It's only taken me five years to put pen to paper on this.
I was probably supposed to learn my lesson on day three when one of our bush planes crashed on an extremely remote and exposed island beach. Down a plane, there was no way for nine of us to fit into the two remaining Piper Super Cub aircraft. Which meant that three of us needed to stay back, shore up the downed plane from the incoming tide, and wait six or so hours for the rest of the party to come back over the mountain range to pick us up. Naively eager for adventure, I volunteered to stay on Kayak Island and help pull the aircraft out of the tidal zone and find freshwater. In the meantime, my 32-week pregnant wife and 2 1/2 year old daughter were back at the base camp lodge, unknown to any of this.
At first, I thought it was a mosquito that buzzed my ear, but it grew louder. I begged the other two guys to stop and listen to me. When we looked parallel to the water, a tiny outline of a single plane appeared low on the horizon just a few minutes after we discussed our island game plan.
Downed plane on Kayak Island
As the red Piper approached, six hours too early, we immediately knew that something was wrong. Landing on the very beach where the other plane had just crashed, the pilot screamed out the window before he even had a chance to slow down. "Get inside! Get inside! Go, go! Go!”.
Us three guys plus the pilot, squeeze in, nut-to-butt, taking off over the drift wood strewn beach and sharply turning over the icy Pacific not having a clue what is’s going on other than it was urgent.
Fresh tracks
Quickly landing and regrouping with the rest of the crew and the other plane on the mainland we found out a storm was rapidly approaching and the likelihood of rescuing us was slim.
Landing on the mainland beach
And going against the procedure, as the apparent storm front moved closer, the quick-thinking pilot called for everyone's weight to be identified. As a result, we split nine of us into two planes and made our flight over jagged peaks and some of the biggest glaciers in North America. At the end of the day, the crew took 10 days to get back to Kayak Island and repair the aircraft.
Welcome to Alaska.
Crossing the range with the other plane
I was hired to shoot a very remote lodge and its client’s deep in the Wrangle – St. Elias Wilderness, the largest wilderness in America. At nearly 10 million acres, nearly nothing comes close. Yosemite is only 750,000 acres by comparison. And I got to take my family. The lodge, literally grandfathered into one of the newest wilderness' designated places in the USA, now has a veritable monopoly as the sole lodge and outfitter. They only way in and out is by using their flight / piloting services. At $7,900 / person for 4 nights, this was not something I wanted to pass on - especially because we were to be there for 3+ weeks. But early on after a few small weather-related events happened a lot of their guests canceled at the last minute - leaving me and my family as a fifth wheel. The high cost of me flying around with clients in bush planes would be easily covered but without paying guests to underwrite my time, left me and my family high and dry and more or less stuck at this remote outpost.
Me carrying Norah on my back during a hike
After a few weeks of short photo stints, I / we got anxious to get outside of the lodge compound. So the crew offered for me and my family to fly out to an even more remote trapper cabin and drop us off for 24 hours. What could go wrong? Like I said, I should have learned my lesson on day 3.
On one side was a steep drop off into a glacial river. 100 yards the other way was a near vertical mountain. In between the two, amongst a scraggly spruce grove sat a tiny, one window and thoroughly depressing shack that would become our home and refuge.
As soon as the bush plane flew away we were alone on a scale unimaginable. It was beautiful and remote beyond description. We loved it.
Norah and I loving it, before everything changed
The following morning, expecting our 9:00 a.m. meeting, I walked through the spruce grove to the opening where the day before I could see straight up to the 17,000 ft. top of the valley.
I ran back to the shack to get a map of the topo and went back to the clearing. Studying the smaller valleys perpendicular to the broader glacial canyon, my heart sank. This white wall was coming down quickly. Running back to the shack to locate a satellite phone, I glanced at our dwindling food supply. I called the pilot to tell him to come sooner, since we didn't have enough food to last much longer. He wasn't able to make some earlier. A white omnipresence engulfed our camp at 8:30 AM. You weren't able to see 10 meters in front of you. At our 9:00 AM scheduled pick-up time, we heard the tell-tale sound of the Piper circling overhead, unable to land.
The shack
Food rationing has been our first strategy. We had so little that we didn't have much to prepare for. Summer in the northern latitudes meant that there was hardly any darkness. And we found it dark as my wife, a very pregnant woman, and myself crowded into a windowless bedroom closet. We woke up to another day of foggy, humid, shimmering white light and still unable to see more than 10 meters. It was at the end of this day that the depression started. Food supplies were becoming dangerously low, particularly for 32 weeks of pregnancy and 2 1/2 years of age. Zero sign of the lifting of the weather.
Waking up to the same thing on day 3 I think I broke. Lindsey was starting to have small contractions. We had a 4 + day trek to the nearest base, and we didn't have the supplies to get there. We hadn't seen any evidence of animals capturing a bird or a chipmunk. Except for the glacier's roaring noise, I've never experienced such utter silence as there was nothing alive but us. I've always had a .45 Mag on me for a potential grizzly encounter, and at this point I'd welcome one.
Let me have a sidebar here for a moment. I've been struggling with some of the worst hunger cases you can imagine. I've seen food insecurity at extreme levels across entire regions. Refugee camps, where people were dying of starvation. Though I didn't know anything about a father's hunger and debilitating feelings that could not provide for his family or decide who gets which calories. I pray that you will never experience this.
We were out of options, nearly out of food and at the mercy of the weather.
I walked through the foggy dripping spruce again the last morning for a sign of change. I looked down the valley to see a tiny break in the cloud as if it were a tunnel into another world.
I sprinted back and grabbed the satellite phone, with one bar of battery left and rang the pilot. He too saw the hole as he had been camping, with is plane down the valley waiting for this very moment.
The image that I’ll never forget was that bush plane landing on the narrow strip as my wife, carrying my daughter running up hill as fast as she could and the pilot again, hardly throttling down yelling out the window, “Get in! Get in! – go, go go!”.
In a matter of seconds, we were turned around and took off from the grass strip, heading back through the brief break in the cloud. Together and safely the shack disappeared from sight and the deep well of human emotion burst in all of us.
– I will forever be amazed at the resilience of my wife and daughter.
Back at basecamp
