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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



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 thegeography 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 ontothe 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 tryingto 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 combinedhere 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 44.

CAMPER ON THE ALCAN HIGHWAY 45.

ERNIE AND WASHING MACHINE 46.KLONDIKE HELICOPTERS HANGAR 47.

KLONDIKE HELICOPTERS BELL G-2 AND CREW 46.

CF-MLL AT TOMBSTONE PASS 48.

CF-MLL AT MAYO MOTEL 47.

DAWSON CITY DREDGE TAILINGS 49.

RIVER-PANNING FOR GOLD 48.

PROSPECTOR/EXPLORATION TENT CAMP 48.

GOLD DREDGE 50.DAWSON CITY; MAIN STREET 52.

DAWSON CITY; PALACE GRAND AND BONANZA HOTEL 51.

DAWSON CITY HARDWARE AND Y.O.O.P. 52.

DAWSON CITY; MME. TREMBLAY’S STORE 52.

STERNWHEELER ‘KENO’ IN DAWSON CITY 53.

THE MAMMOTH TUNDRA BUGGY 53.

DC-3 ON SKIIS ON LAKEBED 54.

DC-3 UNLOADING FREIGHT AT HUNGRY LAKE 54.

HUNGRY LAKE; HAULING FREIGHT 54.

CF-MLL SLINGING FUEL DRUMS 55.

OPERATION PORCUPINE CREW LOADING ON DC-3 55.

SETTING UP TENTS AT HUNGRY LAKE BASE CAMP 55.

HUNGRY LAKE BASE CAMP FROM THE AIR 56.

CARIBOU ON ROTTEN ICE: HUNGRY LAKE 56.

BEAVER AND FUEL DRUMS: HUNGRY LAKE 57.KIT AND ERNIE OUTSIDE HUNGRY CAMP TENT 56.

OPERATION PORCUPINE CAMP COOK 58.

HELICOPTER LANDING PAD 57.

HUNGRY LAKE OUTDOOR SHOWER 58.



PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS (cont’d.)

Page

HORN LAKE BASE CAMP 59.

LOADING CF-MLL: KIT & ERNIE 59.

ARCTIC ICE FOG MOVING IN 60.

ICE FOG SHUT DOWN 60.

DC-3 WRECKAGE 60.

FLY CAMP WITH CARIBOU NEARBY 61.

FLY CAMP 61.

MOSQUITO SCOURGE 62.

KOMAKUK CARIBOU HERD 62.

DROPPING OFF FLY CAMP 62.

AMERADA HESS OIL RIG CAMP 63.

SAMSON’S ANVIL BUTTE LANDMARK 65.MLL AND ONF TOGETHER IN RIVERBED 63.

PEEL RIVER CANYON SPRING BREAKUP 63.

MOUNTAIN LANDINGS 64.

SIDE HILL LANDING; ARCTIC COAST 65.

SAMPLING RIVERBANK GEOLOGY 65.

ONF ENGINE FAILURE #1 66.

ONF ENGINE FAILURE #2 66

KPI FLIES BROKEN ENGINE OUT 67.SLINGING NEW ENGINE IN 67.

MLL ENGINE FAILURE SITE ON OLD CROW FLATS 67.

ERNIE REPAIRING MLL; STU WATCHING 68.

OLD CROW FLATS PERMAFROST 68.

INUVIK, NWT 69.

MAIN STREET IN OLD CROW 1962 69.

RCMP HOUSING 69.

RESIDENTIAL HOUSES 69.

OLD CROW SLED DOGS 69.

OLD CROW CHURCH 69.

MLL WITH CHILDREN IN INUVIK 70.

MAP OF NORTHERN YUKON 72.



6

Flying The Yukon’s Bush: The Story In Word s

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’splexiglass 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



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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 untiOctober, 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 three-foot 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 claimsand 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 unmuffledroar—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, dril

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.



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The most difficult part of the job comes in picking the smoothest route in cold, 40-

degree-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 earthcovered 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.



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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 theGold 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 itcomes 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.



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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 andground 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



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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. Severa

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 physicalwork 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 thelast 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.



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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 maincab 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.



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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 liebetween 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 CanadianGeological 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



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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 patterneach 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 sleepingquarters 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 ten-

gallon 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, 375miles 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 flyinga 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.



15

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 beenmounted 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 waterand 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 thingdidn’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!



16

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 knee-

high 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.



17

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 eachcup 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 beslowly 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



18

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 tonear 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 somefamiliar 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.



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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 andhaul 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 neverthelessan 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.



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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 no-

one 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



21

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 theGeological Survey Of Canada, we heard their whole story.

Supposedly the discovery is one of the largest in this part of the world; but they wil

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



22

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, CanadaGeese, 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 theGeologist 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 whirledabove 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.



23

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 totaand 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 objectswhich 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



24

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 withflattened 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



25

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. Theyhad 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



26

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 thewolves 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 contributesome 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 ferro-

magnetism. 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.



27

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).



28

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 3500years, 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 fromthe 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 anice-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.



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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 theday 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 oneof these storms on the way back from a traverse with two geologists. It took him a ful

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.



30

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 temperaturesrange 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 manageto 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.



31

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.



32

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 JuneAnd 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



33

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 gunsIn 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



34

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” staysAnd 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 light-

gravity oil and 10 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. This was the farthest Northoil 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



35

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 theiroverindulgent 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

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 throneI 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



36

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 saltedor 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!



37

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 alittle 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 highwith 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 eight-

foot-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.



38

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 therest 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 therun 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 thatwhen 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.



39

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 storefuel 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.



40

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 treebranch 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.”



41

“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 devater 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’ onepole 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



42

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, lookedup, 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 stoodstraight 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.



43

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 peopleto 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.

~



44

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 publi-

cation can be enlarged slightly by zooming, but it is far from an accurate representa-

tion 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, multi-

engine, helicopter, and instrument ratings. By March of

1963, I had secured a job flying helicopters for Klondike

Helicopters of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory.



45

The commercial use of large helicopters in 1962 was very limited. Most commercia

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 preparedsite 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 practica

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 schoo

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



46

I could not have had. Ernie’s eternally jovial, jokingand humorous nature coupled with his high level of mechanical expertise and knowledge of helicopter maintenance were a constant level of comfort andconfidence. Many times over, his critical eye caughtpotential problems in the delicate mechanisms of the helicopter’s complex engine, transmission, rotor head and tail assembly that could have led to seriousaccidents if not corrected immediately. Ernie is shownhere with his wind-driven washing machine which hemade from scrap from the camp garbage pile. Hehas it attched to an empty 12-gallon fuel drum suchas those I carried strapped to the helicopter’s cargonets along with a hand pump for long journeys awayfrom base camp. Ernie’s work always began whenmy work stopped, and often went on into the never-dark, twilight nights of the North. As it turned out, the

washing machine required about forty knots of wind to make the blades turn, soErnie built a crank handle for the other end and washed his clothes by winding thecrank handle.

Working around the Klondike Helicoptershangar, I also had the opportunity tomeet the other bush pilots. In particular, Iremember Chuck Ford whose tales of hairyflying experiences would put to shamethe crazy tales of most seagoing sailors.He told of his first helicopter crash whichhappened when one of the blades cameoff while in flight. He was fortunately over a lake at the time and managed to swimashore...and obviously he lived throughthe tumble into the lake. The second crash occurred while he was crop dusting; theforward skid of the helicopter caught on a piece of barbed wire, tripping it forwardand rolling it up into a ball of wreckage—which he simply walked away from. He toldof 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.”



47

By 1962, Pat had expanded his

small fleet of planes to include

two Hiller 12E’s(CF-MLL and CF-

ONF), two Bell G-models, and his

own Cessna 180, CF-KPI, which

spent most of the year mounted on

floats. My helicopter, CF-MLL, atthe far right, carried no navigationa

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 HFantennae 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



48

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 photoimmediately 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 floatplanes 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.



49

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 mattingsaturated 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 up-

stream 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 whenI 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 accommoda-

tions for the dredge crew. The HF radio transmitters still sat on a table in the radio



50

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 convenientway 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.



51

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 wel

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 theold 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 ful



52

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.



53

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 atourist attraction.

The “TUNDRA BUGGY” ...a not-so-

successful effort to cross miles of tundrawith 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 givehelicopter 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.



54

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 infresh 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 re-

built many times over. Pat

Callison started the Connelly-

Dawson 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 snow-



55

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 DC-

3 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 theDC-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.



56

As the weather warmed, water re-

placed 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 Logantent along with his assistant. The

Geologists spent little time at base

camp, being constantly re-locat-

ed 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 ski-

equipped planes to land on.



57

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, thecamp 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 automobileengines. 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.



58

Getting one’s self clean in the bush is

never an easy task at best. Rivers and

lakes are always ice cold. Even a home-

made 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, aspecialty 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.



59

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 ofthe tree line (see map)

It would have been

located at McDouga

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 andhigh 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 muchgood 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 rocksample 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!



60

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 themost 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 placeuntil 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.



61

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 in-

cidents despite the fact that

would see very large Grizzliesand Black Bear all over the

place in the areas we covered

Each Geologist had a helper

with him, plus a rifle for surviv-

al purposes. You can see the

HF radio antenna in the fore-

ground. 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-sup-

ply 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 Cari-

bou 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 onthe 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 heli-

copter was running and

the blades turning, I had

no hands free to protect

myself.



62

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 isa mainstay for the OldCrow Indians and the

other Indian bands of the Northern Yukon.The meat is dried in thesun—flies and bugs notwirhstanding—until itlooks like beef jerky. It’sconsumed as a mainfood source in Winter.Their heel bones make

a sharp clicking soundas they walk.

We had no maps at all of the area we wereflying over. All navigation had to be doneby memory of mountains, rivers, and un-usual landmarks. The expedition had aer-ial photographs of the entire area, whichis what the team members are using here

to discover where rock outcrops are locat-ed, but as pilots we had only our memoryto rely on and it is amazing how radicallythe landscape (and memory) changeswhen the clouds drop down low enoughto obscure hilltops and mountains.



63

Another surprising landmarkwas the closed up Amerada-Hess Oil Co. camp at the con-fluence of the Eagle, the Rockand The Waters Rivers.

Seeing both of the expedition’shelicopters together was a rather rare occurrence as we constantlyworked the Fly Camps at differ-ent points of the compass. In thisinstance we were moving fromone base camp to another andstopped to look at some river bankrock outcrops. As you can tell fromlooking at this and other photos,the choice of places to land wasalways extremely limited.

Probably the most anxiety-producing landing I made during the expedition involvedputting a Geologist and Fly Camp in close proximity to the highest and deepest partof the Peel River Canyon (below) during Spring breakup. As you can see, there’s noplace 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 apartial landing pad. The only approachpossible was a hovering approachover the wild water below. Once on therock I could balance the helicopter onthe uneven surface with the tail rotorhanging out over the river and sort ofhover/land there long enough for theGeologist and his helper to unload theircamp and supplies. Because the rotorblades were whirling only a few feetfrom a very large tree in front of me,I had to take off backwards, dropping



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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 youcan 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 moun-tains in the world, rising six

thousand vertical feet from

sea level and made up of al-

most pure black basalt rock.

They are certainly the rug-

gedest mountains I have ever

flown in and we had to land on

many of the peaks and ridg-

es 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.



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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. Moreoften 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 losttwo 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 Coasta

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 500-

feet 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



67

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 forgottenmore 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.



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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 noradio 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.



69

Main Street, Old Crow,1962 RCMP HQ; by flag pole

ResidentialResidential!

One of two churches. Sled dogs



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Unlike the settlement of Old Crow,the government-built town of Inuvik(pictured at left in 1962) was aneffort to transition the native Indianand Eskimo peoples to a moremodern way of life, if they or their children so desired. Children from

outlying settlements are broughtto Aklavik and boarded here for their schooling. I was fascinatedto learn that one of the doctors of geology on Operation Porcupinewas a product of this transition,having been born and raised in a

settlement similar to Old Crow named Aklavik. We were talking about his experiencesgrowing 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 singleshot. 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 barnstormingNorth 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 whocould 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 hadbeen one of the first fixed-wing operators in the Yukon in the thirties. Today, in 2006,helicopters are everywhere and fewpeople even look up as they passby overhead. I do, though, becauseI’m always right there in the pilot’sseat with him, feeling the uniqueexperience all over again that onlyflight in a helicopter can give. It’sonly a few steps removed from thefreedom of being a bird in flight.Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride withme vicariously.



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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.

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 straightand 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!



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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 mystica

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 thought-

provoking 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.

http://www.kitcain.com/

http://www.kitcain.com/



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 namedVictor 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.

flying the yukon's bush illustrated e-book

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