Rescued by the Canadian Air Force

Back in the ’80’s or so, when I lived in Seattle, a group of us used to go ski mountaineering frequently in the Cascades. We skied Mt Adams, St Helens, Baker, Shuksan, and Silver Star, as well as other peaks in the Cascades and occasionally in British Columbia. While most of our outings involved driving up an access road and skiing from the car or nearby, sometimes we would go with our pilot friend John Neal on more adventurous outings in Canada.

John owned a Cessna 180 equipped with ski wheels that he had purchased from the climber/skier/pilot Margaret Young and refurbished. Ski wheels are wheels with hydraulically-operated skis that can be raised above the wheels or lowered below them, from the cockpit. Thus takeoffs and landings could be made both on snow and on solid ground. John and friends would fly up to the British Columbia Coast Range, land on a glacier, ski an interesting peak and fly out, often on the same day.

John was an interesting character. While his day job was a pharmacist’s assistant at the UW Hospital, he lived for aviation. A bachelor, he had a modest home in N Seattle where he stored airplane parts everywhere indoors - on the kitchen table, the sofa, in the bathtub, etc. He did his own airplane mechanical work, and drove an old VW bug with all the seats removed except for the driver’s seat in order to make room to haul airplane parts and equipment. Frugal to a fault, you learned where all his disposable income went when the hangar door opened and there sat his beautiful, exquisitely maintained airplane.

John’s ski-plane outings always had the possibility of drama because the plane was a bit underpowered, which made takeoffs on flat snowfields and glaciers difficult if not impossible due to the drag of the skis on the snow. Thus an important part of an outing was always to land at or near the top of a down-sloping snowfield or glacier suitable for takeoff. This was not always easy to accomplish. On on such trip, after skiing a peak we called Mt Dog Leash (more conventionally known as Mt. Dalgleish) in the B. C. Coast Range, we ended up taking off steeply down an icefall. John had correctly surmised that we’d be airborne before we reached the broken-up part of the icefall, to his passengers’ enormous relief.

Another big adventure was a September 1984 trip with John, Gary Rose and myself to Mt. Munday*, near Mt Waddington. We landed in a narrow cirque at the head of the Ice Valley Glacier and made an easy ski ascent of Mt Munday that same day. Back to the plane by 4pm or so, Gary and I were ready to fly out. John had a different opinion. We were in an unprecedented stretch of good weather in the Coast Range, and John figured there’d be no harm in staying overnight. So we ended up spending the night at the plane, with John sleeping inside the airplane and Gary and me on the glacier.

Well, dear reader, if you haven’t already guessed it, in the middle of the night came a howling blizzard - high winds, blowing snow, whiteout. Good thing we had tied the plane down before the storm started. In the morning, sun and blue sky. What a relief. We got busy stomping out a runway - a compacted surface several hundred feet long, down the glacier below the plane.

Well, we soon discovered that we were able to move the plane only a few feet before the skis stuck fast in the new snow. If you’re a cross country skier, you’ve probably experienced this yourself - newly fallen warm snow sticking to the bottom of your skis. The cure is to scrape the snow off and apply extra glide wax. Easier said than done, given that the weight of the plane rested on the skis. In fact our only practical solution was to wait it out. We figured once the temperature cooled down, we’d be able to free the skis.

Unfortunately this would require staying another night, which raised a separate difficulty. John had filed a flight plan, and shortly we would be overdue, precipitating the possibility that Canadian Search and Rescue would come looking for us. This was the last thing John wanted, as a rescue would require us to abandon John’s pride and joy, his airplane. Winter comes early in the Coast Range, and leaving the plane in the mountains for the winter would mean the heavy snows would break the wings off the plane, destroying it.

Because John’s 2-way airplane radio was line of-sight transmission only, he couldn’t call out to adjust his flight plan. It seemed we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. However, after sitting around stewing for several hours, we heard an airplane in the distance. Shortly an airliner appeared overhead. John quickly radioed the pilot and asked him to call in our location and altered flight plan.

Feeling somewhat relieved, we tried to relax. Unfortunately, before long a Canadian Air Force Search and Rescue plane appeared overhead. The pilot radioed John and told him they were coming to rescue us. When John reiterated his wish not to be rescued, the pilot told him that either we all come out with them now, or they were washing their hands of us and would never come back. Faced with this ultimatum, John felt we had no choice but to go out with our rescuers. We were told they’d be landing down below, on the flat part of the glacier, and we were to meet them down there, leaving all of our gear behind. [Fig3 CAF rescue helicopter preparing to land after dropping a flare on the snow.] We skied down to the rescue aircraft, a big twin-engine helicopter, and were flown out to the Comox Canadian Air Force base on Vancouver Island. With heavy hearts we rode home to Seattle that same day with my wife Susan, who had driven up to get us.

Less than a week later, lady luck was on John’s side. During a brief spell of good weather, John got Ron Banner of Glacier Air Service in Squamish B.C. to fly him back up to the Ice Valley Glacier where he managed to fly his plane out. Undaunted by the mishap, John installed a larger engine and larger skis on his plane, continuing his adventure flying until he was done in a year or so later by prostrate cancer.

*Mt Munday was named after the intrepid mountain climber/adventurer couple Don and Phyllis Munday, who pioneered several heroic attempts back in the ’30’s to climb Mt. Waddington, the highest peak in the B.C. Coast Range. Their attempts are chronicled in the book The Unknown Mountain by Don Munday.