Bush Pilot Crashed in a White-Out Near Whitehorse in 1973 — Says A Sasquatch Rescued Him

Bush Pilot Crashed in a White-Out Near Whitehorse in 1973 — Says A Sasquatch Rescued Him

Carried from the Ridge: A Bush Pilot’s Secret in the Yukon

I have logged just over 19,000 hours in single-engine aircraft across 41 years as a commercial bush pilot in the Yukon Territory. In all that time I crashed exactly once—November 4, 1973. I should have died in the wreckage. I should have died of exposure. I should have died trying to walk out. I did not die. The one who carried me down off that mountain was not a man. He was not human. I have kept that secret for 52 years because I made a promise, in a way that did not involve words, that I would.

My name is Glenn Coltrain. I was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1947 and came north to the Yukon in 1966 after flying coastal supply runs out of Prince Rupert. The Yukon in those years swallowed pilots whole. The country was too big, the weather too unforgiving, the navigation too primitive, and the margin for error too thin. We flew Beavers and Otters and the occasional Norseman—machines that could land on a frozen lake the size of a postage stamp and take off again with a thousand pounds of cargo. We flew prospectors, trappers, government surveyors, mail to communities with no other connection to the outside world, sick people to hospitals, and the dead home for burial.

I worked for Northern Reach Aviation, run by Floyd Marston out of a Quonset hangar on the south end of the Whitehorse airport. Floyd was sixty-four when I started. He had been flying the Yukon since the Alaska Highway was built. His face was cracked leather; his left hand was missing the last two fingers from a propeller incident in 1951. He could fly an Otter through a blizzard with the precision of a man threading a needle. He hired me on the spot in the spring of ’66 and taught me everything I needed to know to survive in country that did not forgive mistakes. “The Yukon will try to kill you at least once a year,” he told me on the first day. “The trick is to make sure each attempt fails.”

By the fall of 1973 I had been flying for Floyd for seven years. I had married Doris, a schoolteacher from Whitehorse, in 1969. Our daughter Patty was two years old that November. We rented a small house on Black Street and were starting to talk about buying a place of our own. Life was good.

The job that morning was a supply run to a placer mining outfit on the upper Pelly River run by two brothers, Lloyd and Wesley Decker. They had radioed two days earlier asking for staples, fuel for their generator, and a part for a sluice pump. The morning of November 4th dawned cold and bright—minus 18 Celsius on the ramp, deep cobalt sky, light and variable winds. The forecast for the Pelly drainage was good through mid-afternoon with a possible front moving in from the northwest around dark. I would be back well before then.

I pre-flighted the 1956 de Havilland Beaver I had been flying as my primary aircraft for almost three years. Skis were properly serviced. Fuel was topped off in both wing tanks and the belly tank. Cargo—cases of canned goods, bags of flour, the heavy iron pump part wrapped in burlap—totaled about 900 pounds, well within limits. I filed a flight plan, signed out, and started up at 8:45 a.m. By 9:00 I was airborne and climbing east.

The flight from Whitehorse to the Pelly takes about an hour and forty minutes in a Beaver. I followed the Yukon River northeast to Fort Selkirk, then turned east up the Pelly Valley toward the headwaters. The Decker claim was on a tributary called the Ross River about thirty miles east of where the Pelly crosses the Robert Campbell Highway. I had flown the route four times that summer and fall. I knew the country.

The first half of the flight was uneventful. I cruised at 4,000 feet. The Yukon in November is a study in white and black—white snow on the ground, black spruce forest thick and unbroken, black water where the current kept channels open. I crossed Fort Selkirk at 9:52 and turned east. Air smooth, visibility unlimited, engine running clean. My flight bag held the usual Yukon pilot’s kit: signal mirror, waterproof matches, fixed-blade knife, two days of tinned rations, wool blanket, small axe, and a .30-30 lever-action for bears.

I picked up the Ross River drainage around 10:30. The Deckers had cut a strip on the river ice about half a mile downstream from their cabin and marked the threshold with spruce boughs. I overflew once, checked the windsock, and landed. We spent about forty minutes unloading. They paid me in cash, gave me coffee, and Wesley wrapped a slab of fresh moose meat in waxed paper and pressed it into my hands for Doris. I took off at 12:18 p.m. Weather still clear, wind still light. I climbed west, turned down the Pelly, and started the ninety-minute flight home.

Thirty minutes later, somewhere over the country between the headwaters of the Pelly and the Yukon River, the weather changed. I had been watching a thin band of high cirrus forming to the northwest. Cirrus is usually the leading edge of a front, but it does not produce whiteouts. What happened next was unlike anything I had experienced in seven years of flying the Yukon. The cirrus thickened, then dropped, then kept dropping faster than I had ever seen weather drop. Within three minutes visibility ahead degraded from unlimited to maybe ten miles. Within five minutes it was down to two. Then, in the space of perhaps ninety seconds, the sky simply closed. A wall of gray-white came down off the ridges, blew across the valley floor, and swallowed the Beaver whole.

I lost the horizon. I lost the ground. I lost the dark line of the spruce forest. Everything outside the windows became the same featureless glaring white. I was suddenly inside an instrument flight situation in an airplane not equipped for it, flown by a pilot not trained for it. A true whiteout is the complete elimination of visual reference. Your eyes have nothing to fix on. Your inner ear has no way to tell you which way is up. Within thirty seconds an untrained pilot begins to experience spatial disorientation.

I went on the gauges immediately—attitude indicator, altimeter, airspeed, heading indicator, vertical speed. The Beaver had all of them, though the attitude indicator was an older vacuum-driven unit I had never fully trusted. I throttled back to seventy knots, just above stall with the load I was carrying, and tried to maintain altitude. I was at 4,000 feet. The terrain underneath rose to around 3,000 feet on the highest ridges. I had a margin of about a thousand feet if I could keep the airplane straight and level.

I tried to turn back. I started a slow left bank using the attitude and heading indicators together. After perhaps thirty seconds the attitude indicator began to drift. I corrected with rudder and aileron; the instrument kept rolling. The gyro had tumbled or the vacuum pump was failing. I no longer had a reliable attitude reference. I tried the turn-and-bank indicator, but the cognitive load of flying straight and level in a whiteout with only that and the altimeter is enormous. I lost altitude without realizing it at first. By the time I had the airplane back under control I was at 2,900 feet and no longer knew which direction I was heading.

The next forty-five seconds are the most vivid memory of my life. I was flying at what the instruments told me was straight and level at eighty knots in a whiteout so complete I could see nothing outside the cockpit. I knew the terrain reached close to 3,000 feet. I had no way to know if I was flying into a mountain. I never saw what I hit. The first warning was a high, ripping, tearing sound as the tops of black spruce trees sliced into the leading edges of the wings and the nose. The Beaver lurched. The propeller bit into something heavier than wood. The engine screamed as the prop tips deformed. The windscreen filled with green and brown and white. The right wing struck something solid and the airplane began to cartwheel.

I do not remember the impact. I lost consciousness somewhere in the cartwheel. The next thing I was aware of was the smell of gasoline and cold air on my face. I was upside down, hanging from the seat belt. My head was pounding. My left arm was numb. Blood ran down the side of my face. Through the shattered windscreen I could see white ground and the dark trunks of broken spruce. I released the belt and dropped onto the inverted ceiling. My left arm was broken in two places—humerus snapped about six inches below the shoulder, radius fractured at the wrist. Both closed fractures. The pain was beyond anything I had ever experienced.

I crawled out through the broken windscreen, dragging myself across snow and glass and shattered wood. I got maybe ten feet from the airplane before assessing the rest of the damage. Forehead gash already slowing. Left arm useless. Right arm worked. Legs both worked, though the right knee was painful and swollen. Ribs hurt with every breath, but lungs were not punctured. I was alive. The airplane was not on fire. The whiteout was still total—visibility maybe twenty feet—and snow was falling heavily. Temperature somewhere around minus 25 Celsius with a wind cutting through my parka.

I went back into the wreckage and recovered what I could: flight bag, cracked-stock .30-30, wool blanket, axe, matches, rations, the slab of moose meat. I sat in the snow and tried to think. I was probably ninety miles from the nearest road, a hundred and twenty from Whitehorse. My flight plan had me overdue at 2:30 p.m. Floyd would not start organizing a search until the weather cleared, which could be hours or days. The emergency locator transmitter in the tail had not activated and would not switch on manually. Radio was dead. I had no way to call for help and no accurate position because I had been off course when I went down.

I made the decision to walk out—the worst decision I could have made, but at the time it seemed the only option. The wreckage was tucked into thick spruce on a steep slope, hard to spot from the air. I oriented myself as best I could. The whiteout was lifting slightly—maybe forty feet of visibility. The slope ran downhill to what I estimated was the southwest. If I walked downhill I would eventually reach a creek or river drainage, follow it downstream, and find the Pelly or the Yukon or a trapper’s cabin. I tied the blanket around myself like a cape, tucked matches, rations, and moose meat into my pockets, left the rifle and axe, and started walking.

I made it perhaps a quarter mile. The snow was deeper than I had estimated—up to my thighs in places. Breaking trail with one good arm while the broken left arm dangled and screamed with every step was the most exhausting physical effort of my life. My right knee started to give out. Fingers went numb. Heat left my face and feet. I sat down against a large spruce to rest and knew that sitting was dangerous. I closed my eyes for a moment.

When I opened them he was there.

He stood about fifteen feet away, half-hidden by a spruce. He was tall—easily eight feet, maybe more—broad through the chest and shoulders, covered in dark hair that looked almost black in the low light. The face was partially visible: heavy brow, deep-set eyes, wide nose, a jaw that was neither fully human nor ape. He watched me with a focus that was not animal. There was intention in that gaze, awareness, the clear recognition that I was being measured.

I tried to stand and failed. He stepped forward. I flinched. He stopped, tilted his head slightly, then came closer. He crouched. The smell of him was heavy, musky, part animal and part something else, thick enough to taste but not the smell of rot. He reached out one enormous hand and touched my broken arm, the pressure careful, testing. Then he slid his arms under me—one under my knees, one behind my back—and lifted me as easily as I would lift a child. He stood and began walking uphill, away from the direction I had been going, deeper into the timber and higher onto the ridge.

I do not know how long he carried me. The whiteout continued. Snow fell. The temperature dropped. I drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of the steady rhythm of his walking, the warmth of his body against my side, the careful way he adjusted his grip when the terrain steepened. At some point the light faded entirely. Night came. He kept walking.

He stopped at a recess in the rock—a shallow overhang on the side of a ridge, protected from the wind, with a floor of dry spruce needles and a natural windbreak of boulders. He set me down carefully. He had already prepared the place: a bed of fresh spruce boughs, a small fire circle of stones, a pile of dry wood. He built a fire with practiced efficiency—tinder, kindling, larger sticks—and the flames caught quickly. He left and returned a short time later with a bundle of something that looked like dried meat and a quantity of what I later realized was berries or roots. He placed the food near me and gestured for me to eat. I managed a few bites. He sat at the entrance of the recess, watching the darkness, and did not move for a long time.

Sometime in the night I woke to find him still there. The fire had burned down to coals. He added wood. He looked at my arm again, then at my face, and made a soft sound—low, almost a hum. I slept again.

In the morning the whiteout had lifted enough that I could see the country. We were high on a ridge overlooking a broad valley. He was gone when I first woke, but he returned within the hour carrying a long, straight birch branch, a quantity of the fibrous inner bark that local people used for cordage, and a flat piece of wood he had worked smooth on one side. He sat beside me, looked at my broken arm, and gestured for me to extend it. I did.

He placed the flat wood along the inside of my arm from shoulder to elbow, supporting the broken humerus. He broke the birch branch carefully against his knee until it was the right length and placed it along the outside. Then he wrapped the inner-bark strips around the splints and my arm, securing them in place. He worked methodically, his enormous fingers moving with a precision that was almost delicate. When he finished, my upper arm was immobilized between the two splints in exactly the configuration I would have used myself. He did the same for the wrist—smaller wood, shorter branch, more bark strips—immobilizing the joint above and below the fracture the way an emergency-room doctor would.

I have thought about this for fifty-two years and I cannot adequately explain what I witnessed. Whatever he was, he understood human anatomy. He understood that broken bones need to be immobilized in straight alignment with rigid supports both above and below the fracture. He had selected appropriate materials, prepared them properly, and applied them with skill. He had done in about fifteen minutes what would have taken me hours, even if I had been able to do it with one hand.

I asked him out loud, “Where did you learn this?” The words came out before I thought. He looked at me, tilted his head, and made a soft sound of acknowledgment. Then he finished tightening the last wrappings. When he was done he sat back on his heels and looked at me. I held the arm out, testing. The splint was firm. It did not pinch or cut off circulation. It was a proper field splint executed correctly. I tried with my eyes to communicate gratitude. He held my gaze and nodded—a small, unmistakable dip of the head, the same gesture a man would make to acknowledge another man’s recognition.

He gave me more food. I ate. Strength returned. The pain lessened now that the arm was immobilized. He stood and gestured for me to come with him, pointing downslope to the southwest. The meaning was clear: it was time to go. He would take me down. I stood. He stooped slightly so I could put my good arm around his shoulder and supported me on his right side as we left the recess.

We walked for most of the morning. He matched his pace to mine, going slowly, supporting my weight on difficult sections, breaking trail where the snow was deep. When my knee buckled he caught me. When I stopped to rest he waited. He carried me across a creek where the ice was thin. After about three hours we came to a clearing where the creek joined a larger river. He stopped at the edge, pointed across the clearing downstream where the river bent around a stand of birch, and made a single low tone. Through the birch I could see the unmistakable shape of a trapper’s cabin—smoke rising from the chimney, a sled and dog team in the cleared area in front. The cabin was perhaps a quarter mile away.

He stepped back into the timber, partly hidden by a large spruce. This was the limit. He would not come any closer. He had brought me as far as he could. I tried to thank him. I said the words several times and tried to communicate that his secret was safe, that I understood what he was and what would happen if the world knew, and that I would protect that knowledge for the rest of my life. He looked at me with patient eyes. Then he stepped forward one step and extended his hand. I extended mine. His fingers closed around my hand and wrist—careful, controlled, gentle. He could have crushed the bones without effort. He did not. He held on for perhaps three seconds, then released me, turned, and walked into the timber. Within ten steps he was gone, swallowed by the spruce so completely I could not have said which direction he had taken.

I walked across the clearing. The trapper, a man named Reuben Gates, came out to meet me, alerted by his dogs. He took one look at the splint, the swollen face, and the state of my clothing and got me inside without questions. He fed me, gave me hot tea, looked at the arm, and said the splint was a good piece of work. He asked who had done it. I told him I had managed it myself. I do not know if he believed me. He did not press.

Reuben had a battery-powered shortwave. That evening he raised the RCMP detachment at Ross River. They relayed word to Whitehorse. The next morning the weather had cleared enough for a search aircraft. A Beaver from Northern Reach landed on the river ice in front of the cabin. The pilot, Doug Henderson, a friend of mine, did not recognize me at first. He told me later I looked like I had been buried and dug up.

The story I told Floyd and the investigators was simple: whiteout crash, unconsciousness, recovery of supplies, walk downhill, shelter under a rock overhang, self-splinted arm using sticks and bark, continued walking until I reached Reuben’s cabin. They wanted to know how I had managed the splint with one hand. I told them necessity is a great teacher and that I had used my teeth to hold the bark strips. The investigation closed with a finding of weather-related forced landing. Insurance paid. Floyd ordered a replacement Beaver. I was back in the air by the spring of ’74 with a knitted arm and a permanent slight stiffness in the right knee.

Floyd never quite believed the story about the splint. Six months later in the hangar he looked at me and said, “Glenn, that splint you came out with was the work of somebody who knew what they were doing. There is no way in hell you did that to yourself with one hand and your teeth.” I did not respond. He did not press. Floyd was the kind of man who knew when a question was meant to be unanswered.

I flew the Yukon another thirty-five years. I retired in 2008 when my eyes started to give trouble. In all those years I never flew over that drainage without thinking about him. I never crossed the Pelly Valley without scanning the timber on the ridges to the north. I never told Doris the full story until 1998, twenty-five years after the crash, sitting on the porch of our house in Whitehorse. She listened without interrupting. When I finished she was quiet a long time. Then she said, “I always wondered what kind of man came home to me after that crash. I knew you were different. I think I understand now.” She did not ask if it was true. She did not ask for proof.

Patty knows now too. She is fifty-three, a teacher in Whitehorse like her mother. I told her last spring, after Doris passed in 2021. Patty asked what he was. I told her I did not know in any scientific sense. I had read the accounts over the years—the stories, the alleged sightings, the photographs, the footprint casts. None of them captured what mattered most: the intelligence in his eyes and the deliberate care with which he had treated me. The accounts made him out to be either a monster or a kind of mysterious ape. He was neither. He was a being. He was someone. He had a mind and a method and a kind of wisdom I have not encountered in any human being I have known. He had saved my life because he chose to. He had done it the way a competent person does competent work—with patience, skill, and attention to detail. And he had let me go with the clear-eyed knowledge that contact between his kind and mine was dangerous for both of us, but that some moments are worth the risk.

I have a piece of birch bark in my desk drawer—the piece he twisted into a cup for me. It is old now, dry and brittle, but you can still see the precise folds. Whatever fingers shaped that piece of bark understood how to make a cup from a flat sheet using only knowledge, pressure, and time. I run my thumb along the fold where his hand pressed it and I remember.

I have read what I could find about the indigenous traditions of the Yukon and northern British Columbia—the Tlingit, the Kaska, the Tahltan, the Gwich’in. The stories vary in detail but share certain features: the beings are tall, strong, intelligent; they live in the deep country; they generally avoid humans but have on rare occasions intervened; they are not enemies and not friends; they are simply other peoples, neighbors with whom one shares the land; the appropriate response is respect.

I have come to believe the traditions are correct. I have also come to believe he was old. The gray in his hair was real. He had lived a long time, longer than any human lifespan, and he had seen many winters and many storms and many lost things in the snow. The skill with which he splinted my arm was the skill of a being who had done it many times before—perhaps for members of his own kind, perhaps for the occasional human who had stumbled into his territory in trouble.

The silence around these encounters is part of what protects them. I am breaking that silence now because I am seventy-eight years old and I do not know how many more years I have, and I did not want the story to die with me. The world is larger and stranger than the world we have been taught to see. There are beings in the forests of the Yukon and in the forests of every country that still has true wilderness. They are not myths. They are not legends. They are real, and they are intelligent, and they are kind. They have been here longer than we have. They have watched us spread across the continent and cut down the forests and build our cities and our roads, and they have stepped back into the parts of the land we have not yet ruined, and they have continued to live their lives. They are not enemies. In some sense I do not have the philosophical vocabulary to fully articulate, they are our cousins—the branch of the family that did not come down out of the trees and start building things, the branch that stayed close to the earth and the seasons and the deep patience of forests.

I have spent fifty-two years thinking about him. I have spent fifty-two years carrying the weight of what he did for me and the weight of what I owe him and the weight of the promise I made without words. I am breaking that promise now, but I do not think he would mind. I think he understood even then that some stories need to be told eventually, when the teller is old enough and the listener is ready enough. I have chosen now.

My name is Glenn Coltrain. I was a bush pilot in the Yukon Territory for forty-one years. I crashed once in 1973 in a whiteout near the Pelly drainage about 120 miles east of Whitehorse. I should have died. I did not die because a being came down off a ridge, picked me up out of the snow, carried me to a shelter he had prepared, gave me food and water, stayed with me through the night, splinted my broken arm in the morning, and walked me down to a trapper’s cabin where I could be rescued. He was real. He was kind. He was, in every way that matters, a person even if he was not human.

The Yukon is full of country we will never fully know. The mountains hold their secrets the way they have always held them. Somewhere up on that ridge, in that recess in the rock, there is a bed of spruce boughs that has long since rotted back into the earth, and a memory that has not. I have flown over that country a thousand times in the years since and never seen him again. But I have felt him there the way you feel someone in a room before you turn around. He is still up there. He is still walking those ridges. And I am still alive because of him. Every breath I have taken for the last fifty-two years has been a breath he gave me. Every morning when I wake up in my house in Whitehorse and look out at the dawn coming up over the mountains to the east, I think of him and I say thank you. And I mean it the way I meant it when I tried to say it to him in a clearing in November of 1973 with my arm in a splint he had made and my heart full of a gratitude I could not begin to express.

The mountains are watching. They always have been. And whatever lives up there is patient, and it is kind, and it is waiting for us to grow up enough to understand what we share the world with. I hope we will. Because the world that contains him is a better world than the world that does not.