The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  By 1990, Carl had started his own company, Edzo Air, which primarily flew members of the Dogrib nation on charters between the hamlets in the area. At any time of the year, Carl and his Cessna 206 could be seen flying between Rae-Edzo, a pair of sister communities just north of Yellowknife, and Whatì (then called Lac La Martre), Gameti (Rae Lakes), and Wekweti (Snare Lakes), a trio of hamlets about 200 kilometres (125 miles) northwest of Yellowknife.

  Like Buffalo Joe, sixty-eight-year-old Carl strikes me as one of those people who has managed to carve out a professional life for himself doing exactly what he was put on Earth to do: fly. “It’s not a job,” he said with a wry smile, “it’s the greatest profession in the world.”

  Where Carl and Joe diverge, though, is in what they do when they’re up in the air. While Joe seems to use flying as a way to cleanse his mind of his myriad responsibilities, Carl is always looking down from the air—at geological formations on the ground, that is. Carl is not only a pilot, but a prospector as well, two vocations that go hand in hand.

  Just like some of the biggest gold strikes in history, Carl’s discovery of his calling came serendipitously. “I did some geology courses,” he told me through the cloud of blue smoke hanging in the air between us. “Back in Newfoundland, I flew with Noranda Exploration a lot. That’s when I got my first rock hammer. Then I got some books, and here I am.”

  If that all sounds a little accidental, don’t be fooled. Over the years, Carl has developed a knack for prospecting, and he remains one of Yellowknife’s most prolific prospectors. Everywhere I turned in his crowded living room, stacks of geology books were fighting for space. His shelves and window sills are peppered with hundreds of rock samples, in every size, shape, hue, and texture imaginable. Some were dull and grey, and tweaked no dreams of riches in my brain; others gleamed with flecks of precious metals and spoke of vast riches stored under millions of tons of earth. The extent of Carl’s collection should come as no surprise, given its owner’s history: in the years he has been prospecting, Carl has staked over 350 claims around Great Slave Lake.

  In the prospecting game, most claims fizzle out—the area holds few minable resources, or no company is interested in the claim, or logistical challenges prevent profitable development of a mine. Every once in a while, though, a prospector hits the proverbial motherlode, and things take off. I’m not sure if Carl is in this latter category, but he was not ashamed to tell me that he’s “done very well prospecting.”

  Indeed he has. Carl is currently one of the directors of Fortune Minerals, a public company that trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange. In 1995, Carl was flying his Cessna when he discovered a gold-cobalt-bismuth-copper deposit about 160 kilometres (100 miles) northwest of Yellowknife. That find has become the focal point of Fortune’s northern mining efforts; the company estimates that the NICO deposit contains 760,000 ounces of gold, 61 million pounds of cobalt, and 77 million pounds of bismuth. Once the company gets the go-ahead from the Tlicho government, mining will begin in earnest.

  The way Carl describes it, successful prospecting involves much more than throwing a dart at a map. His research begins with old geological maps of the area, which are available from the territorial government. He then turns to a more modern tool: Google Earth. “It’s great!” he exclaimed. “You can actually see faults and systems on Google Earth.”

  If Carl finds an area that tweaks his keen imagination, he’ll take the next step and investigate, first by plane, then by foot. It’s a pattern he’s been repeating for decades. “Years ago when I was flying fire patrols for the government, I’d have their firefighting map and my prospecting map on board at all times,” he said. “And if I saw something interesting in the rock, I would put a little ‘x’ on my map, to come back and check it out later. So I’m getting paid to do the fire patrol—and I stayed on their lines, of course—but I’m prospecting too!”

  Carl always seemed to find time for a bit of prospecting, no matter what the job or who the client. “Let’s say I was flying back to Fort Rae from Snare Lakes with a local RCMP officer, doctor, dentist, or social services worker,” he recalled. “I’d ask if they would be interested in stopping for an hour or two to prospect, and they always said ‘Sure, Carl!’ Their job would be over, and they’d get a chance to see things they’d never seen before while I got to do a bit of prospecting.”

  Prospecting only starts with aerial observation. If you want to see what the Earth holds, you have to get down on the ground and start chipping away at it with your rock hammer. Find something interesting, and the sample is sent to a lab for analysis. Since the land is still technically fair game, at some point the prospector needs to decide whether he’s going to stake a claim on it. Such decisions are not done rashly, though, as each claim is an investment of time, money, and physical effort.

  “You have to go out there and walk the ground,” Carl said. He begins with the northeast corner of the claim as his starting point, and drives his first stake into the ground. From there he walks 1,500 feet to the southeast corner, another 1,500 feet to the southwest corner, 1,500 feet to the northwest corner, then back where he started, driving stakes at every corner. The result is a fifteen-acre patch of untamed earth. There’s also the option of staking a block of fifty claims.

  Once the claim has been staked, it’s back to the territorial government office for registration. After the office has verified the measurements and officially recorded the claim, it’s Carl’s for a limited period of time. If he—or another company, if he sells the claim—doesn’t work it within a two-year period, the claim expires.

  Sitting there listening to Carl was an otherworldly experience. His life seems idyllic, almost serene. He strikes me as a man who has come to peace with who and what he is, and has made a life around that. But just as soon as I started waxing nostalgic about the lifestyle of this hale and hearty man of the world, he began to tell me about some of the near misses he’s had flying in the North. It was enough to abruptly shake me out of my wistfulness.

  “If you fly these things, shit happens,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. They’re mechanical devices, just like cars. And if you’re gonna fly them, you’re gonna have things go wrong. You don’t fly airplanes and not have near-misses.”

  On one occasion, Carl was flying a DHC-2 Beaver in the High Arctic near a remote fishing lodge at Bathurst Inlet. “I was on top of the clouds, about five hundred feet off the ground, when the thing packed up,” he told me nonchalantly. Maybe too nonchalantly, since the phrase “packed up” means the engine seized, leaving Carl five hundred feet off the ground with no source of power.

  “I came down through the cloud and beat the plane up pretty good,” he said with a chuckle, “tore the legs off the thing. I had my hands full with that one!” After a long and lonely night in the bush, Carl was back at it the next day.

  Another time, Carl was flying a six-seat Cessna 185 Skywagon in the dead of winter at about 3,500 feet when one of the two landing skis broke off the plane and ripped right through its door, flipping the craft upside down along the way. Everything on board flew out the windows.

  “I flew it for forty miles pretty much sideways with two notches of flap on and the ski still on the check cables,” he said, never showing a hint of discomfort at the memory. “I flew it sideways to keep the ski out where I could see it, so it didn’t beat up the airplane anymore.” He landed safely in Lac La Martre, where a pilot from Yellowknife-based Ptarmigan Airways flew him back to the city.

  Carl hasn’t always been alone during such adventures, for better or worse. One time he was taking off with a representative from Transport Canada and the owner of Air Dogrib aboard when one of his plane’s skis fell off. For Carl—who has logged more than eighteen thousand hours flying the lonely northern skies—it was another day on the job. “I just continued around and landed on the one ski,” he said. “But the boys were sure a little white!”r />
  If this all seems like old hat to Carl, it probably is. He says the key to handling an emergency situation in a bush plane is to stay focused on the task at hand. “I never get flustered, and I’ve never been afraid,” he said. “It happens and you’re too busy trying to correct the situation to be afraid of it. So up to the point where you terminate yourself, upside down or inside out or the wing falls off, you’re just too busy flying the airplane to be afraid of it. Something goes wrong, and you just have to deal with it.”

  Deal with it again and again, it would seem, regardless of the location. Apparently Carl’s adventures have not been limited to the North. “I was taking off out of Gander in a Beaver with a load of mail, one passenger, and on wheel-skis again,” he said. “We were on our way to Fogo and were just off the ground when the engine seized.

  “I had to go straight ahead, because I didn’t have enough speed to do anything else. And the control tower kept telling me I was on fire; I guess there was flames shooting out the back of the plane. I didn’t care; I kept priming the thing trying to get it going again, but all the gas was running out the back.

  “Well, I went into the trees with that one. But it didn’t catch on fire and we both got out, so no big deal.”

  Not all of Carl’s flying stories involve crash landings. Two of his favourites, in fact, involve the dearly departed. The first one sees Carl transporting a body for the first time in his life. “Well, nobody had ever told me about the gases in the body,” he said. “So I’m flying along in a Beaver and the body bag started shaking and moving. And I’m thinking ‘What in the name of God is going on?’ I thought for a while that he wasn’t dead.

  “But then the aroma—oh my good God, it was unbelievable. And I thought ‘Holy shit man, I don’t need this.’ I delivered the body back to Yellowknife, but it was pretty stinky.”

  The Beaver was big enough to fit a body bag, but a coffin is another story. While still living in Newfoundland, Carl was tasked with flying a casket—replete with a woman’s body inside—to her hometown in Change Islands for the funeral. The side door was too small to turn the coffin, so Carl had no choice but to fly with both doors open and the coffin protruding a foot out each side of the plane.

  “We tied ropes underneath the airplane to keep the coffin from sliding out,” he said, “but I had to do gentle turns anyway.

  “Well, the deal was to land on the ice,” he says. “But the wind blew the ice offshore, and I couldn’t find a safe place to land. So instead I landed on the bog behind the town. After we landed, a guy came over with a horse and carriage to pick up the coffin.

  “The co-pilot and me were untying the ropes, and I had to climb over the top of the coffin. I was just going up over the coffin and I said to the guy, ‘Oh man, I’m sorry I have to get on top of her like this, but I gotta get over there and untie them ropes.’

  “‘My son,’ he says, ‘you’re not the first one that was on top of her!’ ”

  To this day Carl doesn’t know how the man was connected to the woman in the coffin, though he suspects it may have been her husband.

  The day wound on, and the sweet, smoky air in Carl’s cabin filled with the stories of his life in the North. It’s a life, I realized, that mirrors Joe’s on a certain level, as old bush pilots all seem cut from the same fabric: the cloth of independence, freedom, and living every minute of this great gift called life. Yet there is something else these men and women share: the recognition that when things go wrong in the wilderness, people need to band together to solve problems.

  Sometimes, though, there isn’t anyone around to help, and you have to make your own choices. Such was the situation in which Martin Hartwell and the three passengers in his bush plane found themselves on a fateful day in late November 1972. Hartwell was flying a charter in his Gateway Aviation Beechcraft 18 from Cambridge Bay to Yellowknife with a pregnant Inuit woman named Neemee Nulliayok, a fourteen-year-old Inuit boy named David Pisurayak Kootook suffering from appendicitis, and a nurse named Judy Hill.

  Something went terribly wrong en route, and the plane crashed into a hillside near Hottah Lake, north of Yellowknife and east of Great Bear Lake. Judy Hill was killed on impact; Neemee Nulliayok and her unborn child died the next night. Martin Hartwell and David Kootook survived the crash; both of Hartwell’s ankles were broken.

  A massive search-and-rescue effort was mounted in the days to come, but no sign of the downed plane was found. The weather was brutally cold, at times dipping toward –40°. With no help on the way and the pilot barely able to walk, David rose to the occasion and kept the pair alive as long as he could. He erected a tent from the plane’s engine covers, made and tended the fires that kept them warm, fished at a nearby lake, and gathered lichen for them to eat.

  Miraculously, Hartwell was found alive after thirty-one days, when a passing commercial aircraft picked up a signal from his emergency radio beacon. Sadly, David was dead by then, the result of complications related to his appendicitis.

  Yet the rescuers’ most grisly discovery was yet to come. When they happened upon the crash site, it became evident that Hartwell had survived by eating Judy Hill’s flesh. Many observers were quick to condemn the act, but it illustrates that for all the romance associated with bush flying in remote regions, things sometimes do go terribly wrong.

  Carl has certainly had his fair share of chilling experiences. And as I so often heard during my time in Yellowknife, Joe was there to help Carl in his times of need. “Joe’s a temperamental guy sometimes, but he went out of his way to get me out of the bush,” Carl said.

  When Carl blew an engine on his pride and joy, the yellow Cessna 180 parked in front of his cabin, he again had to improvise the landing, this time on a remote lake sixty-eight nautical miles from Yellowknife. “So I paddled the plane to shore and got on my satellite radio and had a guy come pick me up. Well, now I need an engine.”

  Securing an engine for the 180 was not a problem, but getting it back to the plane was a little more challenging. Enter Buffalo Joe, the secret philanthropist. “Joe shipped the engine up from Penhold, then flew it into the bush in his Norseman. Joe brought two of his people there with him, and we changed the engine right there in the bush.” The job took two days.

  It’s this kind of attitude, an attitude born of shared recognition of just how special life’s circumstances are for northern bush pilots, that fascinates me. And as I came to spend more time reacquainting myself with Yellowknife, the North, and the people who build their lives there, I gained new appreciation for what it means to live in a houseboat on a great northern lake with a plane sitting in your now-frozen front driveway. The beauty of such a life is not lost on Carl. “Even when I flew commercially—and no matter who I flew for—it was never a job.”

  It struck me that Carl Clouter has likely stood on a lonely patch of tundra a number of times in his life and been the first two-legged creature ever to set foot on that piece of earth. We sat with that notion for a while, the calm silence between us, two men enjoying the moment.

  He drew long on his pipe and looked out the window. “You oughta hear a bear when it comes out of its den in the spring,” he said softly. “The den is starting to melt, and everything is dripping on their fur. Well, they come out and they got icicles hanging all over their fur. And when they walk, everything is tinkling, like a crystal chandelier.

  “You have to be in the bush to see that.”

  * * *

  The Flying Knight of the Northland

  He was the bush pilot who went by many names. Aboriginals of the north dubbed him “Snow Eagle”; non-aboriginals called him “White Eagle.” To the press, he was “the Flying Knight of the Northland.” No matter what his nickname, Clennell Haggerston “Punch” Dickins (pictured on page 172) was a pioneer of northern aviation.

  Born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, at the turn of the twentieth century, Punch
fought with the Canadian armed forces in World War I, where he became a bomber pilot. When he returned in the early 1920s, he was one of the first pilots to join Western Canada Airways, one of the airlines credited with opening up the West and North to the age of aviation.

  Punch played a huge role in charting the unmapped Barrenlands of the North, flying more than a million miles in his career, often in treacherous weather conditions, with unreliable navigation aids and few landing strips. In 1928, Dickins flew one of the first aerial surveys of Canada in a Fokker Super Universal. In January 1929 he delivered the first airmail to the Northwest Territories, stopping at ten communities between Waterways, Alberta, and Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories. In classic Punch fashion, he extended the trip to Aklavik, in the bargain becoming the first pilot to ever fly the entire length of the Mackenzie River.

  Punch’s final flight came after his death, in 1995, when his ashes were scattered by his son John along the Mackenzie River.

  HAY RIVER

  By northern standards, Hay River is a substantial place. With a population of almost four thousand residents, it is the second-biggest in the Northwest Territories, and also one of its most affluent. The town stretches alongside the muddy waters of the river that bears the same name, streets laid out in tidy rectangles.

  Yet as close as Hay River may be to Alberta (it’s less than one hundred kilometres north of the provincial border), the town still has that unmistakable Northern feel. Dirt roads vie for dominance with their paved counterparts. Small, unassuming houses share streetscapes with seventeen-storey buildings. And like Yellowknife to the north, the town boasts a population of Native and non-Native residents that together bring the town’s cultural mosaic to life.

  That mosaic was alive and well the night the Hay River Chamber of Commerce held its annual gala, a night of food, drink, and fun where members of the town’s business community come together to celebrate themselves. That night, though, was a particularly important one for the McBryans. The chamber was about to unveil a commemorative five-dollar coin that could be used as currency at any Hay River business. The face on the coin? Joe McBryan’s.