"Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"

Clayton Brockel with his plaque memento.

WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’ GOIN’ ON

March 2009

In the early 1980s, friends of Jean McMaster were tearing down the lean-to attached to the back of her log-cabin dance studio near Kenai when they came across an old brass plaque hanging on the wall in a room that had been used for radio-dispatch calls to the Kenai volunteer fire department. The rectangular plaque had grinder marks on each corner, as if bolts holding it in place had been sheared off to remove it. Stamped into the metal was the name of the manufacturer: the Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel Co. And below that were four lines of data: Whatever the plaque had been attached to had been erected in 1952 and had a capacity of 150,000 gallons. Its “upper capacity level” was 147 feet, 6 inches, while its “lower capacity level” was 120 feet, 2 inches.

Long-time area educator, Gene Morin, whose daughter and son-in-law had been helping to dismantle the lean-to, realized what the plaque was, and he thought he knew who might like to have it….

*****

Back on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, Clayton Brockel, the 37-year-old director of Adult Education and recently appointed director of the new Kenai Peninsula Community College, had just finished another week of work and was planning to wind down. He climbed into his 1960 white, two-door Chevy Corvair and headed west out of Kenai toward the Wildwood Army Station, where he was a civilian regular at the Friday evening social hour.

He arrived in front of the Officers Club at approximately 5:30 p.m., parked in front of a four-by-four post supporting an electrical plug-in, and then strolled inside. The Officers Club consisted of three stories—an upstairs quarters, a downstairs mess hall, and a basement bar and social area—and Brockel walked in through the front door and headed down.

“I walked in, and I recall that someone said he wanted me to meet this new officer,” said Brockel, now 82. “So we shook hands, and, about the same time that we shook hands, the earthquake started.” The time was 5:36 p.m.

The epicenter of the quake, which would become known as the most powerful ever recorded in North America, was about 80 miles east of Anchorage. From its focus deep inside the earth, surface waves were generated that rippled through communities, fracturing foundations and warping the ground so that trees tipped wildly in the undulations.

At Wildwood Station, the Army’s red-and-white water tower was easily the tallest structure, rising nearly 14 stories above the low buildings and grid-like network of roads on the base. It stood directly across a narrow road from the Officers Club, about 200 feet away.

When the surface waves reached the base, they caused the tower’s huge reservoir, containing more than a million pounds of water, to rock back and forth like the more-limber trees. The waves destabilized the tower, and the entire structure came crashing to the ground.

The concussive force of water and air shot outward from the point of impact, driving the back window of Brockel’s car through the vehicle, smashing out the front windshield as it exited. The driver’s-side door bulged and bowed under the pressure as glass fragments littered the Corvair’s interior and embedded themselves in the back of the front seat. The car itself was slammed through the four-by-four post and shoved up onto the snow-covered lawn of the Officers Club.

Inside, no one was sure at first what was going on.

“We couldn’t move in the basement,” Brockel said. “It was shaking that bad. We were hanging on to anything we could hang on to.” And then the tower fell.

Remains of the Wildwood water tower. Officers Club is visible in background.

A huge booming sound could be heard inside, and the impact of the tower striking the ground could be felt throughout the building. The high windows on the tower-side wall of the basement were blown inward, and water began surging in through the vacant window frames.

“The lights went out in the club, and the emergency lights came on,” said Brockel. “And someone said, ‘My God, it must be a bomb!’ We couldn’t see anything. We couldn’t see outside.”

Outside, across Alaska, devastation was being wrought. Parts of downtown Anchorage were being reduced to rubble. Ocean waves were being generated that would kill dozens of people in southcentral coastal communities, and the death toll statewide would rise above 100. Vibrations from the quake were felt over a land area of more than a million square miles, and quake-generated ocean waves later affected communities as far away as northern California.

In the Officers Club, one young officer had left his room and headed downstairs for social hour just before the quake struck, Brockel said. In the violent shaking in the stairwell, he lost his balance, toppled downward, and broke his arm. It was the only serious injury to anyone on the base.

“As soon as the ground stopped shaking, we evacuated the building, and when we walked out, we were walking in water,” Brockel said. “I was scared.”

Outside, the evacuating officers and civilians immediately noticed the fallen tower and realized that no bomb had struck the base. Brockel just stood there with the others, stunned by the destruction, and astonished at the fate of his car.

The first human voice that he said he remembers hearing after leaving the Officers Club contained a message of doom. A terrified civilian, who had been on duty at the power plant just down the road, raced around a corner and into view. “It’s all over!” he screamed. “Wildwood is gone!” Fortunately, he was incorrect.

Brockel eyeballed his vehicle and wondered whether it would even start. He tried his luck, pulling open the damaged door and climbing in. He inserted the key, and the engine turned over, so, lacking both a front and back window, he drove back to his home on Walker Lane in Kenai. “It was cold,” he said. “It was awful cold.”

The Corvair wound up in a lot behind Ingram’s Garage in Soldotna. “I parked it back there. I believe it was totaled,” Brockel said. As a consolation, he purchased a 1963 Chevy Biscayne, named it “Old Blue,” and drove it for many years while he was the director of the college.

But the after-effects of the Good Friday earthquake didn’t end with his car. “I was teaching then, as well as being the Adult Education director,” Brockel said. “I was teaching at the Kenai School, on the second floor of that building, and when I went to school Monday morning, I noticed that one of my students was missing.”

The missing student was Larry Damon, son of Frances Damon, the daughter of Clarence and Anna Goodrich, who would later make a generous land contribution to the community college. Both Larry and Frances Damon had been in Whittier at the time of the quake, and both were killed both an ocean wave.

The earthquake experience also affected Brockel psychologically. “I was pretty well shaken up by that,” he said. “I recall that I did not like to go into any building that was over two stories high. Like, if I were to go into Anchorage on business, I was going to stay in a motel. I would never stay in a high-rise. And I wouldn’t stay above the second floor.”

For months after March 27, he also suffered momentary dizzy spells if he experienced any vibrations akin to those in the quake. At school, when kids would walk in front of his desk, the trembling sometimes would upset him. “The damn floor would vibrate,” he said. “And it was the same vibration as the earthquake, and I would momentarily have a dizzy spell.”

Certain elevators in Anchorage had the same effect, and Brockel began to wonder if he was going crazy, until he overheard someone else describing the same phenomenon.

Eventually, Brockel resumed his attendance at social hour in the Officers Club, but things were never the same. Parking his Biscayne sometimes reminded him of how close he had been to still being inside the Corvair when the quake hit. “I don’t know what damage would have been done to my neck and head,” he said. “I’ve often wondered about that. I’m glad I’ll never find out.”

And he remembers the next time he saw the officer to whom he’d just been introduced that day. “I said, ‘Remind me not to shake hands with you again.’ And we both laughed,” Brockel said.

*****

During the clean-up effort that followed the tower’s collapse, one of the civilian contractors hired to help was Carl Haller, who was then married to Jean McMaster. Brockel suspects that Haller came across the section of tower containing the plaque and decided to keep it, so he detached it and took it home.

Nearly 20 years later, long after Haller and McMaster had divorced, the plaque, along with a scattered assortment of other mementos and old papers, was still hanging on the wall of the radio-dispatch room when demolition time arrived.

Gene Morin, who had retired and was visiting that summer from his home Outside, looked at the plaque and thought of Brockel, who was pleased to receive it. “I thought that was pretty neat,” he said. “That water tower became a pretty important factor to me after the earthquake.”

Brockel’s friend, Martin Breitenfeld, made a wooden frame and used brass screws to affix the plaque to the backing. Beneath the plaque he attached a label: “GOOD FRIDAY EARTHQUAKE 1964, Wildwood Station, Alaska.”

That’s all the reminder Clayton Brockel needs these days.

 

 

"Down to Earth, Unfortunately"

The Cordova Airlines plane prior to its crash into Tustumena Lake.

DOWN TO EARTH, UNFORTUNATELY

April 2012

One day in 1966, a visitor came to the office of Harold H. Galliett Jr. and offered him something he didn’t want.

Galliett was a civil engineer at the time, working contractually on a water-and-sewer project for the City of Kenai, and his office was upstairs above the café at the Kenai Airport. His visitor was a friend named Bert Johnston, and the conversation, according to Galliett, went something like this:

“Harold, how would you like to take a ride in a plane?”

“Uh-oh. I suppose you’re going to suggest that we ride in that Grand Commander that I crashed in.”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, forget it. Not only ‘no,’ but ‘hell no.’”

Galliett said he wasn’t afraid to climb back into the Grand Commander, but doing so just seemed like a bad idea. “I just thought I’d had enough of that plane for a while,” he said.

The last time he’d seen the aircraft was during the previous September, and he had been standing on the leading edge of one of the wings as it sank rapidly into Tustumena Lake. As the plane vanished from sight, Galliett steeled himself against the icy water surrounding him and began to swim for his life….

*****

During that same September, only a short time after he’d survived the incident that had resulted in four fatalities, Galliett had a different visitor to his Kenai office: Anchorage businessman Joe Blackard, who began the conversation with, “Harold, I want to buy you a cup of coffee.” Since Blackard was a friend of Galliett’s, he agreed to join him in the café downstairs.

“He got a booth,” Galliett remembered, “and he said, ‘Harold, I want you to tell me the absolute truth.’ I said, ‘Okay. Depends on what you’re asking, but I’ll try.’ He was interested in the condition of the plane just before it sank—and very interested in how far from shore it was.” Turned out that Blackard and his partner, Anchorage helicopter pilot Bert Johnston, were keenly interested in buying the sunken wreckage and salvaging it, but they wanted to first make sure they’d be able to find it.

Galliett, who was also a licensed land surveyor, told Blackard that he was confident in his ability to determine the distance, which he estimated as almost exactly one mile. Besides the “eyeball test,” he said that he also knew—because he’d been wearing a Swiss-style waterproof Wittnauer watch—that his swim to shore had taken him approximately one hour. As an experienced swimmer, he estimated that he had been traveling through the frigid waters at a rate of one mile per hour.

Harold Galliett, a few years prior to the crash.

However, Blackard and Johnston chose not to heed Galliett’s measurements. Instead, after they had paid Cordova Airlines for the plane, they sent hired divers to search only 3,850 feet out from shore because a Cordova Airlines pilot named Gene Effler had flown the area back and forth in his Piper Cub and had estimated that to be the proper distance.

“They tried at 3,850 feet or thereabouts for three or four days, with no result,” Galliett said. “They were getting very worried. They had $9,000 (more than $61,000 in 2012 dollars) into this venture of theirs. It looked like they weren’t going to find anything. It’s a pretty deep lake, and they already knew it (the plane) was about 140 feet deep.”

Frustrated, Blackard and Johnston turned to Galliett’s recommendation. “They got a boat and a rope of measured length, and they got down to the spot where I said it was,” Galliett recalled. “And for three days they fooled around down there, dragging the bottom—and by golly they found the plane, right there, right where I said—pretty close anyway—damn close. And they got it out.”

The accident had occurred on Sept. 4, one mile out from Point Lake, which lies just north of Tustumena’s northern shoreline, approximately halfway between Moose Creek and Bear Creek. By the end of that month they had the plane ashore.

“They worked as fast as they could, but to recover the plane they had to get straps under it and raise it a foot or two (using flotation), drift toward shore with it, and then tighten the straps.” Divers had affixed the straps to the plane, and through this lifting-and-moving strategy, they incrementally raised the aircraft and brought it in to land.

Meanwhile, on the shore they had to make room to beach the plane and create a work area, for it was their intent to repair the aircraft on the spot and then attempt to fly it out. The 42-foot Grand Commander, with its high wings, narrow fuselage, twin engines and eight-passenger capacity, required considerable space for this operation, so they felled a large swath of forest to bring the plane ashore. From there, they hoped to move the wheeled craft through the woods to Point Lake and take off there once the coming winter had formed an icy runway.

“They built a shelter over it, a tent of some kind, and the plane was in excellent condition,” Galliett said. “The propellers were not bent, were not damaged at all. The mechanical was okay, except that the engines were full of water and some silt.” Only the bottom of the fuselage was “pretty chewed up” from its impact with the lake surface during the initial crash. Since doing aluminum work onsite would have been difficult, they trimmed off the sharp edges and covered the holes with treated fabric.

They spent weeks working on the project and hired Tustumena resident Joe Secora to stay onsite and guard the plane when they couldn’t be on hand.

When Point Lake was sufficiently frozen over, Blackard and Johnston climbed aboard, started the engines, and then went rolling across the icy lake until they could lift off. Airborne, they headed for Anchorage—but not without incident.

“They were on final approach at the Anchorage International Airport, and they were close to touching down when one of the engines quit,” Galliett said. “Scary, but nothing fatal at all. They landed with one engine, and they taxied off the line.”

More repairs ensued, including specialized work at the Aero Commander factory in Oklahoma City, and soon the craft was in “first-class condition” again.

*****

Despite Bert Johnston’s generous offer of a flight in the revamped airplane, however, Galliett turned down the opportunity. He said he toyed with the notion of going, but quickly rejected the idea. “I never did take a ride in that thing,” he said, “but I saw it a few times parked along Merrill Field.”

Galliett allowed the memory of his only flight on that plane to suffice for a lifetime, and today—at age 88 and living near Oroville, Calif.—his memory of that trip and its disastrous conclusion is still crystal clear.

*****

The speculation about the cause of the Cordova Airlines crash into Tustumena Lake centers on the fallibility of the human senses in certain conditions and on the need, therefore, to trust one’s instruments.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the crash determined the probable cause to be that the pilot had “misjudged distance and altitude” under “adverse weather conditions.” Given the conditions, in other words, he should have trusted his eyes less and his dials more.

The pilot was 29-year-old Bob Barton—with brother, Bill, owner of Barton’s Flying Service out of Anchorage—who had 5,184 total hours of flying experience, including 403 hours in the type of plane, an Aero Grand Commander, that he was flying that day.

Barton had been a Cordova Airlines pilot for 7-8 years, flying previously out of Cordova, Gulkana and Yakutat. After the crash, he would leave behind a wife named Sharon and a six-year-old daughter named Sandra.

Barton’s first stop occurred sometime 7 and 7:30 a.m. in Homer, where he received two passengers: The first was 27-year-old North Kenai construction worker, Raymond M. Puckett, who had been living for the previous six years with Mr. and Mrs. Tony McGahan of Kenai and who had been a secretary to the Kenai Volunteer Fire Department.

The second passenger was 41-year-old Galliett, a key figure in the Anchorage Utility Company and under contract at that time with the City of Kenai. A qualified navigator himself, Galliett, who was returning to Kenai from Homer where he had been attending a meeting of the Homer City Council, sat in the left front passenger seat immediately behind the pilot.

Under heavy overcast and with temperature at about 50 degrees, Barton took off for his second stop, Seldovia, where he received his final passengers, an elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Antonio Cuerde of Port Graham. Poor visibility forced a one-hour delay, and then, before lifting off the runway at Seldovia at 9:16 a.m., the pilot opted to take an alternate route to his final destination, the airport at Soldotna.

The alternate route called for Barton to fly up Kachemak Bay, passing just south of Homer, and then to turn north up the Fox River drainage. Following the Fox upstream past its headwaters would lead the plane directly over a low rise and then down across the eastern end of Tustumena Lake and onward to Soldotna.

But the approach to the lake presented a problem: Because it was flat calm, the lake surface was like a giant gray looking-glass, and because the cloud ceiling sat only 300 feet above the lake, Barton dropped down perilously close to the water, where at best the horizon may have been little more than a thin line of trees several miles away.

“These lakes in Alaska, these glacial lakes, when it’s calm like that,” said Galliett, “are a giant trap for the unwary aviator because when you get down close to the water during that kind of weather, you can’t tell how high you are just by vision—the water’s so flat and mirror-like. So you really have to watch your altimeter. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. And I think that was a large part of the accident.”

In his official statement after being rescued, Galliett said the first contact between plane and lake surface “was not violent.” He compared it to “a rough seaplane landing” and added that it was “rather smooth for a crash.” Barton, he said, handled the plane well and kept it going straight.

“Then when it might have nosed over, the pilot, to prevent this, ground looped the aircraft 180 degrees to the left, and the right wing hit the water and kept the aircraft upright,” Galliett said. “For some seconds we couldn’t see out because of spray and water running off of the windows.” The plane did not bob up and down, the engines stopped, and there was no noise at all, he said.

After that, however, action was swift.

At approximately 9:40 a.m., the plane, with its wheeled landing gear that was not designed for water, began to sink.

“Almost immediately water started to come through the floor boards,” Galliett said. “I tried to open the left door first by using the normal handle. Then I reached over and tried to use the emergency release, but I guess the door was jammed closed.” He tried slamming into the door with his left shoulder but was unable to budge it. At the end of this day, the only injury that Galliett would sustain was a bruise on his left shoulder from trying to jar open that door.

Then Barton and Puckett managed pop open the hatch on the right side, and Puckett exited quickly, stepping on the prop help him climb onto the right wing. Galliett helped Mrs. Cuerde climb out, followed by Mr. Cuerde, and then Galliett shrugged off his jacket and climbed outside, too. Inside, with the cabin of the plane nearly half full of water, Barton grabbed seat cushions to serve as flotation devices and hurled them out the door, instructing the passengers to take them for safety.

Each of the Cuerdes took a cushion, as did Puckett. Galliett saw another cushion in the water and beginning to drift away from the aircraft. He dived off the wing and swam to retrieve it.

“About this time, the aircraft nosed up, and the plane sank from beneath the other three passengers and pilot,” Galliett said. The pilot, he said, appeared to have no cushion and could consequently barely keep his head above water. When they all began to swim for their lives, no sign of the airplane remained on the glassy surface, the shoreline lay almost exactly a mile in the distance, and it was not quite 9:45 a.m.

*****

Even in the summertime, the silt-laden waters of Tustumena Lake are notoriously cold. Fed by mountain streams and the Tustumena Glacier, the surface temperature is regularly in the 40s, greatly increasing the likelihood of hypothermia and greatly decreasing the likelihood of survival. Tustumena Lake has claimed many drowning victims over the years, but on this day it did not claim Harold Galliett.

Galliett alone was able to swim more than a mile to shore and survive.

In his statement to authorities shortly after being rescued, Galliett said that he placed his seat cushion beneath his left arm and began to swim the side stroke to conserve his energy. After he had swum only about 100 feet, he said, he heard Puckett yell. Galliett turned to look and saw the 27-year-old man sink out of sight.

Galliett’s leather dress shoes began to swell in the water and hindered the effective kicking of his feet. He tried to tread water and remove his shoes, but in the effort he struggled to remain afloat, so he left them on and continued swimming.

The next time he looked back for his fellow passengers, he noticed that the Cuerdes were still moving toward the shore but the pilot had vanished. Before he was halfway to shore, the Cuerdes, too, were gone.

All alone on a 26-mile-long glacial lake, he continued his measured breathing and steady stroke, watching the bubbles from his exhaled breaths trail behind him, counting the seconds it took them to move past, and calculating the speed at which he was moving. With his waterproof Wittnauer watch—a gift from his father—he occasionally checked his time, relying on years of swimming practice to gauge his progress.

When Galliett had attended the University of California in the 1940s, he had been financially strapped and forced to live in the basement of a boarding house occupied by numerous other young men, all of whom would crowd into the single upstairs bathroom each morning. “I couldn’t get in,” he said. “So that got kind of bothersome after a while. I said, ‘Well, hell with this. I’m going to go down to the gym.’”

At the UC gym each morning, he stood beneath the shower, with all the hot water and elbow room he desired, and washed himself and shaved. After a while, however, he discovered that the university had an Olympic-sized swimming pool right outside of the showers, and he decided to add a workout in the water to his time at the gym.

“I figured out how many laps I needed for a mile, and I decided to swim a mile every day,” Galliett said. “And that’s what I did. And I kept it up for several months.”

He had enjoyed swimming since his childhood, especially in the days that he and his family had lived on Oahu. “My mother used to pack us into our old Studebaker, and we’d roll on down to the beach, and I’d be there all day, swimming and trying to surf and whatnot,” he said.

The UC pool and the Hawaiian surf, however, were considerably different than the frigid Tustumena waters, which began to exact a toll on Galliett as he continued to move almost mechanically toward the shore. Despite his exertions, his legs were numb and he was growing steadily weaker.

About 45 minutes into his swim he heard the drone of an airplane, and shortly thereafter he saw a Cordova Airlines Widgeon fly over in a southeasterly direction.

“I tried to wave to attract their attention,” he said, “but every time I would put my arm up to wave I would start sinking, so I thought I better give that up and just try to keep swimming.”

Soon, he said, he noticed that the shoreline was only about 100 feet away, and as he drew closer he felt his feet begin to strike the bottom of the suddenly shallower water.

“I just swam right into the shore,” Galliett said. “I was very cold. I just flopped on the beach and (was) out of breath and almost unconscious. I tried to move and just couldn’t even do that for a while. In fact, I couldn’t even move the cushion.” The time was approximately 10:45 a.m.

He lay there for perhaps a quarter of an hour and then was able to stand and try to walk. He saw a point of land about 50 feet away to the west and began moving down the beach in that direction. From the point, he peered into a small bay and noticed the reflection of what appeared to be metal. On the theory that he was seeing the roof of a remote cabin, he set off with the hope of shelter.

“I was staggering,” he said. “To walk, I had to keep my feet far apart so I wouldn’t fall over sideways.” The cabin was nearly a mile further westward, and along the way Galliett foraged on lowbush cranberries. He also saw several spruce grouse and considered trying to bash one over the head with a stick; instead, unwilling to make the effort to hunt, he drove himself forward.

He arrived at the Pipe Creek Cabin just as he was “beginning to feel kind of alive again,” he said, and unwired the front door and walked in. Inside, he saw a woodstove in one corner, two cots with mattresses in another corner, and, above the stove, a small shelf containing an old-looking can of milk, a can of coffee grounds, and a bottle filled with long-handled kitchen matches.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I got it made now. I’m not even going to be cold tonight. I can put one mattress on top and sleep on one,’” Galliett said, “I didn’t start a fire in the stove. I decided to do it outside. I was going to pull a Robinson Crusoe or something like that—build a fire and have a lot of green wood to dump on it (to make a signal).”

For tinder he employed dry twigs and pages from an old American Rifleman magazine, and soon he had a roaring fire. Then, with the help of a saw from the cabin, he stacked armloads of green branches nearby. He stripped down to his underpants and lay his wet clothing and the contents of his wallet out to dry a safe distance from the fire.

Sometime after noon, he heard another aircraft.

“I was walking around in my shorts, so I grabbed my shirt, dashed down to the beach and started waving my shirt,” he said. “A Cordova (Airlines) C-46 flew over me then, and came back and passed over me about five or six times. I kept waving my shirt and practically jumping up and down, (but) the C-46 didn’t even tip his wings or anything, and he left.”

Shortly afterward, however, the Widgeon returned, landed out on the lake, and taxied in to the shore. The pilot hollered for Galliett to climb aboard, but Galliett said he needed to go back and collect his belongings, put out the fire and close up the cabin first. Behind him, the flames were reaching at least 15 feet toward the sky.

The pilot told him to grab his stuff but not worry about the rest. Someone else would take care of the details, he said.

Inside the amphibious aircraft a few minutes later, Galliett received some dry clothes, which he put on as they taxied out to the area he indicated as the crash site. There they found a rainbow-like sheen of gas and oil, but no bodies, no debris, no cushions.

*****

Galliett was back at work in a few days. His ordeal and rescue were reported in the local Cheechako News and in the Anchorage Times, and later that fall the Grand Commander was salvaged from the bottom of the lake. The bodies of neither the pilot nor the other passengers were ever found.

“I’ve told this story a few times,” said Galliett, now 88, via telephone from his home near Oroville. “It didn’t bother me at the time (because) I felt so lucky to have survived. Who am I to criticize the decisions of the Almighty? Anyway, I made it out. That’s all I can say, really.”

 

Harold Galliett, age 88, at his home in Oroville, California, in 2012.

 

"Hank & the Bear"

Hank Knackstedt, pre-1952, at his original homestead cabin near Mile 17 of the Kenai River.

HANK & THE BEAR

November 2010

“Henry Knackstedt is still alive, though why, neither he nor anyone else knows.” Those are the words of Jim Woodworth in the introductory chapter of his 1958 book, The Kodiak Bear.

Over the course of the next several pages, Woodworth attempts to explain this conundrum as he simultaneously tries to illustrate some of the reasons that bears attack humans. The 1952 mauling of Hank Knackstedt provided his readers with some of the desired answers, while supplying them also with more questions.

To better understand the attack and its aftermath, it is probably best to start at the beginning of the story, Sept. 1, 1952, the opening day of moose-hunting season on the Kenai Peninsula.

At about eight o’clock that morning—which was breezy after several days of fairly steady rain—Henry “Hank” Knackstedt of Kenai was ready to start hunting. More than ready, in fact. He decided that he had waited long enough for his hunting partner, Waldo Coyle, to show up. Further, he decided to leave without him.

Knackstedt, a World War II tank mechanic who had been wounded in Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had traveled to Alaska in 1947, arriving by ship in Seward and then traveling overland to Kenai. He had worked at Libby, McNeil & Libby cannery that summer, and in 1948 had homesteaded on the southern bank of the Kenai River at about Mile 17.

In 1951, he had moved closer to town after purchasing the home and property of Charles “Windy” Wagner at Mile 6 of the river, and it was from there on Aug. 31 that he launched his boat toward his homestead hunting cabin.



Knackstedt at the old Wagner cabin.

After motoring upstream to the cabin, the 39-year-old Knackstedt spent the night and then waited—probably impatiently—for the arrival of Coyle, who lived just 500 feet upriver from the old Wagner property.

Knackstedt and Coyle were good friends, but the depth of that friendship might not have been apparent to the casual observer. According to Knackstedt’s son, Henry, the two men shared a common avocation for commercial fishing and a love of the outdoors, but they were prone to arguments that often resulted in hurt feelings and considerable time spent sulking apart.

“They wouldn’t talk to each other for months because they were pissed off at each other,” said Henry, who now lives on the same piece of land his father purchased from Wagner. “Then Waldo would need a hoe or something, and he’d show up wanting something—or my dad would, perhaps—and it was like nothing ever happened … until the next time.”

Their backgrounds and belief systems were also different enough to cause friction. The frugal, conservative Knackstedt had been born Hans Heinrich Knackstedt in Germany in 1912, and he had immigrated to the United States after World War I. Coyle, on the other hand, was of Irish stock and decidedly less conservative. Both were undeniably stubborn men.

Once, in an attempt to demonstrate how wrong Coyle was about a particular point, Knackstedt reached for a volume from his set of Encyclopedia Britannica; when the book failed to support his view, Knackstedt insisted that the encyclopedia itself was wrong.

Knackstedt with king salmon, pre-1952,

“This (type of behavior) happened all the time,” Henry said. “Even at Christmas dinner, they’d be arguing.”

It is not difficult, therefore, to believe that Hank Knackstedt would be frustrated by Coyle’s tardiness and would choose to set out on his own. He grabbed his old wooden packboard and his 30-caliber Model 1903 Springfield rifle and headed into the woods and the wind, following a well-worn game trail that led in the general direction of a large clearing about a mile inland.

According to Knackstedt’s story in the Woodworth book, he hadn’t gone far when his “woodsman’s eye” made a crucial observation:

“The trail was worn deep into the moss of the forest floor and at this particular spot was about three feet wide. Low brush and the usual rye grass bordered the trail on both sides. It had been raining more or less steadily for days, and every sprig of grass contained great drops of rain. The whole country was saturated, but this section of the trail was dry!

“The water had been shaken from the foliage by something wider than the lower legs of a moose. There were no tracks in the spongy moss-covered trail. It had to be a bear—probably more than one!”

Having no desire to encounter a bear with cubs in thick brush, Knackstedt, who was an expert marksman, according to his service record, decided to angle away from the trail for about two hundred yards before breaking back toward the clearing where he hoped to hunt.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the bears—a sow with twin cubs—had made a similar detour nearby and were now sleeping in the tall grass in a smaller clearing directly in his path.

“Sure that I had missed the bears on the trail, I was walking in a sort of a daze, as men will when dreaming of sizzling moose T-bones,” Knackstedt reported in Woodworth’s book. “I had traveled this area dozens of times with never a sight of a brownie—nothing was farther from my mind. But she was in my trail, and her precious cubs were draped around her hind legs—the wind had been wrong all the time.”

According to Knackstedt’s own version of events, he had been walking without a chambered round in his rifle, believing that “it takes only a second or two to pull down on the magazine safety and work a shell into the chamber.” But he didn’t have one or two seconds.

“A low ominous growl snapped me back to reality. My rifle moved upward even as I turned toward the sound. Not an inch more than 15 feet to my left, the big sow was already in a half-crouch rising to her haunches. After this, I was conscious for three, perhaps five seconds.”

And in those few seconds, Knackstedt recognized an awful reality: He would never get off a shot.

“As I swung my gun upward, I instinctively pulled back the bolt and started it forward when I noticed that the magazine wasn’t feeding. The bolt had failed to pick up a shell!”

Knackstedt’s rifle, like all M1903 Springfields, had a cut-off switch on the left side; when this switch was in the down position, the bolt would not travel far enough back to work a shell into the chamber—even with the safety off.

Later, in retrospect, Knackstedt wondered whether the switch had been knocked by brush into the down position or whether he had failed to make sure that it was pointed up in the first place.

 “It was sure down at the wrong time,” he said, “for at this moment, I could have put a bullet right into her snarling mouth.”

Knackstedt said he remembers jerking his rifle up in both hands for protection from “those murderous claws and that head full of snarling ivory.” He said he had a “faint memory of smelling rotten fish,” and then: “I was out as though a 10-ton truck had hit me.”

 “I lay unconscious in a pool of blood with my left eye gone and the left side of my face and head a gory mess. Part of my skull had been bitten or clawed away, exposing brain tissue to the open air. There was a hell of a big hole in the back of my neck, and my rifle had been tossed 30 feet in the brush.”

When Hank Knackstedt awoke, he found himself face down on ground wet with his own blood and the previous days’ rain. On his back was his old wooden packboard—minus “a few healthy bites”—which may have saved his life after he was battered about the head and neck and knocked out and left for dead.

Knackstedt awoke without a concrete sense of the amount of time passed or the location of his attacker.

He tried to lie still and listen, but his injuries made both movement and the lack of movement excruciating. “Try as I might, it was impossible for me to feign death,” Knackstedt related in Woodworth’s book. “I was breathing heavily and shaking, (and) my body was racked with pain. In desperation I had to move, and if she were still around—well, the sooner the better. I didn’t much care one way or the other.”

Eventually, Knackstedt determined that the bears had departed, and he decided that he must find his rifle and try to signal for help. A U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plane, performing a moose count, flew directly overhead, but those aboard missed the hunter lying in plain view in the little grassy clearing where he’d been attacked.

Grimly, then, he began to crawl and drag himself around until he was able to locate his rifle, and he chambered and fired a few evenly spaced rounds in the hope that they would be taken as signals, and not mistaken for the shots of another hunter. As he awaited a response, Knackstedt passed out a second time.

When he reawakened, he fired his remaining rounds and hoped for the best. And this time luck was on his side.

Waldo Coyle was in the woods nearby and heard the shots. He fired a volley in return and then began moving toward the sound.

For Knackstedt, Coyle’s arrival probably seemed like both a blessing and a curse. Knackstedt certainly wanted to live and knew he needed help, but he probably would have been happier to see almost any person other than his friend. Later, in fact, Knackstedt would partly blame Coyle’s lateness for what had happened, while Coyle, in turn, would constantly remind Knackstedt that he had saved his life.

According to Knackstedt’s son, many years later—after Hank had passed away—Coyle brought Henry into his home to tell him his version of the events that day. “Waldo wanted to talk to me about the past,” Henry said. “He wanted to tell what really happened with my dad. He knew that I’d probably got some wrong information, and he wanted to set the record straight.”

Henry said that he was skeptical at first because of Waldo and Hank’s argumentative past, but he said that Waldo got so choked up as he narrated that in the end Henry believed everything he told him.

“He finds my dad, and my dad was a mess—blood all over the place. A mess. His eye was kind of hanging out—it’s just tore up. And he got my dad up—he was real weak—and my dad didn’t want any help. ‘I’ll find my own way!’ My dad started going off in the wrong direction. ‘No, you need to go this way!’ He kept redirecting Dad to try to get back. The direction to go was toward the Kenai River to get in a boat. He needed to get to Kenai.”

It was difficult, but the lean, shorter Coyle managed to steer the taller, stockier Knackstedt through the woods, and then down a steep wooded bank to the river. There, they began to slowly motor downstream. By the time they had traveled nearly three miles—to the bend where Big Eddy is located—Coyle decided that they needed to rest. He pulled the boat into slack water, and that is when they caught their first big break.

On the high bank above them they spotted a group of soldiers, who had driven in a bus down the graveled Spur Highway to the river either from an Anchorage base or from Wildwood Station to go fishing. “And there was a bunch of medics on board,” said Henry.

The medics immediately went into triage mode. They patched up Knackstedt as well as they could and realized that he needed help far beyond the emergency care they could supply along the river bank. They loaded Knackstedt into their vehicle and rumbled straight for the Kenai Airport.

Already lying on a gurney at the airport was Soldotna’s Marge Mullen, who was 32 years old at the time and was pregnant with (and four days from delivering) her youngest child, Mary. She was about to be loaded onto a waiting airplane when Knackstedt was brought in, all bloody and being carried by a group of G.I.’s. She insisted that Knackstedt be attended to first.

Minutes later, the plane was winging toward Anchorage, where an ambulance would be waiting to carry Knackstedt to Providence Hospital—his second trip to a hospital for a serious injury in only eight years.

On Sept. 17, 1944, Technician 5^th Grade Hank Knackstedt of the 67^th Armored Regiment, 2^nd Armored Division of the U.S. Army, had been shot in the upper-right chest while fighting against Nazi forces in Holland. He had been evacuated from the battle scene to the 111^th General Hospital near Cirencester, England, about 90 miles northwest of London, and he was awarded a Purple Heart 10 days later.

This time, however, Knackstedt’s condition was much more dire.

In the days to follow, he would undergo numerous examinations and procedures, racking up more air miles and some huge medical bills. He would also transform from a locally known bachelor and commercial fisherman to a nationally known “Bear Battler,” photographed in his bandages by the Associated Press.

And his plight would attract unexpected attention from someone thousands of miles away.

***************

A partial list of medical expenses for Hank Knackstedt, 1952:

·         Flight from Kenai to Anchorage                 $11.21

·         Ambulance to Providence Hospital          $20

·         Dr. Milo Fritz (twice)                                       $25

·         Hospital bill (Anchorage)                               $256.65

·         Ambulance to Airport                                    $20

·         Flight to Seattle (+Nurse)                             $281

·         Virginia Mason Hospital (Seattle)              $1,214.92

·         Dr. Carl Chism (Virginia Mason)                  $1,000

·         Eye patches                                                        $15

·         Tooth pulled                                                      $5

On and on the expenses mounted—hundreds of dollars more for insurance, doctor’s fees, clinic fees, medicine, more flights, more procedures. A rough estimate of the medical costs alone incurred by Knackstedt in 1952 totaled nearly $4,700—at a time when, according to government reports, the average American wage earner brought home about $2,300.

Despite being  a commercial fisherman and a dues-paying member of the carpenters union, according to Knackstedt’s son, “it was a fairly bleak existence” economically.

“I know he tended fish traps early on and was also an employee of the Libby McNeil Libby cannery,” Henry said. “He came to Alaska and didn’t want to be beholding to anyone. I think if he made enough money to survive, plus some, that was fine with him.

“When I was a kid, we got most of our stores from the cannery in the fall—some on credit—so we literally owed the company store. Money was always tight through the winter, and Dad always paid his bill in the summer during fishing.”

When Knackstedt arrived at Providence Hospital in Anchorage—with puncture wounds to his skull and neck, his left eye dangling from its socket, and his left cheekbone shattered—he was tended to initially by Dr. Milo Fritz—who would later become a popular physician and politician out of Anchor Point. Fritz patched up Knackstedt as well as he was able, but he knew that his patient needed specialized care and would have to be flown out of state as soon as possible.

Later that day, a Dr. Johnson from the hospital sent a message via the Civil Aeronautics Administration  to Waldo Coyle. It read: “To W. D. Coil Kenai Alaska. Mr Henry Knackstad condition critical. Must go to Seattle on Strato Cruiser tomorrow morning for sure accompanyed by nurse. Come immediately to Anc. Wire answer. They advised the hospital needs some money.”

“I recall Waldo saying that he sent some money as needed,” Henry said. “I asked him if Dad paid him back. Waldo seemed surprised and acknowledged that Dad had paid him back. I know Dad was very particular about being honest with money and promises. He for sure would never have allowed a debt to Waldo to linger any longer than absolutely necessary.”

The next day, Knackstedt was driven by ambulance back to the Anchorage airport and loaded into a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser—a post-World War II commercial jet—and whisked away to the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, where he was treated first by Dr. Joel Baker and later by a surgeon named Dr. Carl Chism.

Meanwhile, back in Knackstedt’s home, his relatives were worried.

In 1951, Hank’s nephew, Ernie Knackstedt, had come with his wife, Laura, and daughter, Sharon, to live with Hank until they could find a place of their own. Laura said that receiving complete and accurate information about Hank’s condition was difficult—especially for her because of the “condition” she was in.

“I was pregnant, so they wouldn’t hardly tell me anything because they thought it would scare me,” she said. It irritated her that the men believed that she needed to be protected, even though she was only three months along.

A week after Knackstedt was flown to Seattle, Dr. Chism sent a letter to Laura to inform her of Hank’s progress. He said that care of Knackstedt had been turned over to him because his main problem now was “primarily one of plastic and reconstructive surgery.”

Chism termed Knackstedt’s general condition “excellent,” although he was still weak. He said that the “main immediate problem” concerned whether or not the left eye could be saved. The amount of reconstruction work to Knackstedt’s eyelid, he said, would be determined by the fate of the eye itself. Additionally, he said, Knackstedt would need a “revision” of his scars after they had healed, and he would also require “some cartilage inserted into his face to make up for the areas of bony loss.”

In the end, Knackstedt would lose the eye and would eschew the notion of a glass replacement. Besides, according to Henry, “someone said he looked good with a patch.”

In Kenai, meanwhile, the laborers and Teamsters were sponsoring a drive to raise contributions to assist Knackstedt with his growing medical tab. Henry still has a list of some of the individuals and businesses who promised to donate to the cause—from $1 to $10 each. Among the more well-known contributors were Herman Hermansen, Larry Lancashire, Joe Cochrane, Les Holt, J.K. Jones, Jack Hinerman, John Stanton, and Howard Binkley.

About this same time, an Associated Press photographer came to Knackstedt’s room in Virginia Mason to photograph the patient, who was shown sitting in a striped bathrobe, the left side of his face almost completely hidden by a large white triangular bandage that began near his high blond hairline. Knackstedt was also interviewed about what the writer would call his “nightmarish experience.”

And across the country at some later date, a woman named Loretta Dunlap—a single mother of three school-age children, living in Fort Wayne, Indiana—would read of Knackstedt’s harrowing misadventure and would decide to write to the handsome bachelor.

Loretta, little Henry, and Hank Knackstedt, early 1960s.

Over the next several years, according to Henry, Loretta and Hank became “pen pals.”

“She had read about him, and she was intrigued,” Henry said. In 1960, Knackstedt—now sporting a black patch over his empty left eye socket—loaded up his big black 1954 Ford in Kenai and drove all the way to Fort Wayne to see Dunlap. Until he arrived, they had seen each other only in photographs.

They got married in Indiana, and in May the new family of five filled the Ford and began the long drive back to Kenai. Nine months later, Hank and Loretta became the proud parents of a fourth child, Henry.

“I did the math,” Henry said, “and I was probably conceived along the way.”

Knackstedt, who died of a heart attack in 1969, spent the 1960s fishing commercially, and raising chickens and a big garden at his home along the river. Henry said that the family had two or three freezers continually full of food, including big game.

Every year, Henry said, his sharp-shooting father would bend his blue right eye onto the sight of his trusty rifle and add another moose to the freezer.

When Knackstedt had been interviewed in 1952, as a patient in Virginia Mason, the reporter had asked him if—in consideration of the mauling—he ever intended to hunt again.

“Of course,” Knackstedt had said. “Just as soon as I’m able. You can’t let the bears chase you out.”

Hank Knackstedt, at home along the Kenai River, 1968.

"Popsicle Plane"

Only the tail of the Super Cub could be seen when the rescuers returned

to try to salvage the plane from the ice of Beluga Lake.

POPSICLE PLANE

May 2010

The problem began with a December goat hunt and four friends in two airplanes.

One of the planes, a red-and-white Super Cub, was owned and piloted by Dr. Elaine Riegle, a Soldotna pediatrician. Sitting behind her in the two-passenger aircraft was Dr. Paul Isaak, a renowned bi-plane pilot and Soldotna general practitioner.

The other plane, a modified cream-and-gold Cessna 170B that had been previously owned by legendary Alaska bush pilot Don Sheldon, was being flown by its current owner, Jerry Near of Soldotna. In the seat to Near’s right sat his friend and fellow pilot, Gene Kempf.

Both planes were affixed with snow skis, and the plan was to make an aerial search for mountain goats in the hills around alpine lakes in the Kenai Mountains, and then, upon spotting some animals, to land on a lake and hike over to wherever the hunting was.

The four companions hoped that snow and cold weather would drive the goats to lower elevations, making them easier targets. With that thought in mind, they departed from the Soldotna airport on Dec. 4, 1971, and headed for the Fox River drainage near the head of Kachemak Bay.

They landed on two lakes there to take a look around. Noting that about 3-4 inches of snow covered the icy lake surface, they scanned for goats, saw none and so they moved on.

They flew south to Bradley Lake, which was about two decades from becoming a major source of hydroelectric power, and which was nestled in the largely treeless mountains just west of the southern tip of the Harding Icefield. It was there that they finally sighted some game.

“We flew in, and I spotted six or seven goats within about 50 yards of the lake,” Near said. He prepared to fly over the animals again and “wiggle the wings a little” to signal the other plane of their good fortune.

Just as he began to make the pass, however, the doctors in the other plane radioed in to notify him that they’d also seen the goats and were already preparing to land.

Near radioed back: “As they landed, I said, ‘How the ice?’ And Doc Isaak came back, ‘Good. All kinds of ice. Good and hard.’ And then I heard some kind of exclamation, and I looked out—and the aircraft has come to a stop and just broke through, fell right to the belly.

“And then the airplane sort of slowly filled with water and began to settle. They got out because the Cub door just folds down, and they had enough sense to roll along the wing but not climb on it. They got wet from about their waist down as they rolled toward the shore.

“And I’m in the air watching this, and I said to myself, ‘Now what am I going to do?’”

What he did first was look for a safer place to land, and he found such a place more than a mile away near a glacial outwash at the head of the lake. He landed on the thicker ice there and ran his plane up onto the beach.

Meanwhile, the half-soaked Riegle and Isaak were walking along the shore in the cold December air. When they finally reached Near and Kempf, the doctors gratefully boarded the four-passenger Cessna and shivered as they were flown home.

“We came back to town,” Near said, “and now we were puzzled: ‘What are we going to do?’”

They acknowledged that, for the time being, thin ice would prevent them from landing near the Super Cub, but they believed that they needed to take some action soon if they wanted to have any chance of rescuing the plane.

Shortly thereafter, Near and Kempf flew in Kempf’s plane back to Bradley Lake to assess the situation. Dr. Isaak followed in his own plane, and the men hauled along with them some “equipment” they believed might be helpful whatever the circumstances: some two-by-fours, some ropes, a semi-truck tire inner tube.

Doing some early shovel work.

Again, they landed at the upper end of the lake, and they carried their gear as they hiked along the shore toward the Super Cub, by this time supported solely by its wings, which were lying flat on the still-intact edges of the ice hole created when the plane broke through. The fuselage was almost entirely submerged and full of water.

Using the boards to stand on and more evenly distribute their body weight near the edges of the ice, the men attached one end of the rope to the inner tube and managed to loop the other end around the tail wheels. They hoped that the inner tube would act as a sort of buoy to keep the aircraft from dropping all the way to the bottom of the lake.

After they returned again to Soldotna, the weather took a turn for the worse. Although they were able to check periodically on the plane and occasionally stash more supplies, it was obvious to them that more snow was dumping on the lake, and that high winds from out on the Pacific Ocean were continuously buffeting the location.

While they awaited a string of nicer days, Near, Riegle, Isaak and their friend Herman Stenga were busy scheming. “There was a whole lot of head-scratching,” Near said. “And we had all kinds of suggestions. One was to get up there with bolt-cutters and cut the engine loose and just forget the rest. We kind of discussed this for weeks and weeks.”

When the proper nexus of time and opportunity finally arrived, it was Jan. 7, 1972, and the temperature was minus-20 degrees.

When the would-be rescuers arrived at the lake, they were astonished by what they saw: Only the tip of the plane’s tail was showing above the drifted snow. As they began brushing snow away from where the rest of the plane should be, they discovered that it was no longer on the surface.

Over the intervening five weeks, heavy snow and cracking ice had produced overflow, and sub-zero temperatures had produced more ice. The Super Cub was now entombed in a 42-inch crust, a sort of icy netherworld between the air above and the water below.

Despite the dire logistics involved, they hoped to find a way to stir up the water around the entombed plane, melt the ice, and free the aircraft.

Isaak had flown to the lake with Riegle and Stenga in his Cessna 180. A Civil Air Patrol pilot had also flown out in to the lake in a De Havilland Beaver to help haul in supplies. They landed as daylight was fading, according to Riegle, who kept handwritten notes throughout the rescue attempt, and when Isaak and the C.A.P. pilot departed, Stenga and Riegle were left alone to set up camp and begin their operation.

In the near-dark on the ice adjacent to the accident site, they erected a small, tan-colored nylon tent. At dinnertime, they used a blowtorch to cook their food.  During the night, the temperature continued to drop, and overflow seeped up through the floor of the tent and into their sleeping bags.

At daylight the following morning, visibility had dwindled to one-eighth of a mile. The temperature was minus-25 degrees, and the wind was beginning to howl. Riegle said she learned later from a report by one of their visitors that area winds by the end of the day were gusting up to 100 miles per hour.

Knowing that their wet sleeping bags and gear posed a danger to their lives, they hiked across the ice for about a mile to a Forest Service cabin, which they established the next day as their primary shelter.

When they headed back through the blowing snow toward the plane, they struggled to find the tent. When they did locate it, they covered it with Visqueen and banked the windward side with snow. They slept one more night in its wet confines, munched on C-rations, and suffered minor frostbite.

On Sunday, Jan. 9, they moved into the cabin, which featured two wooden bunks. To dry out their sleeping bags, they chopped alders into lengths and started a fire in a small woodstove.

Meanwhile, Isaak flew back in to lend a hand, and then Near arrived in his Cessna 170B.

The four of them set to work on the actual recovery of the Super Cub. From the beginning, however, it was clear that little was going to be easy. On this first day of work, they discovered that the fuel line on their small generator had been broken, and then, as they were chopping ice to widen a hole they had recently bored, one of them accidentally let the ice auger slip and it fell through the hole and dropped 60 feet to the bottom of the lake.

Isaak flew the generator back to Soldotna, and on Monday the C.A.P. Beaver arrived with Riegle’s 10-horse Ski-Doo, which she had also purchased from Stenga. The snowmachine provided them with more rapid transit between work site and cabin shelter.

The temperature, according to Riegle’s thermometer, had dipped to minus-30 degrees, but the winds had eased to only 30 miles per hour. Out on the ice, the trio worked in snowsuits and bunny boots or heavy Sorels. They wore woolen caps and heavy mittens and facemasks to stave off more frostbite. Despite these precautions, Riegle, now 67 and a pediatric anesthesiologist in St. Louis, said that for several years after this experience, parts of her face, fingers and toes continued to “react negatively” to cold.

On Tuesday, Jan. 11, they set up a large canvas tent out on the ice to use for equipment maintenance. Inside the tent they placed a Herman-Nelson kerosene-powered heater capable of producing 120,000 BTU’s and providing them with a warm workplace.

Before beginning this rescue attempt, they had taken the dimensions of other Super Cubs back in Soldotna so that they could be fairly certain of the location of each wing tip and the propeller entombed in the ice. In front of the nose of the plane, they chiseled a large hole through the ice, placed a 2x12 plank adjacent to the open water, and then attached two three-horse Johnson outboard motors to the plank as if it were a boat transom.

One of the 3-horse Johnson outboards at work.

As the motors ran, hour after hour, the action of the moving water began to melt the ice nearby, creating a small underwater ice cavern just in front of the prop. They placed a third three-horse Johnson just off the tip of the right wing.

According to Riegle, they broke so many shear pins on the small outboards that they soon began repairing the problem with nails.

By Wednesday, the ice at the front of the plane had melted sufficiently to allow them to drop a cable into the open water and encircle the crankshaft between prop and engine. Then, in order to support the weight of the engine as the ice continued to melt, they began erecting a steel A-frame that would act like the boom on the back of a tow truck.

The A-frame consisted of two long legs—each made up of three six-foot sections of steel pipe held together with couplings—connected at the top, like an inverted “V.” At the top joint was a steel plate with a hole in it from which they hung a pulley to use in a block-and-tackle system. The “foot” end of each leg was bolted to a gusseted steel plate that allowed the entire A-frame to articulate forward and backward, controlled by a series of ropes acting as guy wires.

With a replacement auger, they bored holes in the ice through which to drop the end of each rope, connected to a deadman plate that effectively anchored the rope end into the ice. They employed a come-along to tighten all the ropes and position the A-frame’s apex directly over the prop. With the cable connected from apex to crankshaft, the plane was then secure.

The plane begins to emerge from the ice.



Most of the A-frame work was accomplished on Thursday when the air temperature rose somewhat and the winds decreased. The outboard action near the wing tip had cleared the ice from the surface of the wing itself, and, as the workers moved the outboard to the tail of the aircraft, they were pleased at the progress they had made.

Unfortunately, the weather stopped cooperating on Friday afternoon. Before the temperature plummeted to minus-50 degrees, however, Stenga examined the open water developing around the tail and decided that he should secure a cable to the tail wheel. To do so, he stripped to the waist and reached into the water with the cable in his bare hands.

As the winds continued to intensify on Saturday, Near flew back to Soldotna for more gear and fuel. After he departed, however, Stenga and Riegle ran out of fuel entirely and began to have problems with the starter on their generator. When Isaak dropped by to check on the project and deliver more gasoline, they decided to escape the worsening weather and go home for the rest of the weekend.

They pulled up the outboards and placed them inside the work tent, then climbed aboard Isaak’s Cessna just ahead of a storm. Riegle said that on Sunday the winds at Kodiak were clocked at 110 miles per hour, and 90 miles per hour at Homer. It would be Monday before they could return.

The weather was so bad over the weekend of Jan. 15-16 that returning to the aircraft was out of the question. Riegle and Stenga sat at home in Soldotna over the weekend and contemplated their next move.

Prior to returning on Monday, Jan. 17, to continue the job, they decided to upgrade their equipment. They borrowed two larger outboards—18 horsepower—hoping that the stronger prop action would allow them to melt ice and expose the plane much more quickly.

When they arrived in Isaak’s Cessna, however, they were dismayed to see that they had more work ahead of them than they had expected. “Six inches of overflow had covered everything and had erased all our work from the previous week,” Riegle said. “We spent the entire day moving the tents and campsite.”

Also flying in Monday was Near, who had helped extensively during the first week. Although Near did not stay this time, he did drop off Bob Robinson, whose wife, Jeanne, worked as a nurse in Isaak and Riegle’s clinic. Robinson planned to help complete the rescue.

On Tuesday, with the weather improving (no wind, minus-20 degrees and sunny), they re-set the three-horse Johnsons near the prop and tail and then placed one 18-horse motor at each wingtip. As the outboards chugged along, the rescuers used shovels to clear the snow that had drifted over their work area. For the first time since they had begun this mission, Riegle said, “Everything worked great.”

On Wednesday, their good fortune continued. Although the skies remained clear, the temperature warmed to zero degrees and the day remained windless.

Around the plane, as the ice thinned, they used a steel chipping tool to break it apart. Standing on boards to more evenly distribute their weight, they chipped away, scooping the ice from the water whenever possible. Then, much to their surprise, at about 3 p.m. the left wing of the Super Cub suddenly bobbed to the surface of the water.

It took them a few moments to figure out why the left side had risen first, especially since they had melted ice around the right wing during the first week.

While a three-horse motor had run off the right wing tip, the action of the moving water had melted the ice inside the wing; however, the water inside the left wing was still frozen, and since ice floats, the left wing rose first.

In an effort to more effectively remove the ice from the left wing, Stenga attempted to cut the fabric of the wing itself. In this attempt, he fell into the water but was able to jump to the edge of the ice as he fell, thus avoiding sliding under the wing.

The C.A.P. plane, piloted by Zillman Willis, had arrived just as the left wing had surfaced, and Willis soon returned to Soldotna to tell friends of the rescue team that more help would be needed the next day.

Riegle stayed up all that night to keep the motors running, while the men returned to the cabin to rest. By Thursday morning, which was again windless at zero degrees, a large T-shaped swath of open water revealed the entire airplane.

After Near flew in at about 9:30 a.m., the workers connected the block-and-tackle system to the plane’s sky hook to slowly raise it as the water drained from the fuselage and the wings. By adjusting the angle of the A-frame, they were able to pull the plane forward onto wooden planks placed like ramps under the skis at the edge of the ice.

The plane emerges from its icy tomb.

Next, they extracted all of the gear from the aircraft to lighten the load and then placed a blanket over the engine. Because the engine was the heaviest part of the airplane, the entire craft had canted nose-down, raising the tail above the ice and keeping the engine largely underwater all seven weeks.

Then, through “brute force,” according to Riegle, they began at noon to lift the plane entirely free of the lake. The plane was stable and on the ice by 4:30 p.m. and enveloped in a 50-foot square of Visqueen by 5 p.m.

As a Herman-Nelson kerosene heater blasted away beneath the enclosure, Stenga and Near worked until 2 a.m. to clean up and repair the engine. According to Near, they dried out the plane’s interior, pulled off and dried the magnetos, changed the spark plugs, and drained and replaced the oil and all other fluids. They also replaced the Cub’s bent propeller with a new straight one that they had flown in from town. The temperature under the Visqueen was a tropical 120 degrees.

Visqueen provided a warm workplace to repair the plane.

On Friday, Jan. 21, the weather remained constant: zero degrees, windless and clear. Stenga and Near continued working on the plane. Where Stenga had cut the wing fabric, Near said, they pressed the cardboard from a beer box and duct-taped it into place. Isaak arrived in the afternoon to help. Willis also returned in the C.A.P.’s De Havilland Beaver.

Then, in the early afternoon, Stenga climbed into the cockpit seat and signaled Near that he was ready for him to attempt to prop-start the plane. After several attempts, Near succeeded in engaging the engine. “It sounded awful,” said Riegle.

They allowed the plane to run for a while before Stenga took it out for a test flight, circling the lake at low altitude in a plane with no working gauges or radio. He landed again and told the others that he thought it was safe to fly home. He left Bradley Lake between 4 and 4:30, and arrived at the Soldotna airport at 5:15 p.m.

Back on the lake, the others loaded as much gear as possible into the Beaver and the two Cessnas and headed home. They had to make several more trips out to the lake later in the month to remove the rest of their gear and garbage.

Riegle, who still has nearly a half-hour of Super-8 movie footage she shot during her time on Bradley Lake, said that the two-week effort nearly 40 years ago was “an important event” in her life.

“I remember it like it had just happened,” she said. “I have done many other things in my life, but this one is major. It really shows you the value of true friends. None of us could have done this alone. It took real teamwork to think through the problems and solve the problems.”

Riegle, who has worked 22 volunteer pediatric missions in Africa, China, Central America, Eastern Europe, and most recently in Haiti, understands the value of such teamwork.

“When I was a kid growing up, I wanted three things,” she said. “Become a medical doctor, fly an airplane, and live in Alaska.” She achieved all three of those wishes, and received a chilly adventure in the bargain.