a cloudy, low ceiling to land, I found the geologist quite excited about what he had discovered. Stacked outside his tent stood nearly 200 pounds of extremely heavy, dark red rock which none of us had ever seen before during the expedition. Having myself had a number of college level courses in Geology, I quickly recognized what the Geologist had become so excited about: the rocks were extremely rich chunks of Hematite, or very high-grade iron ore. He had seen the stakes as well, and said they were recently placed there, probably as claim stakes. The stakes began to take on a newer meaning. The very next day, the California Standard Oil Company walked into the Territorial Mining Recorder's office in Mayo with a fiber case full of cash to pay for 388 iron claims on the same mountain. The stakes weren't more than a month old; they'd been put there by California Standard work crews who had been studying and staking the area for six months. They had been so secretive about their movements that noone even knew they had a 50-man camp and four helicopters hidden from sight in a mountain valley nearby. As we flew the Geologist and his camp out, we happened to pass over a small lake and noticed the Standard Oil Beaver floatplane landing there to meet a helicopter that we did not recognize. I went down for a look and recognized the helicopter as belonging to Okanagan Helicopters of Vancouver. Men in business suits were climbing out of the Beaver (300 miles back in the wilderness) and my curiosity got the best of me. We went in and landed alongside the Okanagan chopper. As it turned 20

out, the businessmen were executives of Standard Oil and they were very glad to have the chance to talk to us and discover that we were not Shell Oil or any of their other competitors who had discovered what they were about. They had heard our helicopter in the area for several days and, not wanting to be discovered or risk losing the secrecy of their huge iron ore claim-staking operation they had been so careful to maintain for the past year of work, had quickly gone ahead and filed what claims they had……just in case. Once they knew that we were disinterested Geologists from the Geological Survey Of Canada, we heard their whole story. Supposedly the discovery is one of the largest in this part of the world; but they will have to drill down through it to determine its size accurately. Even if it is the largest, the cost of mining it, processing it, and building 500 miles of railroad line through the mountains to remove the ore is prohibitive until the present ore reserves reach a lower state and prices rise to compensate for the expense of extraction. Experiencing wildlife from a helicopter is like being in their midst. Leaping with unbelievable agility and swiftness among the jagged pillars of grey rocks and razorback ridges, Dahl Sheep seem oblivious to the sheer 2,000-foot drops beneath them. Even the tiny youngsters seem to inherit the nimbleness of their parents from the day they're born. Moving in groups of six or seven, they feed on the high, sunny, grassy slopes. Occasionally a big ram with a full curl-and-a-half of horn jerked his head up at the sound of the helicopter and bounded off. I can’t think of any better way to observe wildlife than from inside the bubble of a small helicopter. I’ve hovered just over the tops of 2,000-pound Grizzlies who stand 12 feet tall on their hind feet looking me straight in the face, wind from the rotor blades ruffling their fur, and the roaring noise of the engine not seeming to bother them at all. I often landed right in front of a wolf or wolf pack as they sat observing me fearlessly. I often saw Gold-colored honey-tip Grizzlies, Barren Ground Grizzlies, and Black Bear feeding on lower mountain slopes, or out on the tundra digging ground squirrels out of burrows or feeding on dead caribou carcasses. Snow-white Ptarmigan feed on blueberries and flutter around close to the mountainside using updraft winds to help their flight. In the lowlands, below the timberline, black or beige colored wolves stalk snowshoe rabbits and sniff the winds for the scent of carrion. Moose wade out into the cold water of swamps to escape the incessant ravaging attacks by mosquitoes, black 21

flies and other insects, burying their heads underwater in a search for tender grass roots. Scattered herds of caribou—six or seven thousand strong—feed on moss and lichens, constantly on the move, sometimes running about as if driven mad by the scourge of insects. Bald Eagles, perched on rock ledges or in trees, blend with their background and watch for a lemming to scurry or a fish to dart and mark its doom. Seagulls, Canada Geese, swans, and birds of every description flew over Hungry Lake and its nearby mountainous regions on their way to the secluded breeding grounds of the northern lakes and Mackenzie River delta. I once spotted a female Bald Eagle flapping along lazily above where the Peel River tumbles down into the Peel River canyon. I gradually eased over next to her until the two of us were flying along in formation at almost 70 miles an hour. When she started getting a little nervous about what kind of strange bird I was, I turned off and went down into the Peel Canyon for a rather nerve-wracking landing to unload the Geologist and his camp. Landings were often inches from disaster There were no openings in the scrub trees for a landing so I had to find a spot on the very edge of the canyon that would allow me to squeeze the front portion of the skids onto solid ground while the Geologists unloaded their camp and supplies. The delicate tail rotor of the helicopter hung out over a 200-foot vertical drop into a raging torrent of muddy, roiling and boiling Spring breakup of water. The main rotors whirled above several short scrub spruce, clearing them by inches. There was no time for thoughts of “what if”! Ducks, I found, also move through the air very quickly. I flew along just above one Goldeneye in the helicopter and clocked him at 70 miles an hour on the airspeed indicator. One morning about 6AM I rushed out of my tent after hearing a rushing sound like jets high overhead. Peering up into the overcast sky I saw a flock of about 50 Goldeneye ducks as they passed overhead in a screaming dive of over 100 miles an hour from high altitude well above the clouds. They pulled out of their steep dive at about ten or twelve feet above Hungry Lake, their motionless wings tightly locked in position and swishing through the air as they jockeyed back and forth amongst themselves in a tight formation. The entire flock stayed in tight formation at very high speed and made a long turn around the lake, gradually slowing down to land on the only section of open water not covered by ice. 22

Every bit of me was right there in the middle of that flock, for I too had flown in formation flight just as they were doing at that instant. I had learned tight formation flying as a U.S. Marine pilot in the U.S. Navy’s flight training programs. Nothing else I’ve ever done can compare with the feeling of controlling a powerful engine and airplane with my fingertips as it screams up into the sky in hot pursuit of the flight leader, joining up with him in a long climbing curve, throttling back to lock myself into position not ten feet away from his wingtip at 200 miles an hour……my total and complete concentration on the slightest change of speed or motion of the flight leader. That feeling of power and control I will never forget as long as I live……and I knew that those Goldeneye ducks could feel the thrill of their power and speed just as well as I had. The departure from tree country At the end of our allotted time at Hungry Lake, the expedition moved its base camp 200 miles northward to Horn Lake. That put us at the edge of a long mountain-front in the Rat River valley where we could look out to the east and see the broad, flat expanse of the Mackenzie River delta disappearing into the horizon. The variable northern limit of trees passed slightly to the south of camp leaving our tents exposed on the barren, moss-covered tundra. The only trees this far north, 90 miles above the Arctic Circle, were clumps that survived in river bottoms or on leeward hillsides. For camp cook tent benches and tables we imported the spruce poles from Hungry Lake, but when we tried pounding one of these poles into the frozen muskeg beneath the moss, the ground proved solid as stone. Aluminum tent pegs were the only objects which penetrated and held. Insects: the scourge of the North To say that the mosquitoes and black flies on the delta and at Horn Lake were bad would be an understatement of Gargantuan proportions! They were a tormenting stone-in-the-shoe-of-progress which afflicted us every working minute—a pestilence from which the only refuge was a mosquito-proof tent and an aerosol bomb! At one point, Ernie and I and two geologists took a three-day traverse out onto the Mackenzie River delta whose waters are a bug-breeding heaven. No sooner had we begun to set up camp on a lake shore than we were besieged by swarms of the hungry little biters. They flew in clouds, covering clothing, biting through dungarees, crawling up pants legs, dying by the dozen on plates of food, and forming a layer of dead carcasses on the surface of a hot cup of tea. Worst of all, they made their way into 23

the helicopter bubble by the thousands and fed on us at will. I had to have both hands on the controls at all times or lose control of the helicopter. Every time I climbed into the helicopter bubble and closed the side doors, the first order of the day was to swat mosquitoes for 5 minutes with a cap until most had been done away with. Experience had taught us to carry head nets, mosquito dope, and mosquito-proof tents everywhere, otherwise we'd have been stark raving idiots in a matter of minutes. The Mackenzie River: Highway through the North. In spite of the bugs, the Mackenzie delta is one of the main focal points for Indian and Eskimo activity in the western Arctic. Its 50-mile width is a hundred thousand lakes, swamps, river channels and banks of fertile river silt covered by a thick forest of evergreens. Aklavik is the name of the old Indian settlement on the main channel, and Inuvik is the new, government-planned community on an eastern side-channel. The Indians prefer the old town of Aklavik to the newer one because of its nearness to caribou in the mountains, and its proximity to the main river channel where fish are most abundant. From Aklavik, the Indians head upstream in canoes and 30-foot, square-ended riverboats powered by outboard motors to live in their remote fishing camps along the banks of the Mackenzie River. Their camps may be either one or two eight by ten canvas wall tents, or a shack made from river driftwood and roofed over with flattened five-gallon gas cans. Most Indians prefer to use a tent for the simple reason that, when they kill a Moose, it’s easier to pack the camp to the Moose than it is to pack the Moose to the camp. Here and there along the riverbank, clearings with piles of sawdust indicate a portable sawmill has chewed its way through some of the larger evergreens to make lumber for the river towns. Barges hauled by small, shallow draft tugs haul the lumber up or downstream with supplies, barrels of gas, and mail. Inuvik is the largest town in the Mackenzie delta area and was built by the government for the specific purpose of being a headquarters for far northwestern activities. Its gaily painted buildings sit on pilings driven into the frozen ground and are serviced with water and plumbing pipes which travel from house to house above ground in insulated, aluminum-covered, tunnels. Here at Inuvik, there's a gravel-strip airport 24

with scheduled airline flights; a modern hospital; a Hudson's Bay Company department store; and a school with boarding facilities for hundreds of Eskimo and Indian children from scattered outlying villages. The kids are flown in for school sessions, and have their vacations in May and June so the Indian children can go muskrat trapping with their families. When I looked for Eskimo stone carvings from local artisans, I was disappointed to find that the carvings in the Hudson's Bay store were the only ones available. They had been flown from Cape Dorset in the eastern Arctic south to Winnipeg, and then back North to Inuvik in the western Arctic. I found out later that the reason for this is that there is no local supply of the soft, easily-carved soapstone in the western Arctic. Farther out the eastern edge of the delta, almost to the Beaufort Sea, lie the Eskimo villages of Reindeer Depot and Tuktoyaktuk. The Eskimos at Reindeer Depot are an extremely jovial and smilingly friendly people, taking time to explain how they herd reindeer with planes and Army surplus half-tracks, slaughter them, and send the meat and hide out to native missions. The reindeer now number approximately 7,000 and were originally herded by Laplanders across the Arctic from Siberia. Tuktoyaktuk sits far enough north of the tree line that they might easily have a serious fuel problem were it not for the abundant supply of logs, branches and timbers torn from river banks hundreds of miles southward and deposited along the River’s shorelines as the current abates during slack flow seasons. The Komakuk Herd, 3,000 strong. A geologist and his assistant in a fly-camp were the first to encounter the vast herds of caribou. They were sleeping soundly in their tent one daylight night when they heard a grunting and clomping outside at 2AM. Alarmed, they peered out the tent flap and found themselves surrounded by a moving mass of grey-brown bodies. The caribou herd filled their small valley and moved by the tent as a huge flowing mass, grunting and sloshing in the muskeg—their heel bones clicking as though they were walking on stone rather than the soft ground of the tundra grass. A herd of six or seven thousand Caribou leave hundreds of miles of muddy brown trails paralleling and crossing each other, cut through the soggy moss of the green tundra as they migrate. Antlers, still in the velvet, curve up over their heads like jutting scimitars. Close to seven thousand caribou moved by the tent in the early hours of the morning and disappeared to the south. And this was only a single herd! Fortunate for the 25

Indian and Eskimo there are so many, as they use the animal's meat for food; its hide for clothing; and its sinews for sewing. Hardly is there a trap line cabin or old Indian campsite without the remains of a caribou rotting outside. The herds keep constantly on the move, remaining on higher ground or breaking into a run to escape the mosquitoes or the terrible blow-fly which deposits its eggs in the soft caribou belly raising a painful cyst. During the summer, wolves, singly or in pairs, follow the herds waiting to pounce on the injured or the stragglers. Not until late summer do the wolves travel in packs. Is the North Pole moving? At the dinner table, the geologists often talked their way into heated discussions on highly theoretical problems: Have the poles of the earth changed their positions in the eons of geologic time? Are the land masses of the earth's surface moving slowly apart? One of the secondary purposes of Operation Porcupine was to contribute some small amount of field research data to the substantiation of a firm "yes" or "no" answer to these questions. To do this, the geologists searched diligently throughout the summer for occurrences of a red sandstone which could offer a clue if it occurred under the right conditions. They used the red sandstone because it, of all rocks, retains its direction of magnetization with the greatest accuracy. Every rock has certain properties of magnetization which will align themselves with the earth's magnetic field when the rock is heated to its own particular “Curie” point……and we’d best leave the description of this Curie point to the experts in ferromagnetism. Geologists have different ways of correlating, to a reasonably accurate degree, in which period of time the rock last reached its Curie point; therefore, when they have determined the direction of the rock's ancient magnetization, they know along which line the north magnetic pole lay when the rock was formed. By having one other rock of the same age somewhere else on earth, they can obtain an accurate position for the pole by triangulation. Plotted on the map, these aged polar positions form reasonably smooth "polar wandering curves" which come successively nearer the present pole as time diminishes to the present. Samples of the red sandstone which we obtained, marked to show orientation, helped in the plotting of wandering curves which, so far, indicate a movement of the poles of about one eighth of a degree per million years……not exactly something you want to throw away your magnetic compass for, but having definite scientific value. 26

Assuming that the poles do move; and knowing that the earth's diameter is less at the poles than at the equator, it follows (to a scientist!) that even the slightest movement in the poles would set up a ripple in the earth's surface which might be one factor contributing to a movement of the land masses apart at an estimated 0.6 centimeters a year……again, not something you’d need a radar detector for, but, then again, I have been bounced out of bed by a few California earthquakes. This, however, is as theoretical as the idea of an expanding earth's core—which is in accord with the theory of the expanding universe—and which could also account for major land masses moving apart. This is just a small taste of Geologist dinner conversation—theories which surely don’t send them reaching for the TUMS bottle, but rather make their work a continually challenging treasure hunt into nature's unknown. The Arctic coast is like a gigantic bird sanctuary. Toward the middle of July, we moved further north to Trout Lake, 25 miles south of the Beaufort Sea. Located on the Arctic coastal plain at the base of the Richardson Mountains, the lake is the midway point between the Mackenzie delta and the Alaskan border, and the best point for access to the low Arctic mountain ranges. We arrived at the peak of the Arctic summer when the mosses and grasses had grown to brilliant hues of green interspersed here and there by bright yellows, reds, and blues of flowers. The nearest tree grew 100 miles to the south! This is also the time of year when the Whooping Cranes, Canada Geese, and thousands of species of migratory birds arrive in the Arctic to breed and feed on the bourgeoning bloom of insects. The tents had been erected on a low, well-drained mound of shale above but not far from the edge of the lake. The site was exposed to the winds, and it was indeed impossible to be otherwise, but it was out of the muskeg and blessedly dry underfoot for a change. While pounding in tent pegs, one of the geologists touched off a scrambling treasure hunt by finding several ancient Eskimo flint artifacts: an arrowhead and a skin scraper. His well-trained eyes had recognized the flint as not being a native rock of the area. Several more arrowheads turned up and we later learned from an archaeologist that such a find is not uncommon since the same scarce campsites have been used time and again over literally thousands of years. Farther up the coast toward Herschel Island and the Alaskan border, an archaeologist, Gordon Lowther, of McGill University and the National Museum, camped with his party of four on an archaeological site known as Engigstciak (pronounced En - geegst - see - ak). 27

Archaeological evidence of the “Little People” of Eskimo Legends The site is an ancient campsite which received more use over the years than any other because of its strategic location. It sits on a well-drained mound on the Arctic coastal plain at the mouth of the Firth River; is the only break in the river canyon for miles where caribou can cross; and has a large rock which juts up 75 feet above the plain serving as an excellent lookout. Artifacts already found there date back 3500 years, and this summer the party dug deeper into the old site searching for 5000 year old artifacts. With the small group worked an Eskimo named Alec who proved uncanny in his ability to detect old campsites. Alec claimed that the tools already found had been made by the “Little People" of Eskimo legend—the stories of the little people having been passed down from generation to generation since before the time of Christ. Twenty miles northeast of the archaeological site sits Herschel Island, stranded from the mainland by a mere 100 yard stretch of shallow water, and constantly battling the wind-shifted Arctic ice pack. The glacial geologist with operation Porcupine had reason to visit the island to check for signs of continental ice-sheet passage and so flew in by helicopter to the little settlement where three families lived. Herschel Islanders live a lonely existence with only themselves and a radio transmitter to talk to. The last visitor to the island had been a supply ship four months previously in April, and the families had received no mail or fresh supplies since that time. The settlement exists mainly for the purpose of raising and feeding Siberian Huskies for Mounted Police dog teams at outposts across the North. One of the buildings serves as a Mounted Police Post—one of the remotest—but still not remote enough to deter Walt Disney from making the movie Nikki there. Blue-eyed Nikki still lives on the island. The 26 dogs feed on fish, ducks, seal, and caribou which have been hunted, dressed out, and kept frozen solid during the warm summer months in an ice-house dug down into the permafrost. Whaling ships used the island as a port of call in the 1890's and the settlement was much bigger then than it is now. Fifteen graves remain as a monument to the rugged whaling life—the dead having been young men of 18 and 19 years. 28

Weather on the Arctic coast is as fierce as it is unpredictable ... even more unpredictable, in fact, than weather in the mountains, but there are a lot more places to land when flying becomes impossible! When a north wind blows, it moves the ice pack in against the shoreline cooling the damp sea air. The fog that forms is so thick it has earned its own unique title called “Thule Ground Fog” from similar condions in Thule (pronounced Toolee) Greenland. Once when I had spent most of the day out moving fly-camps to their new locations, I started back to find that Arctic fog had moved in and covered the entire coastal area between the helicopter and home. I was forced to fly down beneath the banks of a wide and twisting riverbed to the coast; down the coast to the river leading to camp. Turning up the river bed, I was at times obscured by fog and at other times barely under the fog layer, until close enough to base camp to hover through the fog and land. Ernie said he had heard me coming up the river bed for five minutes, never sure whether I was going to make it or not. When the wind blows along the coast, it doesn't get turbulent like it does in the mountains, but it blows very hard—around 60 miles an hour on some occasions—and I’ve attempted to make headway in winds where I showed 80 Knots (about 90 mph) on the helicopter’s airspeed indicator and was barely moving forward over the ground. It usually rains at the same time and strong winds drive the rain almost parallel to the ground. The entire open ocean turns a coal black color like a cat-squall makes on a lake, and strangely enough, when this happens there isn't a wave on the ocean's surface. The wind blows with such force and speed it flattens the waves out and succeeds only in picking up sheets of sea-water spray. Stu, had the misfortune to be caught out in one of these storms on the way back from a traverse with two geologists. It took him a full hour to advance ten miles to a coastal DEW line station where he was given shelter until the storm moderated enough to continue on. True or False: The Arctic is actually a desert. The severity of weather conditions on the Arctic coast quite naturally limits the size and types of plant life that manage to maintain a grasp on a thin thread of existence. And, rather ironically, in spite of the proximity to damp sea air, the polar regions have less than 15 inches of rainfall a year which qualifies them to be classified as desert regions. Yet plants do manage to grow. Dark vegetation absorbs the warm rays of summer sun melting the permafrost and drawing water by capillary action to the surface. The resulting surface water is in many places stagnant, but nevertheless good to drink in spite of its mineral taste. 29

The incessant winds of summer and winter evaporate large amounts of moisture from the plant; so in the battle for survival, only the short plants live long enough to pass on their mutated qualities of growing down out of the wind’s reach. Even the leaves take on a leathery, wax-like finish on their upper sides to lower water evaporation. How the Arctic plants manage to survive the alternate freezing and thawing that would kill temperate plants remains a mystery. Seasonal variations in air temperatures range from 50 degrees below zero to 70 degrees above.Plant life close to the ground undergoes an even broader variation in its own micro-climate where air surrounding a plant may be 25 to 40 degrees warmer in summer, thus extending its growing season by a few precious weeks. As a result of these severe climatic limitations, mosses, lichens, algae and fungi are the main types of plants. Of the flowers, only the most brilliantly colored seem to have been able to attract the pollinating insects necessary for reproduction. Protected hillsides and rock havens shelter the bright colors of wild crocus; yellow Arctic poppy; and the purple flowered sax—just to name a few. The Arctic coast in August is like the southern deserts in mid March and April. Brilliant patches of color replace the drab uniformity of life the rest of the year. From the air, the bright green grassy floor of the tundra looks as smooth as a golf course fairway, but a closer inspection reveals peaty tussocks of crabgrass called niggerheads spaced just far enough apart for a foot to twist clumsily between. Walking on the frost-formed niggerheads is very much akin to an attempt to walk across a gymnasium floor covered by thousands of glued-in-place softballs. An hour of walking on tundra muskeg covers barely half the distance normally covered on solid level ground and is twice as tiring. How the Barren Ground Grizzlies manage to lumber across the tundra faster than a man can run is another mystery and is amazing to watch, but having four feet to run on is like having four tires to drive on. Rain and River flooding plagued the last camp move. The move to our last base camp turned into a turmoil of unforeseeable events. Only half the equipment and food had been flown from the Arctic to our southern-most camp on the Porcupine River when the weather became impossible to fly in for five days. It rained so hard during this time that the river rose enough to threaten what camp had been already moved despite the fact that it had been pitched on a high sand bar in the riverbed. Everyone tore down their tents in the darkness of night and hauled them across the muddy, boiling torrent in a rubber boat to the opposite high bank. After clearing the bank of trees they set up camp and had a breakfast of macaroni—the only food left. 30

While the main camp was having all these difficulties, I was back on the Arctic coast tying up loose ends and waiting for a break in the weather. During one lull in the storm, two geologists and I managed to sneak out under a break in the rain and fog—only to have the helicopter’s engine fail on one stop in the midst of the broad expanse of muskeg barrens known as Old Crow Flats. Engine failure on Old Crow Flats. After calling for eight hours on the helicopter's radio, Dawson Radio finally received our message and relayed it to our base camp. It was late into the night before the second helicopter could fly us in to the village of Old Crow while we waited for a new cylinder head to be flown in from Whitehorse. Fortunately, Old Crow had an RCMP detachment of one man, a warm house and extra bedrooms, or we’d have had to camp out in our tent. The RCMP officer, a young man, was as happy to have someone to talk to as we were to have a place to stay! Actually, that four or five days I spent in Old Crow gave me a glimpse of life in the primitive North like no other experience could. The young RCMP officer invited in several of the friendlier Old Crow men and we had a chance to talk about the things most meaningful to them. Out of that brief experience came a very descriptive poem of life in Old Crow as I saw it. It was my very first poem, written on the 22nd of August, 1962. Little did I realize then that this would be the first of many poems about life on Planet Earth……however, though I am certainly no Robert Service, my poetry did improve over the years! The first one went like this:

Life In Old Crow Above the Arctic Circle Lies the village of Old Crow On a black-earth bank Up out of reach Of the river’s muddy flow. Two hundred Indians dwell there In sod-roofed huts of logs Not far from stunted fir trees And endless muskeg bogs. 31

Khaki shirts and baggy work pants; Beaded moccasins made of Moose; Narrow eyes and dark skin Lined by Nature’s rough abuse. A multitude of children scream And play on paths of dirt. Sled-dog brethren of the Timber Wolf Yowl as though they hurt. In the warming of the Spring sun After Winter’s grueling cold Comes the time for trapping muskrat, Their only source of gold. With tent and traps and family Stowed in homemade sleds of birch They slide behind their Huskies On the melting snows they lurch. Two months of slogging trap lines Yield a thousand furs or more Carried by flat-bottomed riverboats To the Trader’s warehouse door. The town becomes a beehive By the final day of June And home-brew flows like water To the fiddler’s squeaky tune. Long and square-nosed river boats To driven posts are tied. The winter’s wood of log booms Swirling lazily alongside. In the sun the gill nets dry Their loose-hung folds bereft Of the Whitefish and the Grayling Sliced by women’s hands so deft. Dried fish is winter’s food for dogs And Caribou’s for men. The bush planes land and Indians ask 32

Where the Caribou are then. The KOMAKUK herd! three thousand strong! Is crossing Old Crow flat; Headed south on muskeg marsh Near the mouth of the River Rat. The hunters jump with knives and guns In their boats and head upstream, For Caribou meat, and hide, and gut Are held in high esteem. At the mouth of the River Rat they land To hide in the brush and wait For the Caribou scouts to pass them by And leave the herd to its fate. Skittish and sniffing the breeze for scent The herd scouts fail to cross. The hunters tense with bated breath At the thought of tragic loss. One hunter cups his hands and gives A snorting bellow clear. The herd scouts toss their heads to hear And cross without a fear. When the scouts have swum to the farthest bank And headed out on their way The herd swarms down to follow And the hunters have their day. The crack of rifles fills the air The herd rushes blindly on ‘Till hundreds lie dead on the ground And the ammunition’s gone. High are piled the carcasses On rafts and floated down Guided by long sweep oars To the skinning knives of town The meat dries out to reddish black 33

And hangs in each cabin’s cache A shield against starvation From winter’s long and furious lash. Open doors of the Old Crow church Beckon the people in, Yet the legend and lore of their “Bushman” stays And little they care about “sin”. Happy are they whose work is play For a stomach full of food And since all things from Nature come Why bother with thoughts imbued.

~ The first oil producing well in the Yukon lay thirty miles south of the Porcupine Camp out on the rolling 6500 square mile Eagle Plains expanse. It was drilled In 1959 by the Western Minerals Oil Exploration Company using a rig whose thousands of tons of iron and steel parts had been freighted by tractor-drawn sled trains across 200 miles of frozen winter tundra. The well, named Chance #1, blew in after 4,000 feet of drilling, producing a very lightgravity oil and 10 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. This was the farthest North oil had been discovered back then, and transporting it out to a market would require 450 miles of pipeline across some of the ruggedest terrain in the north. Thus the well has been capped off until it becomes economically worth putting into production. Little did I realize that ten years later, in 1972, I would be making a documentary film of the Hamilton Brothers Oil Company’s Prudhoe Bay oil discovery 450 miles further to the northwest on the coast of Alaska. Sixty miles further north from our Porcupine Base Camp, yet still on the banks of the long, twisting Porcupine River, stood the Indian village of Old Crow—which I mentioned briefly earlier—where I had been marooned for four days while MLL’s engine was being repaired out on Old Crow Flats. It is one of the few Indian settlements relatively unaffected by the white man's culture. The 220 Indians living in Old Crow today still make their livelihood trapping muskrat; hunting moose and caribou; and fishing with 34

gill nets in the muddy rivers. Only a few white men live in the settlement: two priests; an Anglican minister; a Mounted Policeman (mentioned earlier); a French Trader; a nurse; and two schoolteachers. The government has kept the pride-destroying blight of "relief" money away from the village, and supplied them instead with a small modern dispensary and school. Both government buildings were built by local Indians, who are more industrious than their overindulgent brethren of the towns and reservations. By mid October, the iron grip of Winter was again on us. The weather turned ominously cold and winds began howling through the trees at 50 miles an hour almost daily. It didn't take the geologists long to tie up their loose ends, for they had learned from bitter experience that nature is a temperamental woman who speaks with the voice of authority. We all pitched in to pack the camp up, and, trip by trip, the Beaver flew everything and everyone back to civilization. Ernie and I rumbled out later—two tired individuals in a tired helicopter—and headed south. We bucked and bounced through a gusty, turbulent headwind on the way out and I knew Robert Service was right: it would be a long time before the Yukon was tamed. To quote him: "Wild and wide are my borders, Stern as death is my sway; From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone For a million years ……and a day.” Luxuries of the civilized world. Once back in civilization again, I enjoyed the luxury of a hot shower and the freedom to ask myself what I wanted to do with my spare time. One of the things about the North Country that aroused my curiosity the most was the people who either chose to live there or who were born there and had no desire to leave. One of those people was E. P. "Pat" Callison, owner of Klondike Helicopters. I knew Pat liked the powerful Hudson's Bay Rum that was such high proof (as I recall, it was 150 proof) that it was only allowed to be sold in the Northern Territories and Yukon Territory, so I invited him to have a couple of "Hot Toddies" with me one evening. A Hot Toddy 35

to Pat meant a cup of very hot water, a tablespoon of brown sugar, and 2 tbsp. of Hudson's Bay Rum. I asked him to tell me about his life, and as best I could recall, wrote it all down in my Log Book the next day. We enjoyed the experience so much, we repeated it several times until I’d heard as much as he could tell me in the time we had. Here are some excerpts from the story of Pat’s life as told in front of a fire and over a considerable number of hot buttered rum toddies: "I was one of nine children. My father was a trapper and we lived in a tarpaper shack in the wilderness and we were what you would call “poor”. But ... having been brought up that way with no knowledge of any different way, we were a happy, fun-loving family. We learned to work very early on and to depend on each other for both our happiness as well as our survival. Dad couldn't always afford to buy shoes for us kids, so we had to make our own just like the Eskimos and Indians did. Dawson Creek was the only place we could buy food and clothing, and that was a few miles shy of 200 miles from our shack. The trip took anywhere from a week to two weeks of walking, depending on the time of year, as there was only a cart track going to Dawson Creek. I learned to trap when I was big enough to take to the woods by myself and I've trapped nearly every animal in the northwest. After I got a little bigger I started my own Trading Post. A lot of the Trading Post owners went under after their first few years because they had no experience as trappers. A trader had to know his pelts. He had to know what season they were trapped in, what condition they'd been salted or dried in, and so on, so he'd know what they'd be worth in the big cities. An animal grows its thickest and highest quality fur when the weather's the coldest and it’s had food enough to keep healthy. I knew my pelts and I knew my markets, so I did pretty well as a Trading Post owner. In 1932, at the age of 22, I had two Trading Posts in northern British Columbia and at that time there was no liquor up in my part of B.C. because all supplies came in through southern Alaska. This was before the Alcan Highway was built, and liquor couldn't be shipped across the border from the U.S. or shipped through the mails. So I had my Freight Forwarders down in Vancouver pack bottles of rum down at the bottom of my supply boxes mixed in with cans of food, coffee, and bags of flour and rice. Then they nailed up the boxes and shipped them through regularly, and if anyone ever knew about it they said nothing about it because after all, life is hard enough in the North without a little—or even a lot—of good strong alcohol! 36

In addition I also used to take trips by horse and cart up into Alaska and buy grain alcohol for $1.50 a "Mickey" ... that's a pint, in case you don't know! That stuff is a real body-warmer when you cut it with hot water and a little sugar! I don't make a very good clerk. Running a trading post was a pretty seasonal business ... and most of the time a little too slow for me. I like to be moving, so when I heard the government was letting contracts for a mail delivery run up the Peace River to Fort Nelson, British Columbia, it started me thinking. The government barely paid enough to cover overhead, but I knew I could also bring in supplies and whiskey for my trading posts and have my overhead covered that way, so I put in for the contract and got it." During the summer I ran the mail and supply route in a 30-foot long riverboat with a wide, flat bottom and a "Kicker"—that's an outboard motor. In the shallows, or when the water was low, I had to pole the boat, or haul it with a line from the shore. That was some hard work! The motor often ran up on submerged logs, or hidden rocks and sand bars. The fellows who ran riverboats on the northern rivers used to say that you should always take lots of extra gas with you and a case of extra propellers ... and hope you ran out of gas first! During Spring break-up and Fall freeze-up, when I could no longer travel on the river, I traveled over an old logging road with a team of eight horses and a cart. After things froze up solid, I hitched the horses to a big freighting sled piled high with boxes and loose freight and we traveled over the frozen river ice. The trip was always treacherous because the river still ran beneath the ice and weakened the ice in spots, and those spots were always changing. I always carried with me an eightfoot-long steel crowbar with one end forged into a 4-inch wide ice chisel for testing the ice. I'd give the ice several knocks in places I knew were likely to be thin, and if the chisel didn't break through, I'd know it would hold up under the weight of the team and the freight sled. I knew every inch of that river by heart, and whenever I came to a sand bar, a sharp turn, a log pile-up, or an open stretch, I'd slow down the team, get off the sled, and walk ahead of the team to test the ice. I always had boxes piled higher in the front of the sled so I could drive the team standing up at a good height. In case the whole load went through the ice, I could always jump clear.We would often come to a place where the ice was questionable and there was no other way around. 37

I'd just crack the whip, swear, yell at the team at the top of my lungs ... and pray, and we'd take the bad parts at a dead run! Sometimes a horse's hoof—they had specially-made steel horseshoes for the ice—would break through the ice. Sometimes the whole back end of a horse broke through, but the momentum of the rest of the team and the heavy sled would haul the horse out and back on his feet again, and I'd have to stop at a safe spot further along to dry the horse off before he froze up. I never lost a horse, but I was extra careful, too. Many times I'd stop and camp during late afternoon if the sun was out and the ice liable to be weak. Then I'd harness up at one or two in the morning when it was coldest—if I had enough moonlight—and continue on. In the winter, the trip took six days going one way and six days coming back. In summertime it only took three days. One of the drivers that had the contract for the run before me wasn't careful enough and he ran onto a bad spot in the river ice. The whole team of eight horses and freight sled went through and under the ice and they never found a trace of the horses or sled. The driver was high enough up so that when he saw what was happening he was able to jump clear." Pat paused for a minute in this story and I interrupted him. “How did you get started flying airplanes,” I asked. "That's kind of interesting," he said. "One of my younger brothers and I arranged a contract with a mining company to supply a crew of their prospectors who were checking the Finlayson River for placer gold deposits. That was about 1936. It turned into a contract that lasted several years and involved our freighting placer mining pipe and machinery in addition to supplies. I went out and bought an old Fairchild 71 floatplane with the deal that the guy that sold it to me had to teach me to fly it ... which he did ... and I was pretty soon doing things with that old floatplane that it was never designed to do. It's a wonder I didn't kill myself in the process, but that old Fairchild was a tough airplane and it was very forgiving of foolish pilots. Learning to fly was a real challenge for me. I loved every minute of it! I practiced flying that plane for hours and hours, and every extra penny I earned went into gas and parts to keep the plane and me in the air. It was the only floatplane around at that time, so it paid for itself in a very short period of time. 38

I flew placer mining pipe in to Finlayson Lake, and since there was no place to land on the river where they wanted to do the mining, my brother and I had to build a riverboat to carry the pipe down the Finlayson River which started there at Finlayson lake. We decided we'd have to have lumber to build the boat and the best trees for lumber were down at France's Lake quite a ways away so we flew in supplies to France's Lake and set up camp there. We decided to make France's Lake the main supply point for the mining company's operation because we needed a place to store fuel barrels, and also supplies so the Bears wouldn't get at them. The first thing we did was set to work cutting lumber for the roof and floor of a log cabin storehouse. In order to do that we had to first build a platform about 8 feet up off the ground next to a bank so we could roll logs up onto the platform, peg them in place, and then "whipsaw" them into planks. We had no chainsaws back then so we felled the trees with a two-man crosscut saw, trimmed the branches with an axe, and then dragged the logs to the platform using a rig made up of a 4-inch-thick pole stretched between my brother's and my shoulders with a chain in the middle hooked to what looked like a pair of steel ice tongs. We'd then roll the logs up onto the platform using our peaveys. Next we'd run a chalk line to mark the location for each cut and start to work with the whipsaw. The whipsaw was kind of like a crosscut saw, but it had different handles on each end so one person could stand up on top of the log that was being cut and pull the saw up, then the person standing down under the platform would pull the saw down when it was his turn. It's one hell of a tedious way to make lumber. Back then you didn't think how much time and work things took, you just did what had to be done. We built the walls for the camp out of logs, put in the floor and roof from the lumber we had sawed up, and sealed the roof with several layers of tarpaper with dirt on top of that. When we finally had a cozy little camp, we started cutting up the lumber for the riverboat. When that was done we tied the lumber onto the float plane and flew it up to Finlayson Lake where we nailed the boat together and filled the cracks with cotton soaked in Spruce pitch. It worked fine—all 500 pounds of boat—and that's how we paid for most of the plane. We worked hard, let me tell you. It wasn't easy. Flying was more risky, but it was a better kind of work and for better pay so I just stuck to it." Pat went on for hours with tales of his experiences until I started to yawn and then we called it quits for the night. 39

Several days later, Pat told me about an old customer and friend of his named Oly Roleg, a trapper who had a shack not far from the public bathhouse at the Takhini Hot Springs a few miles from Whitehorse. He told me I would enjoy talking to Oly since he was a good story teller, so I climbed into my little VW panel truck and headed for Takhini Hot Springs. I found Oly’s little plywood shack covered with black tar paper off by itself, and as I climbed out of my van I heard the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle coming from the rear of the shack. Not far from the shack, at the edge of the forest and against a small hill, Oly had set up a target for sighting in his rifles. The cabin door was wide open despite the mosquitoes and black flies. As I knocked, I could see the interior of a small camp with only the barest necessities. A cot stood along one wall; a wood-burning sheepherder's stove in one corner; a chair made from the thick butt of a tree with a chainsaw; and a table made from lengths of tree branch for legs and a piece of cast-off plywood for a tabletop. On top of the table in random disarray there were numerous magazines, newspapers, rock samples, cloth sample bags, a geologist's magnifying glass, two hunting knives, a whetstone, and a .357 Magnum revolver with a 6-inch-long barrel. There was no sink or running water, and I had noticed a tiny outhouse not far off at the edge of the trees. Oly was sighting his rifle out of the only window in the camp, and without even looking up, invited me in and told me to sit anywhere I could find a place to sit. By his accent, I could tell he was not native to the Yukon ... or North America either. I found out later his home had originally been Sweden. "Pe dunned in choost a mindit", he said, and fired the remaining shots from the Winchester’s magazine into the black center of the target. We talked for a while about Pat Callison and then I gradually turned the conversation in the direction of Oly and his experiences in the north woods. As it turned out, he loved to tell stories and started right off with one. “Vone timbe I’m vendt back to de Lake from our placer mine to get some tree lumber for make de sluice box and flume—me and anudder fella—an ve valk almost two mile back to de lake. Ven ve almost dere, I hear dis awful snort and crash and splash in de lake. I say to dis fella wit me: “Ssshh! Be qviet! Ve need some meat back in de camp.” 40

“So I sneak t’rough de bush to de edge of de lake and sure enough dere vas two big damn Moose feed in de reeds and dey vas makin’ a hell of a racket. I take out my pistol and I’m sit down like dis and hold my pistol wid bot’ hands support by my knees……and……BAM! I shoot de big one right in de back of de head. He have his head down in de vater feed’ on de bottom.” “Vell……he never kick, or roll, or move one muscle. He chust fall right straight down in de vater. De udder vone he take off in de bush. Den ve bot’ have to wade out in de vater and haul dat son-of-a-bitch to shore and skin him out. Vot a job dat vas!....and ve bot’ soakin’ vet! Ve make four trips back to camp vit de meat before de volves or de bear smell it, and ve leaves de carcass for dem.” “Anudder day I vas prospect up in de Nahanni Country. Dere is very few white men go up in dat country, you know. Up dere de Grizzly is King. Ever’ting run from him and vot don’t run he kill. Von big Grizzly he tear down my cache von day and he mus’ be damn big bear ‘cause my cache twelve feet up off de ground! I be pretty damn mad at dat bear, so I sit down to wait for him come back. I prop me up agains’ one pole of my cache vit my eider down sleepin’ bag around me so I can get out qvick if I have to. I have my pistol out, and my rifle in de bag wit’ me……and de axe right dere vere I can reach him.” “Pretty soon it get dark and de stream runnin’ by make me sleepy, so I go to sleep. All of a sudden I hear “WHOOF” right in my face and I come avake right qvick! I grab de rifle and stick it in de bear’s ribs. It vas pitch black dark an I jus’empty de gun into him. He tooks off an drags hisself down to de river vit his whole back broke.” “I light up de lantern and follow him down de river to a sand bar, den I give him one more shot vich don’ seem to bodder him atall. Den I gets up closer and give him one in de shoulder so he fall down in de river and drown. By de Jesus dem t’ings are some tough!” “Dey’re awful qvick too. Vun time Sam Jansson vas valk along de Moose trail vit his five dogs in front of him. Each dog have a load in a pack on his back and all of a sudden, CRASH!...and WHAP! A big bear jump out de bush and kill de lead dog qvick as a vink and vit vone svipe of de paw! Sam alvays hav his rifle handy, so he kill dat bear before he kill any more of his dogs, den have to carry de dog’s load back to camp hisself.” After Oley finished, I traded stories with him and told him about the time I had landed my helicopter in a clearing in the forest right where the Wind River and the Bonnet 41

Plume River meet. I landed gingerly to sort of feel the footing hidden by the tall grasses. I had to be on firm and level ground in order to be able to leave the helicopter running and unattended while I unloaded the cargo racks on each side of the ship. Finding the ground solid and level, I let the engine idle down, blades still turning, climbed out and started to unrope the tents and supplies for the Geologists’ camp to be set up at the river’s edge. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, looked up, and there was a very large Black Bear headed for the helicopter at a lumbering run. He was moving fast enough so that it looked like he’d get to me before I could get into the cockpit and unstrap my rifle from the rear cockpit bulkhead just above and behind where my head was when in my seat. As I opened the helicopter door, the Bear stopped —just at the edge of where the blades were turning at about 1,000RPM—and stood straight up to look the situation over. Another two or three feet further on and the Bear would have had his head chopped off and maybe killed all of us as the helicopter chewed itself up into a mass of twisted wreckage. I didn’t waste any time unstrapping the rifle, levering a shell into the chamber and firing a few shots close to his head to scare him off. The noise of the gun and the helicopter together did the job and he immediately set off in the direction from which he’d come at an even faster clip! Fortunately, he didn’t return before I brought the Geologists back an hour later, and the Geologists weren’t bothered by him either. After that I wore my .357 Magnum revolver at my waist at all times, and well understood why I was allowed by the RCMP to carry it as a “survival” weapon. Each of the Geologists’ camps carried a rifle for protection, though they never had to use it that I was aware of. The stories abound of bears destroying tent camps, so no-one in the North Woods goes out unarmed. Finally the cold weather of Winter set in and the lucrative summer and early fall exploration and supply contracts all but ended. Pat had one contract to supply the winter seismograph trains as they tracked across the miles of Tundra looking for oil underground, but I didn’t want to struggle with the bitter cold and wild weather of winter. Spring, summer, and early fall were treacherous enough in that country. 42

Once back within the bounds of civilization, I had two job offers waiting for me: one as a crop duster pilot in New Zealand; the other as a Ski Instructor and part time Executive Pilot at Lake Tahoe in Northern California. I took the latter job, which eventually launched me into real estate marketing and sales for ski area resort developers who were developing entire planned resort towns in Squaw Valley, California, and Snowmass-At-Aspen, Colorado. I found life more than just a little safer on the ground, but now I understood why the North had drawn so many people to its vast, untouched beauty. I could not have seen more giant honey-tipped grizzlies, barren ground grizzlies, black bear, wolves, caribou, Dahl sheep, mountain goats, moose, beaver, and an endless panorama of birds closer-up and in the wild ... and in less time. All of this quite often no more than a few feet away from my safe seat inside of that noisy, shuddering, maneuverable Hiller 12E helicopter. And ... no ... I never did see a Sasquatch or anything resembling one, though some of the prospectors who had lived alone in the bush for six months or so looked and smelled far worse than any Sasquatch I could imagine. One prospector smelled so rank I had to take both doors off the helicopter and strap them onto the cargo rack just to be able to stand the two-hour flight with him back to Dawson City! Over the years since 1962 I’ve heard various stories about Pat Callison and my old helicopter, CF-MLL. I heard that MLL had crashed on a mountainside in the Yukon and been left there for dead……the fate of many faithful old worn-out bush planes. If you’re reading this story, and you’re familiar with the people and places I mention, I’d be interested to hear from you. And now here’s a somewhat different story of the same experience and time frame as told in the pictures taken by myself and the various members of the Operation Porcupine team.

~

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Flying The Yukon’s Bush: The Story In Pictures

The photographs in this presentation are all at least 42 years old; some are duplicates of originals; some were originally taken with Kodachrome II; some with Ektachrome; and others with various other limitations that digital photo editing could not overcome without vast expenditures of time and money. Words can tell stories in ways that pictures can’t, and pictures can tell a story in an instant that a thousand words would never duplicate. The digital version of the map at the rear of this publication can be enlarged slightly by zooming, but it is far from an accurate representation as to camp locations, etc. Its purpose is more to give a general idea of locations relative to the civilized world. There are today digitized versions of the old topo maps that would enable me to be quite exact, but the last time I tried to acquire enough data to cover so vast an area as Operation Porcupine covered, it would have cost me over a thousand dollars for the data, and that didn’t seem relevant to the nature of the story. Here’s the story in pictures: Even after three years of rigorous flight training as a U.S. Marine officer in the U.S. Navy flight training program at Pensacola, Florida, I was still more than a little apprehensive about being a bush pilot. Within the well regimented operations of a Marine squadron, I seldom flew alone, but rather in the company of a more experienced—or less experienced—pilot. I had been released from active duty in December of 1962 and promptly acquired both my American and Canadian commercial pilot's licenses with single-engine, multiengine, helicopter, and instrument ratings. By March of 1963, I had secured a job flying helicopters for Klondike Helicopters of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. 44

The commercial use of large helicopters in 1962 was very limited. Most commercial operations were carried out in Bell and Hiller two and three-place helicopters with six-cylinder reciprocating engines powering them. Jet engines were only found in the larger, military helicopters. Flying these small helicopters into constantly new areas under constantly changing conditions meant that I would have to rely entirely on my own judgment and skills. Even though I had been given what we called “mountain training”, landing an 1800 horsepower Sikorsky helicopter on a specially prepared site at 2,000 ft. elevation was nothing at all like having to land an overloaded 300 horsepower Hiller 12E three-seater on a snow-covered jagged mountain ridge at 7,000 feet. Experience of this kind is too expensive to be trained in the very practical commercial world, but is rather "acquired", and often acquired in ways that produce no small amount of anxiety. Driving from Nova Scotia to Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory, took me about ten days in my 1960 VW panel truck, which I had originally converted to a camper for surfing weekends on the coast of southern California and Baja California. In this picture in March of 1962, the Alcan Highway in lower BC is already free of snow—which wasn’t the case further north—but I had no problems with either the roads or the snow. The biggest problems I had were overcome by the time I headed out from Yarmouth. I had to obtain a Canadian Commercial Pilot’s license, which involved going to school in Halifax for several weeks in preparation for taking the exam and flight check, but the process was relatively simple since I already had a US commercial pilot’s license. I also had to obtain a special permit from the RCMP to transport my .357 magnum revolver across Canada, a permit issued because bush pilots were permitted to carry survival and personal protection weapons ... and well that they could, as I found out later in a very close encounter with a large black bear. Once in Whitehorse, Pat Callison, owner of Klondike Helicopters put me up in the Whitehorse Hotel until time came around for the helicopters to move out on their seasonal jobs. During this time I got to know my engineer and companion, Ernie Sigurdson,whom I would be living with for the next six months. A better companion 45

I could not have had. Ernie’s eternally jovial, joking and humorous nature coupled with his high level of mechanical expertise and knowledge of helicopter maintenance were a constant level of comfort and confidence. Many times over, his critical eye caught potential problems in the delicate mechanisms of the helicopter’s complex engine, transmission, rotor head and tail assembly that could have led to serious accidents if not corrected immediately. Ernie is shown here with his wind-driven washing machine which he made from scrap from the camp garbage pile. He has it attched to an empty 12-gallon fuel drum such as those I carried strapped to the helicopter’s cargo nets along with a hand pump for long journeys away from base camp. Ernie’s work always began when my work stopped, and often went on into the neverdark, twilight nights of the North. As it turned out, the washing machine required about forty knots of wind to make the blades turn, so Ernie built a crank handle for the other end and washed his clothes by winding the crank handle. Working around the Klondike Helicopters hangar, I also had the opportunity to meet the other bush pilots. In particular, I remember Chuck Ford whose tales of hairy flying experiences would put to shame the crazy tales of most seagoing sailors. He told of his first helicopter crash which happened when one of the blades came off while in flight. He was fortunately over a lake at the time and managed to swim ashore...and obviously he lived through the tumble into the lake. The second crash occurred while he was crop dusting; the forward skid of the helicopter caught on a piece of barbed wire, tripping it forward and rolling it up into a ball of wreckage—which he simply walked away from. He told of two more crashes, which I don’t recall in detail, but I do remember saying to him: “Chuck...Don’t you get a message from all these crashes?” “Nah!” he replied. “They don’t bother me a bit. I’ll die of old age in my bed!” “Damn,” I thought, “I wish I had that kind of courage...or knowledge...or whatever the hell it really is.” 46

By 1962, Pat had expanded his small fleet of planes to include two Hiller 12E’s(CF-MLL and CFONF), two Bell G-models, and his own Cessna 180, CF-KPI, which spent most of the year mounted on floats. My helicopter, CF-MLL, at the far right, carried no navigational equipment because there were no navigational aids in the bush, and the communication equipment consisted of an HF radio and a VHF radio. I carried my rifle, a 300 Savage lever-action, strapped to the rear cockpit firewall just over the top of my head for protection from Black Bears, Honey-tipped Grizzly, and Barren Ground Grizzly. If you look carefully at any of the pictures of CF-MLL (pictured at right), you’ll see an aluminum box attached permanently just to the rear of the engine and below the tail rotor drive shaft. In it I carried a fuel filter, a small stove, a few freeze-dried food rations, a cold weather parka, and a sleeping bag. Also in the box was a roll of wire used as a long-range HF antennae for instances when the helicopter had an engine failure on the ground or in places where the normal HF whip antenna was virtually useless. In a Hiller 12E, the pilot sits in the middle with a leg on either side of the instrument panel, the short cyclic stick between his legs, and a rudder pedal at each foot. The collective control(for up and down movement) is beside the pilot’s left leg. Barely noticeable in the above picture are the “bear paw snowshoes” affixed to the rear of each black helicopter skid. When landing in deep snow, as was often the case in early spring, the 12” X 24” snowshoes made of half-inch plywood keep the tail rotor in the air as the entire helicopter often settles into four or five feet of snow up to the cargo racks. The cargo racks are covered with a heavy net designed to hold smaller (12-gallon) fuel drums, tents, food supplies, tools like axes and shovels, backpacks, snowshoes, and all the gear that would normally go into the bush with a prospector, geologist, mining engineer, hunter, archaeologist, photographer, claim 47

staker, etc. In addition, I carried my fishing rods stuck into the ends of the aluminum cargo rack pipes. In the previous picture, MLL is parked beside the only motel in Mayo, YukonTerritory, waiting to transport twenty-four Indian claim stakers out into the mountain snow to stake more claims for a local prospector. The town serves a very large nearby silver mining operation. In early April of 1962, the photo immediately to the left shows what the Tombstone Pass looked like just above Dawson City. MLL is parked on top of what in later years would become the Dempster Highway to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. What’s happening here is a refueling stop on the way to Hungry Lake for the beginning of Operation Porcupine. MLL and I were often chartered by local prospectors, mining, oil or other natural resource companies to trans-port personnel and materials into the bush country. Often we just flew supplies in to camps such as this one located in areas where float planes had no access to water. In this particular camp, a bear had proven to be such a nuisance that it had to be tranquilized and heli-lifted in a sling to a location 10 miles or so away. Though the Great Gold Rush of the late 1800’s is past history, it certainly isn’t the end of the search for—and discovery of—gold, This is a picture of one of the Operation Porcupine Geologists checking for gold samples in one of the Yukon’s rivers, a process that any prospector uses as part of his normal, every-day functions. 48

Whether driving or flying into Dawson City, the first thing to meet one’s eye are the piles upon piles of river stone in almost all the river beds. Residue of the gigantic gold dredges that left the rock behind after removing whatever gold there was, they are monuments to man’s selfish interest and inconsiderateness toward nature’s own beauty. The gold dredges that created the mounds of river rock were gigantic, floating factories that dredged up gravel from the river bottoms, passed the gravel through sieves of various dimension until only the minute ore-bearing sands and gravels remained. The ore-bearing gravels passed down over “riffles” like an old-fashioned washboard covered with cocoa matting saturated with mercury. Water and gravity washed the lighter gravels away until only the heavier gold dust remained, captured by the mercury. All the waste found its way onto a long conveyor belt which exited from the opposite end of the dredge from the dredging scoops, depositing the waste in wide sweeping piles as the dredge moved from side to side. The dredge continually dug its own small lake in which it floated, moving always upstream so that a continuous flow of water moved into the pond and through the internal workings of the dredge. When the dredge finally reached a point at the upstream end of a river where there was inadequate water flow to maintain operations, the dredge was abandoned. Since there were no roads into the areas where the dredges worked, and since the dredges invariably wore themselves out processing the tremendous volumes of rock, it was more economical to just abandon them. Such was the case here with this particular dredge in the next photo, abandoned several miles southwest of Dawson City on South Henderson Creek, off the Stewart River. Even the tools were still hanging from their hooks over the work benches when I was there; it was as though work were going to begin again the next day, but the dredge had not been in opertion for seven years. The engineer’s log book lay open on the bench with the last work sheet dated October 13th, 1955. A short distance away there were ten buildings which constituted the living and eating accommodations for the dredge crew. The HF radio transmitters still sat on a table in the radio 49

operator’s shack; the kitchen implements hung in place ready for the next meal; the foreman’s cabin had a sod roof with a washtub hanging on the outside wall and a buck-saw hanging beside it.

I had flown a salvage contractor in to look the dredge over and the only convenient way to get onto the barge was to land on the roof...a feat which required sliding the skids along the roof at a snail’s pace until the main rotor blades were just a few feet from the flagstaff and metal chimney, but so that the rear portion of the skids were far enough onto the roof so as to prevent the helicopter from tipping over backwards. The long conveyor belt that made the gravel piles extends out from the dredge to the left. The scoops from the front of the dredge are lying in the grass in the foreground. The dredge superstructure itself is a good six stories high. This dredge belonged to the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, known as YCGC, headquartered in Dawson City where we had obtained permission to look the dredge over for possible salvage purposes. We had landed at one dredge which was still operating (not the one pictured above), and, once inside, were overwhelmed by the noise of machinery and rock constantly hammering or sliding against steel. I can’t imagine that anyone had any hearing left after a few months of that, but no-one was wearing any ear covering at all. 50

Dawson City, in 1962, was just at the beginning of its development as a tourist attraction, thanks to the visionary far-sightedness of the Diefenbaker government. Funds finally began to find their way into the north country to open up tourism as well as to establish outposts of civilization and roads that would open up the frontier of the Yukon. Until a few years prior to 1962, there had only been a winter road to Dawson City from Whitehorse, now there was an all-season gravel road to bring in supplies and construction materials. Money had been allocated for the reconstruction of the old Palace Grand Theater (I believe it was called), and the construction was overseen by an interesting gentlemen named Allan Innes-Taylor. Allan told me the story how he had been commissioned by the Canadian government to do another project at the beginning of the II World War. This was a survey on how many wooden-hulled ships there were on the east coast suitable for shipping goods to the Carribbean so that metal-hulled vessels could be used in the trans-Atlantic trade. There were thirty according to his survey, however, two of the old square-rigged sailing vessels were being mysteriously fitted out with large diesel engines and Allan advised the military intelligence officer—with whom he had previous communication—that he had better check them out because there was a lot of suspicious activity that no-one wanted to talk about. As it turned out, the ships were being fitted out to re-fuel German U-Boats!

In the above picture, the Palace Grand is under renovation and construction on the right, the Bonanza Hotel in the foreground remaining in her antiquated status with totally exposed “knob and tube’” wiring and a single bare light bulb in each room. There was, however, a toilet for each floor, a bar on the first floor, and a lobby full 51

of colorful characters. I had a room on the top floor for the two weeks I was there waiting for Operation Porcupine to begin.

This is the main street of Dawson City in April of 1962; the Occidental Hotel is the first building to the left.

Madame Tremblay’s Store ... and I wouldn’t want to guess what went on in there in the 1860’s!

What was left of the Dawson Hardware Company Store in 1962... slowly sinking into the melting perma-frost. The Yukon Order Of Pioneers Hall still standing strong.

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Sternwheel Steamer KENO immortalized for a few more years by being hauled up high and dry in Dawson City at the edge of the Yukon River as a tourist attraction.

The “TUNDRA BUGGY” ...a not-sosuccessful effort to cross miles of tundra with freight for oil exploration crews. It kept breaking apart when crossing the steep banks at river crossings. Each wheel is about six feet high and poiwered by its own electric motor which in turn is powered by a diesel generator. Stored in 1962 at the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp construction yard outside Dawson City.

Operation Porcupine During the winter of 1961 and 1962, preparations for the largest Geological survey undertaken in the North—called Operation Porcupine—were underway with fuel and camp supplies being flown in to the various base camp locations designed to give helicopter mobility to the nine doctors of Geology who formed the backbone of the expedition. The very ambitious goal was to map the underground stratigraphy of the entire northern half of the Yukon Territory from Dawson City to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Alaska border to the McKenzie River.

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Douglas DC-3 aircraft on skiis were the primary means of freighting equipment onto frozen lakebeds. Base camp sites were chosen so that in the late Spring, Summer, and Fall, DeHaviland Beavers and other amphibious aircraft could bring in fresh supplies, parts, and be available for emergency evacuation services.

Built in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s for World War II, these DC-3’s seemed old to us at twenty years, but there are thousands of them flying all over the world today, though they’ve been completely rebuilt many times over. Pat Callison started the ConnellyDawson Airways, but sold his interest in it when he started Klondike Helicopters.

Once the supplies had been landed on the lake,manpower then hauled the camp supplies and equipment on makeshift sleds to the base camp locations at the edge of the lake or river.

In some cases, the DC-3 was unable to land on a nearby lake, as was the case for the Porcupine River base camp, so the fuel supply had to be landed on the snow54

covered tundra and heli-lifted to the base camp on the river bank. Due to the helicopter’s maximum weight limitations, it was all the ship could do to haul two fuel drums at a time. Fuel weighs 6# per US Gallon; 55 gallons per drum; 660# for two drums—the maximum load for a Hiller 12E. All 24 or so members of Operation Porcupine climb aboard the DC3 bound for the first base camp at Hungry Lake. Note the short hair as there are no barbers in the bush! The brightly colored parkas were essential, making it easy to spot anyone lost or injured out away from base camp or on the tundra. The weather had begun to change and it was necessary to land on Hungry Lake before the ice became too rotten to support the weight of the DC-3. This was early May of 1962.

The Canadian Geological Survey team chose brightly colored Mount Logan tents because they were lightweight, roomy, only needed one central pole, and could withstand the wild winds and weather of the mountains and Arctic coastal plain. Ground was still snow-covered on arrival and during the setup of camp, but the weather grew rapidly warmer over the next few weeks. 55

As the weather warmed, water replaced snow everywhere as the frozen permafrost did not allow the moisture to disappear into the water table. The cook tent is the largest structure in the picture and each Geologist had a yellow Logan tent along with his assistant. The Geologists spent little time at base camp, being constantly re-located by helicopter to new locations. These satellite camps were known as “Fly Camps” (aptly named) and were set out at the limit of the helicopter’s fuel capacity in an arrangement resembling the spokes of a wagon wheel.

To the right is a self-made Polaroid shot of me with Ernie wearing his perpetual smile. We heated the tent on very cold or damp evenings with a propane heater, but used it seldom, sleeping on canvas cots in double down-filled sleeping bags wrapped in heavy canvas. That’s snow falling about us....on May twentieth!

A string of Caribou make their way gingerly across Hungry Lake during a two week period when we were unable to have any fresh supplies or parts flown in while the ice gradually melted and left enough open water for the Beaver to fly in. The ice is rotten in this picture and unsafe for skiequipped planes to land on. 56

In due course, the lake ice disappeared and the DeHaviland Beaver flew in from Dawson City with fresh supplies and some helicopter parts. By this time, the camp had strung HF Radio antennae wires and established contact on a daily basis with Dawson Radio, Dawson City’s Government radio station and occasionally with the helicopters and other aircraft when weather and distance conditions permitted. HF Radio is not the most dependable level of communication, but it’s certainly far better than no communication at all, as I was to discover during a later engine failure in the middle of nowhere better known as Old Crow Flats. Note the quantities of expensive aviation fuel required for this first part of Operation Porcupine (about 1/4 of the total). Helicopters operate continually under conditions of severe stress. They have high levels of vibration at a number of different frequencies; have high torsional stresses on blades and rotors; and operate at full throttle more often than other aircraft, boat, or automobile engines. They require constant attention and care and thus a landing platform had to be built for each machine to facilitate mechanical work as well as refueling and to ensure that each landing was made to a firm, level surface. Not all landings are made to a level or firm surface—in fact few landings in the bush would be called that—but stability is always a major issue with these basically unstable machines. A flat, firm, level landing pad is always a welcome refief at home base.

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Getting one’s self clean in the bush is never an easy task at best. Rivers and lakes are always ice cold. Even a homemade shower at base camp can feel better than a hot tub at the Ritz after weeks of sweating up and down mountains and gullies and working in the same clothes for the same period of time. You can’t see the hordes of mosquitoes in this picture, but they are none-the-less there. One does not stand naked in the bush for any more than a few seconds unless within the confines of a mosquito-proof tent sprayed with bug poison. Water for the shower is heated in a 5-gallon can over a camp stove—a procedure which can take half an hour in itself and even then the temperature is never exactly right. Then the can has to be hoisted up seven feet and balanced there long enough to take a shower. Mosquitoes drown by the thousands. Always a most important part of any expedition, where there is the steady pressure of hard work seven days a week, is the kitchen and the food served. Oris Gunderson, camp cook on Operation Porcupine, kept all of us contented and uncomplaining for the entire 6 months we lived in tent camps in the bush... and that’s quite an accomplishment considering the amount of work involved and the times when rations were short due to bad weather preventing fresh re-supply. Every now and then, a specialty of fresh Mountain Goat or Dahl Sheep would grace the menu. We called it “Road Kill”, but the flavor belied the method of acquisition! Sitting in a helicopter all day and part of the daylight night put an extra 20 pounds on me that I had a hard time losing later. 58

The two pictures on this page give a good idea of what life was like at the Horn Lake base camp located above the Arctic Circle and right at the northern edge of the tree line (see map). It would have been located at McDougal Pass in the Richardson Mountains just west of the MacKenzie River delta. On the other side of the mountains in the upper picture lay the Arctic Coastal Plain with its constantly changing Thule ground fog and high wind conditions. The lake is visible to the left, above, and Ernie is loading a Geologist’s Fly Camp bound for the mountains where large amounts of exposed rock enabled the Geologists to read the stratigraphy in greater detail and easily take rock samples. Rock samples were always a big issue with me. I had to constantly weigh fuel load with rock sample load to make sure we all landed back at base camp with the engine still running. More than once Ernie remarked to me what the fuel gauge had already told me. “Well...you just barely made that trip, Bunky!” Rock samples, of course, were of major importance to the mission’s success. I must say there was as much good fortune as expertise involved because there was no way a pilot could estimate fuel consumption versus constantly changing headwind conditions, and there were no scales with which to measure the rock sample weights...and every single rock sample was considered vital. That kind of pressure, and the sight of the very accurate fuel gauge sitting on empty were major factors in making me decide to choose another occupation. Neither Stu Pollock, the pilot of the other helicopter on Operation Porcupine, nor I had to have fuel flown out to us due to misjudgement, and every hour of helicopter time had been carefully allocated to specific areas and jobs. In the lower picture, that’s the latrine tent sitting out beyond the camp....not the punishment tent! 59

The Trout Lake base camp was the farthest north camp, having been located on the Arctic Coastal plain itself, just north of the Barn Mountains. It was certainly one of the most interesting camps for a variety of reasons. For one thing, whenever the wind came out of the north, it moved the coastal ice pack in toward shore and brought with it the dreaded ice fog which is the nemesis of any pilot’s existence. Super cooled moisture freezes instantly on aircraft wings, propellers, and rotors ruining their lift capacity and loading them with excess weight to the point that they ultimately have to land, or crash. It moves in so quickly that there is barely time to get back to home base. Fifteen minutes after the above picture was taken, base camp looked like the picture at right. Otherwise, as often happened, one landed and remained in the most convenient place until the fog lifted enough to creep back to base camp down some river valley.

This was probably a supply plane for two DEW Line sites, one at Shingle Point, and one further west at Komakuk near the Alaska/ Yukon border. There’s no telling what the problem leading to the crash was. 60

Life in the outlying Fly Camps proved to be less eventful with Operation Porcupine than with other exploration camps in the wilds. There were no bear incidents despite the fact that I would see very large Grizzlies and Black Bear all over the place in the areas we covered. Each Geologist had a helper with him, plus a rifle for survival purposes. You can see the HF radio antenna in the foreground. Each Fly Camp had their own radio for contact with the base camp. There were times when the mountain winds,fog and clouds were such a problem that I could not get the helicopter back into the mountains to re-supply or bring people out. The longest time without re-supply was about seven days. The Caribou herds seemed to not be bothered at all by the presence of the Fly Camps, the entire herd of 7,000 or so dividing as they migrated right through several of the Fly Camp locations at night. The biggest life-endangering enemies of the Caribou were wolf packs and bears who fed mainly on cripples and old. But by far the biggest psychological enemies were the insects. Insects kept the herd constantly on the move and swatting, brushing, leaping to chase the hordes away. I’d like to have a nickel for every can of OFF the expedition used that summer. Even that was only partially successful. Every time I climbed into the helicopter, I’d have to spend 5 minutes swatting mosquitoes with my hat because once the helicopter was running and the blades turning, I had no hands free to protect myself. 61

As you can see from Geologist, Dr. Ray Price’s shirt, the mosquitoes had no mercy. They seemed to bother some people more than others... the Indians and Eskimos not at all. They drove me nuts, which is why I stayed in the helicopter cockpit. Shown below is a small portion of the Komakuk Caribou herd migrating northward as the snow disappears and the Arctic grasses start growing again.

This particular herd is a mainstay for the Old Crow Indians and the other Indian bands of the Northern Yukon. The meat is dried in the sun—flies and bugs not wirhstanding—until it looks like beef jerky. It’s consumed as a main food source in Winter. Their heel bones make a sharp clicking sound as they walk.

We had no maps at all of the area we were flying over. All navigation had to be done by memory of mountains, rivers, and unusual landmarks. The expedition had aerial photographs of the entire area, which is what the team members are using here to discover where rock outcrops are located, but as pilots we had only our memory to rely on and it is amazing how radically the landscape (and memory) changes when the clouds drop down low enough to obscure hilltops and mountains. 62

Another surprising landmark was the closed up AmeradaHess Oil Co. camp at the confluence of the Eagle, the Rock, and The Waters Rivers.

Seeing both of the expedition’s helicopters together was a rather rare occurrence as we constantly worked the Fly Camps at different points of the compass. In this instance we were moving from one base camp to another and stopped to look at some river bank rock outcrops. As you can tell from looking at this and other photos, the choice of places to land was always extremely limited. Probably the most anxiety-producing landing I made during the expedition involved putting a Geologist and Fly Camp in close proximity to the highest and deepest part of the Peel River Canyon (below) during Spring breakup. As you can see, there’s no place to land for the tree cover, but I did manage to find a huge, bare boulder on the left side of the photo which served as a partial landing pad. The only approach possible was a hovering approach over the wild water below. Once on the rock I could balance the helicopter on the uneven surface with the tail rotor hanging out over the river and sort of hover/land there long enough for the Geologist and his helper to unload their camp and supplies. Because the rotor blades were whirling only a few feet from a very large tree in front of me, I had to take off backwards, dropping 63

down to a few feet above the water until I had enough forward speed to climb up out of the canyon; not something I’d do very often! When it came time to pick them up and return them to base camp, they had made a clearing in some of the lower scrub trees so we were all spared the discomfort of a repeat performance. One of the main problems with mountain flying is that although you can tell the general wind direction by flying in a circle and watching the airspeed indicator, there’s often no way to know the precise movement of the wind over a ridge or around a peak. When carrying a load of extra fuel, rocks, or an entire Fly Camp, the ability to land directly into the wind can be critical. I always tried to land parallel to the ridgeline, as in the picture, so that, if caught in a downdraft, I could veer off and drop down either side of the ridge that felt best at the moment. In the Marines we used a smoke bomb; in the bush you watch the blades of grass! The Richardson Mountains along the eastern border of the Yukon Territory are some of the most precipitous mountains in the world, rising six thousand vertical feet from sea level and made up of almost pure black basalt rock. They are certainly the ruggedest mountains I have ever flown in and we had to land on many of the peaks and ridges in the background. When there’s any kind of wind at all, you never know whether you’re going to get dumped on your side, blasted downward like the bottom has fallen out of the sky, or thrown into a blade stall situation. This is the real white-knuckle, sweaty palm, every-day bush pilot fare! It takes a certain kind of fearlessness to be able to do this kind of work year after year. I feel very fortunate in having had other options available to me. 64

A few more things helicopters and their pilots don’t like to do is land downhill (the tail rotor can get busted off), or land on uneven terrain such as shown here on the side of a ridgeline. Each case is a matter of wind direction and consistency. More often than any pilot would care to admit, mountain landings are a sort of “controlled crash” ... especially when dropping off a full load and carrying a full load of fuel for the return trip. It’s quite exciting, though, to go flapping over a ridgeline with a 2,000-foot drop on the other side; or watch Mountain Goats and Dahl Sheep move about in virtually impossible places to reach otherwise. Much more tame are the river landings, especially when you as the pilot have time to kill. You can take your spinning rod out of its hiding place and flick a lure into a back-eddy for whatever fish are local for that time of year. In one lake, I lost two lures before I figured out that it was the teeth of a pike or pickerel that cut off my leader like a razor blade ... and not a piece of steel leader for a hundred miles! The photo below is of one of my favorite navigational landmarks on the Arctic Coastal Plain. It was obvious for many miles in all directions. I called it “Samson’s Anvil”.

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Every now and then machines, like humans, fail to operate in a manner fitting to their original design. The stress of operational fatigue sets in and the weakest link fails.Stu’s engine on CF-ONF failed in flight at about 500feet when he was loaded with rocks, geologists, and fly camp equipment. Fortunately, he was over this swamp and autorotated down safely into about six inches of water and grass. ONF sits in the background with her rotorhead and transmission removed. Both engineers set up tents, built a log platform out to and around ONF and worked day and twilight night to re-move the damaged engine. Meantime, Pat Callison loaded a brand new engine, a third engineer, and about 100 pounds of tools into his Cessna 180, known affectionately around the Yukon as “KPI” and flew out from Whitehorse to help. When Pat landed on the Porcupine River with that load, the floats of KPI were almost entirely underwater. How he ever managed to take off with all that weight I can’t imagine. Unloading 400 pounds of engine block onto the river bank was no easy task at all, then it was my job to heli-lift the engine out and drop it on the log pad next to ONF. That’s Pat Callison to the left in the fedora. Pat kept a big, enamelled pot of coffee on the open fire all the time while the three engineer/mechanics stripped the old engine down and unbolted it. I don’t recall whether we switched engines using the helicopter or a tripod made of spruce poles and a chain hoist, but I do recall flying the bad engine back to the river bank and loading it into the Cessna. The front passenger seat had been removed form the Cessna, and due to critical center of gravity limitations in the Cessna, the engine and the mechanic both had to occupy the space normally taken up by the passenger 66

seat. Down the floats went until only the front two or three feet were above water, and Pat taxiied out onto the river to head back to Whitehorse to overhaul the engine. I didn’t think he’d ever get the floats up onto their step, but Pat had obviously forgotten more about flying than most people ever know. Below is KPI loaded— and flying—but don’t ask me how.

Slinging the engines from the river to the swamp and back looked and acted similar to the picture to the left where MLL is slinging an Avon inflatable for river reconnaissance. The hook beneath the helicopter’s belly is electrically actuated by a button on the pilot’s cyclic control stick so that he can quickly release the load if the engine fails. Unfortunately, he can also punch the wrong button and drop his very expensive load into the river... or worse.The engine failure in ONF was not the only incident or major problem during the expedition, but it was the most serious.

In the other case, MLL “blew a jug”, which is to say that one of her six cylinders failed. It happened, fortunately, while the Geologist and I were just starting to take off from examining an old lake shore deposit, (see photo to right). The minute I put maximum power to the engine to lift off, the whole ship started vibrating so violently that I thought at first a portion of a blade or the tail rotor had come off. 67

I immediately sat back down on the ground and shut the engine down. Whatever the problem, it was too serious for me to fix, so I tried calling on the HF radio. This happened in the middle of the day on the northern edge of Old Crow Flats ... a hundred square miles of frozen perma-frost like that in the left-hand picture. Receiving no radio response, I set up the emergency antenna to give the signal greater distance, but still no response. It wasn’t until about seven o’clock that night that the Heaviside Layer in the upper atmosphere lowered enough for us to bounce a radio signal off one of the other exploration camps and relay our request for help to the base camp. The first thing that had to happen was for Stu to bring Ernie out in the other helicopter so we could discover the exact extent of the engine damage and order new parts ... from as far away as the Hiller Manufacturing plant in California! Stu finally located us about two hours later, and it took Ernie about an hour to figure out which cylinder was bad, remove it, and decide the extent of the parts required to fix it. The parts were then ordered by radio and I was flown to the Indian village of Old Crow a hundred miles south southwest to stay with the RCMP Officer in his cozy house and await the arrival of the parts by float plane.

OLD CROW Since 1962, I’ve been in some pretty remote parts of the world where aboriginals and native peoples live very marginal subsistance lives, but Old Crow was my first experience with true native Canadians. Canadian government money was helping these people to a very limited extent. For the most part they were living life much the way they had for hundreds of years with a few exceptions .. one being that they now had outboard motors to power their river boats. Here is what Old Crow looked like in 1962. 68

Main Street, Old Crow,1962

RCMP HQ; by flag pole

Residential!

Residential

One of two churches.

Sled dogs 69

Unlike the settlement of Old Crow, the government-built town of Inuvik (pictured at left in 1962) was an effort to transition the native Indian and Eskimo peoples to a more modern way of life, if they or their children so desired. Children from outlying settlements are brought to Aklavik and boarded here for their schooling. I was fascinated to learn that one of the doctors of geology on Operation Porcupine was a product of this transition, having been born and raised in a settlement similar to Old Crow named Aklavik. We were talking about his experiences growing up in Aklavik when he happened to mention to me his mother was such a good shot with a .22 caliber rifle that she could pick off a duck on the wing with a single shot. I wondered how many mothers in this present day and age could make that claim ... or would even be proud to make the claim. IT WAS ONE OF THOSE RARE, ONCE-IN-A -LIFETIME EXPERIENCES Flying a helicopter in the northern bush country in 1962 was a lot like barnstorming North America in the twenties and thirties. Not everyone had even seen a helicopter before, as witnessed by the picture below taken in front of the Hudson’s Bay Store in Inuvik. At $125.00 per hour back then(and about ten times that amount today) few people could afford to hire a helicopter for commercial work. The only ones who could afford it were Governments, and Natural Resource Exploration Companies. Pat Callison was among the very first to use a fleet of helicopters, just as Pat had been one of the first fixed-wing operators in the Yukon in the thirties. Today, in 2006, helicopters are everywhere and few people even look up as they pass by overhead. I do, though, because I’m always right there in the pilot’s seat with him, feeling the unique experience all over again that only flight in a helicopter can give. It’s only a few steps removed from the freedom of being a bird in flight. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride with me vicariously. 70

Photo at left: Arctic Coast, 1962 This was the first—and last—time in my life I ever grew a beard. The hair all grew on my neck and under my chin instead of on my face ... and never did stop itching. Ah, well, I never could get more than half of one foot into the Hippie camp. My training—or soul—is just too straight and narrow! The sweater was hand made for me by Gwen Ruckle with wool hand-carded and spun from their sheep farm on Salt Spring Island, BC.

Photo at right: Desert Hot Springs, 2002 My, how time changes things!

The map on the next page has approximate camp names and locations. Hopefully the resolution is adequate to allow zooming in on the map without seriously pixilating the names. You may copy this entire story as a .pdf file and send it freely to friends, but please be considerate enough to not alter it. The photographs are largely my own, but many were contributed by Dr. Donald K. Norris, expedition leader; Dr. Ray Price, Geologist; and other members of Operation Porcupine.

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If you enjoyed this story…. There are others by Kit Cain at your local bookstore Or at www.kitcain.com The first three chapters of each book can be read for free on the above website and they are available as Paperback Books or E-Books in Adobe .pdf format. Leaves In The Wind: a story of diffident origin about a biker who formed his own major motorcycle club in L.A. and Vegas … and lived to tell me his story. Master Of The Welded Bead: a fictitious short story comparing the lifestyles and attitudes of two men: one who chooses to live a whimsical and humorous life on the “road less traveled”; the other who chooses to live a life of selfish interest on the road too-often traveled. It is an entirely personal idea of how I imagine a disinterested Master Of The Universe might lead an unusual yet entertaining life in a predominantly negative and otherwise boring world. An Arrow To The Heart: a fictitious short story placing the hero of Master Of The Welded Bead in a close-encounter family situation with the “Mother from Heaven” and the beautiful, desirable, precocious “Daughter from Hell”. The Chasm Crossed: an autobiographical story about the unusual experiences and events of my 70 years of spiritual journey from youth to present. Ride the Wind Laughing: An Illustrated autobiographical story describing the mystical events and experiences which contributed in major ways to my building a 51-foot sailboat in my mother’s back yard in rural Nova Scotia— an event which began with no money in an effort to test the Laws of Manifestation and prove to myself the efficacy and practical value of my years of spiritual training. Soul And Man: is a major work attempting to define and describe the parameters of the word “Soul”— particularly as it applies to the human soul. The very nature of its perspective brings together the various schools of Religious, Scientific, Philosophical, Spiritual, and Mystical thought suggestive of a unified frame of reference and vocabulary for all. This book is not easy reading. It can be discomforting and thoughtprovoking for those new to the Spiritual Journey. I wrote it primarily to further define and synergize my own thinking … and for the benefit of those compelled—as am I—to journey into areas of the unknown, uncertain, and impossible to define. 73

On Pegasus’ Wings: is a collection of personal poems and song lyrics begun in 1962 solely as a means of inner expression and never intended for the eyes of the world. Only in later years have I realized that in their number and variety there might be at least a single poem among the many for each person. The knowledge of such would give me great satisfaction. The Tears Of Power: is a fable for all ages from ten to eternity about a mouse named Victor who lives in Edgeville—which is at the edge of everything: the river, the fields, the forest, the mountains, and the sky. Edgeville quickly becomes too small for his adventurous soul so he ventures out into the world of the great unknown, learning to pilot tugboats, fly helicopters, and meet some unusual friends like Oddie the Otter, Mo the musical Mole, and Minkie, his flight instructor. It is Eagle, though, who finally tells him what the tears of power really are. Perfect Health For Dogs And Cats: First wife Ann loved animals and so we always lived on a farm surrounded by dogs, cats, chickens, goats, and horses. Her dedication leaned toward the health and healing of animals by natural means, while mine leaned in a similar direction with humans. Contained in this small booklet are the simplest principles of health and healing for dogs and cats supported by our own experience and that of a major research foundation.

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