Blundering Into The Arctic
By Cliff Fuglestad
Lately I've been leafing through my log books -- and as I turn the pages the years fall away one by one, and then the decades, until I'm back in the early Fifties and venturing into the Arctic for the first time. The entries in my log books record dates, duration of flight, destination, and on rare occasion, a comment -- usually about the weather. But it is the destinations, the names on the land that evoke the memories; names such as Nome, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Cape Prince of Whales, Point Hope, etc. as well as an era when GPS wasn't even a gleam in the inventor's eye.
It's April 8 1951 according to the log book entry, and Cy and I were making our first flight out over the ice covered Chukchi Sea, a large arm of the Arctic Ocean lying north of the Bering Straits. The weather for April had been perfect, a clear day, not too cold and no wind. The seals were hauled out on the ice in fairly large numbers, particularly the large "oogruks" or bearded seals, and as they heard us, they would quickly slip into the open leads of water or through their breathing holes in the ice. We were supposed to be hunting for polar bear, but what we would have done had we seen one escapes me now that I took back over the years. If anything, we were just two tourists roaming around the Arctic, enjoying the sights and savoring the experience of being in a part of Alaska that was entirely new to us.
It's not that we were cheechakos (tenderfeet) by any means. Both Cy and I had hunted moose and caribou along the Railbelt, and had put in several winters working as surveyors for the Alaska Railroad under sub-arctic conditions. And we had some pretty good equipment along; my new ski equipped Piper Pacer with a reliable 125 hp. Lycoming engine, complete emergency gear that included a trusty 30-40 Krag rifle that had probably been up San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War; a Harvey Wells low frequency radio; and for navigation, a magnetic compass. An ADF set would have been nice, but just buying the Pacer for $3500 -- yes, $3500! -- at the Lockhaven factory had taken all the money I had at that time. But navigation was the least of my concerns. With its numerous and well defined mountain ranges and river systems serving as landmarks, I had found it relatively easy to use pilotage in finding my way around Alaska, using the WAC charts of that era which still carried some fairly large patches of yellow that indicated unsurveyed territory.
In venturing into the Arctic, however, I was also obeying some early advice which I had received from an old timer. In the absence of good landmarks, a condition that is quite often true of the Arctic with much of its coastal plains of low lying relief, "Never" he said "set your compass course directly towards your destination because if you miss it, and the chances are that you will if the weather is marginal, you won't know on which side of your destination you are on, especially along the coast line. Always! Always shade your course to one side or the other so that when you reach the coast, you will know which way to turn to reach your destination. It will take longer, but you will live longer."
So there Cy and I were, having been out of sight of land since shortly after leaving Kotzebue, now "closing the coast to the north", a nautical expression I know, but somehow appropriate for the maritime environment we were in, albeit a frozen one. We were on the last leg of a large rectangular course, heading east into a fairly high overcast that lay against the coast and while there was enough light to give me a semblance of a horizon, everything ice pack, shoreline and sky soon began to merge together into an opaque whiteness, "like the inside of a milk bottle" as one pilot had put it. Somewhere ahead too, lay the first foothills of the Brooks Range.
My head was on a swivel, looking down at the pressure ridges that were beginning to show up, indicating that we were getting close to the coast line; looking left to pick out any sign of pressure ridges trending to the northwest; looking ahead towards a faint horizon; then looking down again at willows. WILLOWS! We were inland and those low hills lay not too far off on our present course! I quickly began a slow, shallow 180 degree turn to the left and soon regained the shore line which I could now pick out in the slanting light of a late afternoon sun. Not only had we managed to "close the coast" but we had gone past it, entering the broad, featureless valley of the Wulik River near the village of Kivalina. Only the sight of those willows had prevented me from going further inland. Back in the sunlight and a little shaken, I turned south over the ice pack and we reached Kotzebue in time for dinner and later, a warm bed at Hanson's Trading Post. This, I felt, was the only way to hunt!
The next day we headed due west again, but not so far this time, choosing to go further north in the direction of Point Hope. The ice pack seemed more stationary here much fewer pressure ridges and more long, narrow leads of open water in which we began to see small pods of white beluga whales, which when submerged, took on a pinkish color. Soon, however, the open leads diminished and far ahead of us we could see some kind of movement that resolved into a round opening in the ice in which a pod of 12 to 15 beluga whales were turning the water into a froth as they surfaced for air in the only available opening in the solid ice pack for miles around. Some of that frantic movement could have been an attempt to enlarge the opening. Many years later an Eskimo whaling captain from Point Barrow told me that he had seen the much larger Bowhead and Gray whales in the same situation, one that occasionally led to their drowning if the open water was closed shut by the constantly shifting ice pack.
I had clocked an hour on our northward leg and it was time to turn east and pick up the coast line. An overcast was still there, although not as heavy as yesterday, and this time I "closed the coast" safely as the high, barren bluffs of Cape Thompson loomed out of the mist. We turned south and headed back to Kotzebue for the night.
Around the dinner table that night it was suggested that we should go up to Point Hope and hunt out of there. Conditions were much more favorable for sighting a bear since a strong current brought the moving ice pack closer to shore. As for lodgings we could stay with Fred, a former U. S. Attorney in the Nome district who, we were informed, had pursued an interesting, if somewhat "checkered" career in the Arctic.
Our landing at Point Hope the next morning received the type of welcome that was so common back in those days when the only traffic was the weekly mail plane. It seemed that at least half the village had turned out to see who we were, what we were doing, and did we know anyone in the village. We made ourselves known to Fred who immediately took us under his wing and it wasn't long before we were housed and had time in which to observe village life.
We visited a fairly large family in their snug, one room sod igloo, complete with an entryway constructed of huge ribs from a bowhead whale. Sleeping benches competed for room with the kitchen in which a dead seal hung behind the stove, dripping oil and blood into a large pan. The room temperature was high and the humidity almost tropical, a condition which had led the noted Arctic explorer Steffansson to remark many years ago that the Eskimo, with his excellent skin clothing, and with the exception of his face, actually lived in a near tropical environment, an observation that he felt was born out by the early age of puberty among the women.
An authentic Eskimo dance was held for us one night and looking around at the many faces of the dancers and the audience, I was struck by how few of those faces had the classic Eskimo features. Instead we saw a mixture of many races and nationalities Eskimo, Polynesian, Nordic, Mediterranean, white, black, etc. -- a legacy of the whalers of the 1880's and 1890s who had lost their ships to the ice pack and were forced ashore where they found solace in the arms of the Eskimo women of Point Hope. Conditions must have lead to overcrowding and another village soon sprang up further down the coast that during it's short life carried the logical name of Jabber Town.
Cy and I did do some hunting out over the ice pack away from the village but it was getting late in the season. I took two of the village hunters out to see if we could get close enough to a pod of Beluga whales we had spotted but the ice was breaking up and looking at the faces of my passengers as I made some tight turns over the pod, I had the strong impression that they would just as soon revert to their traditional way of hunting, which meant having both feet firmly on the ice even though it was constantly shifting.
Before leaving Point Hope we made one last swing north and east of the village towards the coal bearing bluffs of Corwin and Thetis where the coal fired ships of the whaling days used to bunker up and which Fred hoped to develop as an alternate source of energy for the White Alice sites then under construction.
In departing Kotzebue we took the long way home by heading west, down the north coast of the Seward Peninsula to the vicinity of the Diomede Islands where we could look through the Iron Curtain into tomorrow and see the east cape of Siberia which lay on the other side of the International Date Line. Rounding Cape Prince of Wales our course was south and east to Nome for an RON before continuing on. We were running out of leave time and that influenced my decision the next morning to take off under a low ceiling that was adequate for flying along a shore line but could become a problem if the weather stacked up against the Nulato Hills which lay between us and our destination of Galena, an Air Force satellite field located on the Yukon River. Adding to the uncertainty was the lack of any pilot reports which was typical of the light traffic of those days.
Sure enough the stuff was there, with an overcast sitting right on the ground at the east end of Norton Bay. But with Galena reporting a broken ceiling with improving weather to the south of their station, I decided to go on top of the overcast, influenced by the fact that Galena lay in the broad, open valley of the Yukon River. Leveling off at 4500 feet, we cruised along, at first admiring the solid undercast, and then becoming a little uneasy when no breaks appeared after an hour of flying. With the day getting on towards the late afternoon, I was growing tired of looking at clouds and wanted to see some ground, particularly when I heard Galena directing an Air Force F 94 on a "penetration approach" to their station. So when a small break appeared ahead of us through which I could see the ground, I dove for it and missed!
We were in the soup and the only smart thing I did in that entire day was to throttle back, take my hands and feet off the controls and let the plane fly itself down through the overcast. Just as Gentry had demonstrated to me when I bought the Pacer, we made a gentle, stable descent, and soon broke out in a broad valley north of Nulato. On both sides of the valley lay hills with their summits hidden in the overcast! There wasn't much I could say to Cy as I picked up our heading and we soon landed at Galena. Although my log book entry for that day carries just two words penetration approach the memories of that flight have a way of cropping up, even now, over 50 years later.
Somewhat subdued, I returned to my job on the Railroad but the pull of the Arctic remained strong and March of next year found me heading north again, following the "iron compass", the Alaska Railroad through Broad Pass to the Tanana River, thence striking overland north and west on a compass heading towards the upper valley of the Kobuk River. For the first time since I began flying in Alaska, I started to puzzle over my inability to meet topographical landmarks as I flew through the Ray Mountains under a lowering cloud cover. Without questioning the accuracy of the compass as I should have done, I attributed my difficulty to unreported winds, found our way to Shungnak and then made the easy leg down the broad west valley of the Kobuk River and on into Kotzebue.
As I look back though my log book covering this second trip into the Arctic, the memories come flooding back of lengthy and lazy trips out over the frozen Chuckchi Sea, often as far out as the International Date Line. Each day would begin with Warren, another Railroad surveyor, and I getting the plane ready; pulling the wing comers off and fire potting the engine, a chore that became awkward whenever there was a wind. At the end of the day we would gas up and then put the plane to bed on the ice in front of Hanson's Trading Post. The sunsets over the frozen Chukchi Sea were spectacular as the setting sun dropped down through the changing density layers which gradually changed its true oval shape into a molten step pyramid, not unlike the Aztec Temple to the Sun. There we were, roughing it again.
We logged flights up the remote valley of the Noatak River looking for the resident herd of caribou and a chance to spot some wolves (no luck); various other side trips until I reach the entry "forced down Norton Bay." We were returning from a side trip to Fairbanks, having flown down the Yukon River to Nulato, thence overland to Unalakleet on the coast and were heading north along the shoreline of Norton Bay in deteriorating weather when I ran out of visibility and had to set the plane down in an open swale behind the beach line, one of the advantages of being on skis but far from the nearest village.
In the fading light it appeared that we were going to be there for the night and would finally have to make camp under arctic conditions. We soon had all the emergency gear out of the airplane and spread out on the ground; wing covers for a temporary shelter, an arctic sleeping bag, a plumber's fire pot for heating, a single burner primus stove for cooking, rations, snow shoes, rifle, etc. In fact there seemed to be enough outdoor gear to set up a sporting goods shop right there on the shores of Norton Bay where years later, dog teams racing in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race would pass through on their way to Nome. But just as I began to look for a suitable ridge pole among the occasional driftwood scattered on the beach, the weather began to show signs of lifting and after getting an improved weather sequence from Moses Point, we quickly and laboriously stowed all the gear back into the plane and high tailed it to Moses Point where we spent a comfortable night at the CAA (now FAA) station.
Three days later we faced a similar and potentially, a much more deadly encounter with Arctic weather. We were returning to Kotzebue from Point Hope where I had agreed to take on two passengers for the trip, Sgt. Leonard Lane, an Eskimo instructor in Arctic survival for the U. S. Air Force and Jimmy Killigivuk, a grand old Eskimo hunter who at the age of eighteen, had hired on as a hunter for Steffansson's expedition of 1912. As I took off, the thought crossed my mind that we certainly were prepared for any emergency that might lie ahead. Little did I know!
Kotzebue reported clear weather over its station with ice fog lying to the west out over the ice pack, the same fog that we saw covering the shore line south of Point Hope. With four people and all our gear, I felt that we were pretty close to grossing out but had enough fuel to reach our destination with a reserve of about 30 minutes. Remembering my "penetration approach" of the previous year, I was reluctant to climb up over the thick fog and chose instead to set a compass course out over the ice pack that appeared to parallel the shoreline which we could not see, but which would put us close to Kotzebue and clearing weather.
An hour and a half had passed without a break in the fog and I knew that something was wrong. It was with some relief that I finally intercepted the north shore of the Seward Peninsula, but at exactly what point I had no idea. Upon hearing another tantalizing report of clear weather over Kotzebue, I chose to go under the fog, anticipating that we would soon break out into the clear. Wrong! The fog was like a dense, woolly blanket lying close to the ice and in the late afternoon sun I quickly lost the horizon, but I dared not try to make a turn out over the shore ice. Desperately I opened the side window, pulled up over a pressure ridge that I barely glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, and let the plane land straight ahead, hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst. Although I didn't deserve it, fortune smiled on me once again as I made one of my smoothest landings ever.
I remember shaking as I shut the engine down, mentally preparing myself for a real survival experience in the coming night on a desolate shore when I became aware of Leonard pounding me on the shoulder and shouting "Look, look" as he pointed inland. Not only had we made a safe landing, but we had made it directly in front of the hunting cabins of James and Bessie Moses at Singeak, the only cabins in 60 miles of coastline. And to top it all, as they say in polite society, James and Bessie "were at home". After being fed, I drifted off to sleep that night, secure in a warm cabin, listening to the excited guttural, clicking sounds as the four Eskimos talked far into the night. Perhaps James had a chance to recount again his famous exploit of killing four wolves with only the single shot -- or was it two? -- that he had left in his rifle, a legend in its time for that part of Alaska. Actually he had to club the fourth wolf to death. Warren and I were in good hands.
The next morning under a clearing sky, James Moses informed me of our location, that we were much closer to Shishmaref than to Kotzebue! I flew there to refuel and to contact CAA who informed me to my mortification that a search for us by the 10th. Air Rescue Command was just getting under way. What could I say? After spending the next few days restocking the slender larder of James and Bessie Moses, Warren and I took off and headed for Anchorage along the flyway that lead through Unalakleet and McGrath.
Here again was another route that required a greater reliance on the compass in the absence of prominent landmarks and here again I found my headings were way off. And then when I missed the entrance to Rainy Pass I was really steaming and began to realize that there was something drastically wrong with the compass and not with my navigation. On the final leg from Skwentna to Anchorage, with landmarks clearly visible, I was able to determine that the compass had a deviation of approximately 17 degrees! No wonder I couldn't make a proper landfall.
Then and only then did I remember the work I had had done on the radio the previous winter and how the technician had relocated the antenna lead into the cockpit. That had to be the cause of the large deviation, one that was much larger than any I had ever heard of and certainly never expected. While it somewhat restored my tarnished reputation for pilotage and dead reckoning, it lead more than once to people asking me "What took you so long to figure it out?" To which I could only mumble something about the difficulty of flying in the Arctic without radio navigation.
The next year I returned to the Arctic once again and this time, with Jimmy Killegivuk along, Wally and I got a polar bear off of Point Hope. And this time also, the log book carries no mention of any difficulties with navigation or the weather, with the exception of a single entry which shows that we stayed overnight at Kivalina to the wait out the weather over Kotzebue. A month later a bush pilot, facing the same weather conditions, chose to take off at Kivalina and crashed into a pressure ridge, killing both himself and his passenger. "There but for the grace of God ......."
Lately I've been leafing through my log books -- and as I turn the pages the years fall away one by one, and then the decades, until I'm back in the early Fifties and venturing into the Arctic for the first time. The entries in my log books record dates, duration of flight, destination, and on rare occasion, a comment -- usually about the weather. But it is the destinations, the names on the land that evoke the memories; names such as Nome, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Cape Prince of Whales, Point Hope, etc. as well as an era when GPS wasn't even a gleam in the inventor's eye.
It's April 8 1951 according to the log book entry, and Cy and I were making our first flight out over the ice covered Chukchi Sea, a large arm of the Arctic Ocean lying north of the Bering Straits. The weather for April had been perfect, a clear day, not too cold and no wind. The seals were hauled out on the ice in fairly large numbers, particularly the large "oogruks" or bearded seals, and as they heard us, they would quickly slip into the open leads of water or through their breathing holes in the ice. We were supposed to be hunting for polar bear, but what we would have done had we seen one escapes me now that I took back over the years. If anything, we were just two tourists roaming around the Arctic, enjoying the sights and savoring the experience of being in a part of Alaska that was entirely new to us.
It's not that we were cheechakos (tenderfeet) by any means. Both Cy and I had hunted moose and caribou along the Railbelt, and had put in several winters working as surveyors for the Alaska Railroad under sub-arctic conditions. And we had some pretty good equipment along; my new ski equipped Piper Pacer with a reliable 125 hp. Lycoming engine, complete emergency gear that included a trusty 30-40 Krag rifle that had probably been up San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War; a Harvey Wells low frequency radio; and for navigation, a magnetic compass. An ADF set would have been nice, but just buying the Pacer for $3500 -- yes, $3500! -- at the Lockhaven factory had taken all the money I had at that time. But navigation was the least of my concerns. With its numerous and well defined mountain ranges and river systems serving as landmarks, I had found it relatively easy to use pilotage in finding my way around Alaska, using the WAC charts of that era which still carried some fairly large patches of yellow that indicated unsurveyed territory.
In venturing into the Arctic, however, I was also obeying some early advice which I had received from an old timer. In the absence of good landmarks, a condition that is quite often true of the Arctic with much of its coastal plains of low lying relief, "Never" he said "set your compass course directly towards your destination because if you miss it, and the chances are that you will if the weather is marginal, you won't know on which side of your destination you are on, especially along the coast line. Always! Always shade your course to one side or the other so that when you reach the coast, you will know which way to turn to reach your destination. It will take longer, but you will live longer."
So there Cy and I were, having been out of sight of land since shortly after leaving Kotzebue, now "closing the coast to the north", a nautical expression I know, but somehow appropriate for the maritime environment we were in, albeit a frozen one. We were on the last leg of a large rectangular course, heading east into a fairly high overcast that lay against the coast and while there was enough light to give me a semblance of a horizon, everything ice pack, shoreline and sky soon began to merge together into an opaque whiteness, "like the inside of a milk bottle" as one pilot had put it. Somewhere ahead too, lay the first foothills of the Brooks Range.
My head was on a swivel, looking down at the pressure ridges that were beginning to show up, indicating that we were getting close to the coast line; looking left to pick out any sign of pressure ridges trending to the northwest; looking ahead towards a faint horizon; then looking down again at willows. WILLOWS! We were inland and those low hills lay not too far off on our present course! I quickly began a slow, shallow 180 degree turn to the left and soon regained the shore line which I could now pick out in the slanting light of a late afternoon sun. Not only had we managed to "close the coast" but we had gone past it, entering the broad, featureless valley of the Wulik River near the village of Kivalina. Only the sight of those willows had prevented me from going further inland. Back in the sunlight and a little shaken, I turned south over the ice pack and we reached Kotzebue in time for dinner and later, a warm bed at Hanson's Trading Post. This, I felt, was the only way to hunt!
The next day we headed due west again, but not so far this time, choosing to go further north in the direction of Point Hope. The ice pack seemed more stationary here much fewer pressure ridges and more long, narrow leads of open water in which we began to see small pods of white beluga whales, which when submerged, took on a pinkish color. Soon, however, the open leads diminished and far ahead of us we could see some kind of movement that resolved into a round opening in the ice in which a pod of 12 to 15 beluga whales were turning the water into a froth as they surfaced for air in the only available opening in the solid ice pack for miles around. Some of that frantic movement could have been an attempt to enlarge the opening. Many years later an Eskimo whaling captain from Point Barrow told me that he had seen the much larger Bowhead and Gray whales in the same situation, one that occasionally led to their drowning if the open water was closed shut by the constantly shifting ice pack.
I had clocked an hour on our northward leg and it was time to turn east and pick up the coast line. An overcast was still there, although not as heavy as yesterday, and this time I "closed the coast" safely as the high, barren bluffs of Cape Thompson loomed out of the mist. We turned south and headed back to Kotzebue for the night.
Around the dinner table that night it was suggested that we should go up to Point Hope and hunt out of there. Conditions were much more favorable for sighting a bear since a strong current brought the moving ice pack closer to shore. As for lodgings we could stay with Fred, a former U. S. Attorney in the Nome district who, we were informed, had pursued an interesting, if somewhat "checkered" career in the Arctic.
Our landing at Point Hope the next morning received the type of welcome that was so common back in those days when the only traffic was the weekly mail plane. It seemed that at least half the village had turned out to see who we were, what we were doing, and did we know anyone in the village. We made ourselves known to Fred who immediately took us under his wing and it wasn't long before we were housed and had time in which to observe village life.
We visited a fairly large family in their snug, one room sod igloo, complete with an entryway constructed of huge ribs from a bowhead whale. Sleeping benches competed for room with the kitchen in which a dead seal hung behind the stove, dripping oil and blood into a large pan. The room temperature was high and the humidity almost tropical, a condition which had led the noted Arctic explorer Steffansson to remark many years ago that the Eskimo, with his excellent skin clothing, and with the exception of his face, actually lived in a near tropical environment, an observation that he felt was born out by the early age of puberty among the women.
An authentic Eskimo dance was held for us one night and looking around at the many faces of the dancers and the audience, I was struck by how few of those faces had the classic Eskimo features. Instead we saw a mixture of many races and nationalities Eskimo, Polynesian, Nordic, Mediterranean, white, black, etc. -- a legacy of the whalers of the 1880's and 1890s who had lost their ships to the ice pack and were forced ashore where they found solace in the arms of the Eskimo women of Point Hope. Conditions must have lead to overcrowding and another village soon sprang up further down the coast that during it's short life carried the logical name of Jabber Town.
Cy and I did do some hunting out over the ice pack away from the village but it was getting late in the season. I took two of the village hunters out to see if we could get close enough to a pod of Beluga whales we had spotted but the ice was breaking up and looking at the faces of my passengers as I made some tight turns over the pod, I had the strong impression that they would just as soon revert to their traditional way of hunting, which meant having both feet firmly on the ice even though it was constantly shifting.
Before leaving Point Hope we made one last swing north and east of the village towards the coal bearing bluffs of Corwin and Thetis where the coal fired ships of the whaling days used to bunker up and which Fred hoped to develop as an alternate source of energy for the White Alice sites then under construction.
In departing Kotzebue we took the long way home by heading west, down the north coast of the Seward Peninsula to the vicinity of the Diomede Islands where we could look through the Iron Curtain into tomorrow and see the east cape of Siberia which lay on the other side of the International Date Line. Rounding Cape Prince of Wales our course was south and east to Nome for an RON before continuing on. We were running out of leave time and that influenced my decision the next morning to take off under a low ceiling that was adequate for flying along a shore line but could become a problem if the weather stacked up against the Nulato Hills which lay between us and our destination of Galena, an Air Force satellite field located on the Yukon River. Adding to the uncertainty was the lack of any pilot reports which was typical of the light traffic of those days.
Sure enough the stuff was there, with an overcast sitting right on the ground at the east end of Norton Bay. But with Galena reporting a broken ceiling with improving weather to the south of their station, I decided to go on top of the overcast, influenced by the fact that Galena lay in the broad, open valley of the Yukon River. Leveling off at 4500 feet, we cruised along, at first admiring the solid undercast, and then becoming a little uneasy when no breaks appeared after an hour of flying. With the day getting on towards the late afternoon, I was growing tired of looking at clouds and wanted to see some ground, particularly when I heard Galena directing an Air Force F 94 on a "penetration approach" to their station. So when a small break appeared ahead of us through which I could see the ground, I dove for it and missed!
We were in the soup and the only smart thing I did in that entire day was to throttle back, take my hands and feet off the controls and let the plane fly itself down through the overcast. Just as Gentry had demonstrated to me when I bought the Pacer, we made a gentle, stable descent, and soon broke out in a broad valley north of Nulato. On both sides of the valley lay hills with their summits hidden in the overcast! There wasn't much I could say to Cy as I picked up our heading and we soon landed at Galena. Although my log book entry for that day carries just two words penetration approach the memories of that flight have a way of cropping up, even now, over 50 years later.
Somewhat subdued, I returned to my job on the Railroad but the pull of the Arctic remained strong and March of next year found me heading north again, following the "iron compass", the Alaska Railroad through Broad Pass to the Tanana River, thence striking overland north and west on a compass heading towards the upper valley of the Kobuk River. For the first time since I began flying in Alaska, I started to puzzle over my inability to meet topographical landmarks as I flew through the Ray Mountains under a lowering cloud cover. Without questioning the accuracy of the compass as I should have done, I attributed my difficulty to unreported winds, found our way to Shungnak and then made the easy leg down the broad west valley of the Kobuk River and on into Kotzebue.
As I look back though my log book covering this second trip into the Arctic, the memories come flooding back of lengthy and lazy trips out over the frozen Chuckchi Sea, often as far out as the International Date Line. Each day would begin with Warren, another Railroad surveyor, and I getting the plane ready; pulling the wing comers off and fire potting the engine, a chore that became awkward whenever there was a wind. At the end of the day we would gas up and then put the plane to bed on the ice in front of Hanson's Trading Post. The sunsets over the frozen Chukchi Sea were spectacular as the setting sun dropped down through the changing density layers which gradually changed its true oval shape into a molten step pyramid, not unlike the Aztec Temple to the Sun. There we were, roughing it again.
We logged flights up the remote valley of the Noatak River looking for the resident herd of caribou and a chance to spot some wolves (no luck); various other side trips until I reach the entry "forced down Norton Bay." We were returning from a side trip to Fairbanks, having flown down the Yukon River to Nulato, thence overland to Unalakleet on the coast and were heading north along the shoreline of Norton Bay in deteriorating weather when I ran out of visibility and had to set the plane down in an open swale behind the beach line, one of the advantages of being on skis but far from the nearest village.
In the fading light it appeared that we were going to be there for the night and would finally have to make camp under arctic conditions. We soon had all the emergency gear out of the airplane and spread out on the ground; wing covers for a temporary shelter, an arctic sleeping bag, a plumber's fire pot for heating, a single burner primus stove for cooking, rations, snow shoes, rifle, etc. In fact there seemed to be enough outdoor gear to set up a sporting goods shop right there on the shores of Norton Bay where years later, dog teams racing in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race would pass through on their way to Nome. But just as I began to look for a suitable ridge pole among the occasional driftwood scattered on the beach, the weather began to show signs of lifting and after getting an improved weather sequence from Moses Point, we quickly and laboriously stowed all the gear back into the plane and high tailed it to Moses Point where we spent a comfortable night at the CAA (now FAA) station.
Three days later we faced a similar and potentially, a much more deadly encounter with Arctic weather. We were returning to Kotzebue from Point Hope where I had agreed to take on two passengers for the trip, Sgt. Leonard Lane, an Eskimo instructor in Arctic survival for the U. S. Air Force and Jimmy Killigivuk, a grand old Eskimo hunter who at the age of eighteen, had hired on as a hunter for Steffansson's expedition of 1912. As I took off, the thought crossed my mind that we certainly were prepared for any emergency that might lie ahead. Little did I know!
Kotzebue reported clear weather over its station with ice fog lying to the west out over the ice pack, the same fog that we saw covering the shore line south of Point Hope. With four people and all our gear, I felt that we were pretty close to grossing out but had enough fuel to reach our destination with a reserve of about 30 minutes. Remembering my "penetration approach" of the previous year, I was reluctant to climb up over the thick fog and chose instead to set a compass course out over the ice pack that appeared to parallel the shoreline which we could not see, but which would put us close to Kotzebue and clearing weather.
An hour and a half had passed without a break in the fog and I knew that something was wrong. It was with some relief that I finally intercepted the north shore of the Seward Peninsula, but at exactly what point I had no idea. Upon hearing another tantalizing report of clear weather over Kotzebue, I chose to go under the fog, anticipating that we would soon break out into the clear. Wrong! The fog was like a dense, woolly blanket lying close to the ice and in the late afternoon sun I quickly lost the horizon, but I dared not try to make a turn out over the shore ice. Desperately I opened the side window, pulled up over a pressure ridge that I barely glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, and let the plane land straight ahead, hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst. Although I didn't deserve it, fortune smiled on me once again as I made one of my smoothest landings ever.
I remember shaking as I shut the engine down, mentally preparing myself for a real survival experience in the coming night on a desolate shore when I became aware of Leonard pounding me on the shoulder and shouting "Look, look" as he pointed inland. Not only had we made a safe landing, but we had made it directly in front of the hunting cabins of James and Bessie Moses at Singeak, the only cabins in 60 miles of coastline. And to top it all, as they say in polite society, James and Bessie "were at home". After being fed, I drifted off to sleep that night, secure in a warm cabin, listening to the excited guttural, clicking sounds as the four Eskimos talked far into the night. Perhaps James had a chance to recount again his famous exploit of killing four wolves with only the single shot -- or was it two? -- that he had left in his rifle, a legend in its time for that part of Alaska. Actually he had to club the fourth wolf to death. Warren and I were in good hands.
The next morning under a clearing sky, James Moses informed me of our location, that we were much closer to Shishmaref than to Kotzebue! I flew there to refuel and to contact CAA who informed me to my mortification that a search for us by the 10th. Air Rescue Command was just getting under way. What could I say? After spending the next few days restocking the slender larder of James and Bessie Moses, Warren and I took off and headed for Anchorage along the flyway that lead through Unalakleet and McGrath.
Here again was another route that required a greater reliance on the compass in the absence of prominent landmarks and here again I found my headings were way off. And then when I missed the entrance to Rainy Pass I was really steaming and began to realize that there was something drastically wrong with the compass and not with my navigation. On the final leg from Skwentna to Anchorage, with landmarks clearly visible, I was able to determine that the compass had a deviation of approximately 17 degrees! No wonder I couldn't make a proper landfall.
Then and only then did I remember the work I had had done on the radio the previous winter and how the technician had relocated the antenna lead into the cockpit. That had to be the cause of the large deviation, one that was much larger than any I had ever heard of and certainly never expected. While it somewhat restored my tarnished reputation for pilotage and dead reckoning, it lead more than once to people asking me "What took you so long to figure it out?" To which I could only mumble something about the difficulty of flying in the Arctic without radio navigation.
The next year I returned to the Arctic once again and this time, with Jimmy Killegivuk along, Wally and I got a polar bear off of Point Hope. And this time also, the log book carries no mention of any difficulties with navigation or the weather, with the exception of a single entry which shows that we stayed overnight at Kivalina to the wait out the weather over Kotzebue. A month later a bush pilot, facing the same weather conditions, chose to take off at Kivalina and crashed into a pressure ridge, killing both himself and his passenger. "There but for the grace of God ......."