Missing in Alaska Without a Trace

In a fascinating look at the scores of backcountry hikers, mountaineers, hunters, boaters and just plain folks who go missing in Alaska - and there's a lot of Alaska to go missing in - Alaskan writer Craig Medred details a few more recent stories.

Excerpt:

The Nabesna Ranger District of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is an easy place to get lost. Sprawling east from Alaska's Richardson Highway across big river valleys, brushy hillsides and the desolate Nutzotin Mountains all the way to the U.S. border with Canada, the district covers 5 million acres, an area almost twice the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Along the district’s northeastern border, lonely Alaska Highway 1 runs for 125 miles east from a backwoods gas station and convenience store at Gakona Junction to join the Alaska Highway in the comparative metropolis of Tok, population 1,258. Another 145 miles south from there along the Alaska Highway, the only road connecting the 49th state to the rest of the country crosses the White River, so named for the color of the massive load of sediment it moves north from the heart of the Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve past the northern edge of Canada's Kluane National Park and Reserve on the way to the Yukon River.
 
...Spread across almost 38,000 square miles of mountaintops, glacier ice, forests and slopes thick with brush, the Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek World Heritage Site is larger than the state of Maine and far wilder.

Far, far wilder.

Nobody knows for sure how many people have gone into the wild here and never come out.

Read the whole thing.

Russians search for lost '30s-era Soviet bomber in Alaska

On Aug. 12, 1937, the world watched as a massive Russian bomber took off from an airdrome near Moscow. Stalin's war ministry abandoned its usual secrecy and invited Western reporters to see the event. Shutters clicked and cameras rolled as great red wings lifted the Bolkhovitinov DB-A into the evening air. Captain Sigizmund Levanevsky banked the plane over a row of trees and set a course for Fairbanks, Alaska.

The plane was never seen again.

Courtesy Andrey Podolskiy / International Search Expedition for Aircraft N-209Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, proudly ran this photo of the Bolkhovitinov DB-A as it left the ground.

 This year a Russian team, with assistance from the Russian Geographic Society, came to the North Slope village of Nuiqsut, following up on long-forgotten reports that the plane came down off Alaska's Arctic Ocean coast. While they didn't find the wreckage, they learned some details that may help pinpoint its underwater location.

Read the rest here. If the bomber went down where the locals say, it means the navigator missed Fairbanks by around 400 miles. Oops.

Searching the Wilderness

Bad weather and the lack of an emergency beacon registered to the plane are complicating the search for a Piper PA-32 Cherokee that dropped off radar Monday afternoon in the area of the Malaspina Glacier near Yakutat.

Search efforts for the plane and its lone occupant, pilot Alan Foster, have been hampered by rain and low clouds. No Emergency Locator Transmitter was registered in conjunction with the plane, officials said. That's increased the potential search area by hundreds of square miles.

"Had the aircraft been fitted with a 406 MHz ELT, rescuers would likely have been able to focus their efforts on recovery instead of aerial searching," the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center spokesman Senior Master Sgt. Rob Carte said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

The Rescue Coordination Center is organizing the search for Foster, with help from the Alaska Air National Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard, Alaska State Troopers and Civil Air Patrol.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the search was focusing on the pilot's flight path near the last known point where radar contact was lost near the glacier. If that's not successful, searchers will undertake a grid-based ground search, officials say. Search planners and crews are staging closer to the search area to make the most of available daylight and weather.

The rest of the story is here.  Please join me in praying for the rescue of Mr. Foster before it's too late.

Breaking: Wreckage ID'd as 1952 Air Force Cargo Plane

... which killed all 52 persons aboard.

Investigators say pieces of a vintage military airplane discovered on a glacier in the mountains east of Anchorage came from an Air Force plane that crashed in 1952, killing everyone onboard.

The C-124 Globemaster had 52 people on board, according to Capt. Jamie Dobson, spokeswoman for the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, whose investigators are looking at the debris from the plane. An Army National Guard helicopter crew spotted the pieces last week on Colony Glacier, in the Chugach Mountains 45 miles east of Anchorage, and the JPAC investigators recovered parts of the plane's life-support system and possible human remains a few days later, Dobson said.

 Follow the link to read the whole article.

Friday News Round-Up

From a perusal of the local news websites ... 

• Heavy snows have stalled the search for the pilot missing from an F-22 crash near Cantwell, Alaska, outside Denali National Park. Rescuers hope to resume their search today.

• Joe Miller's latest legal gambit was to file for an injunction, asking the courts to stop the State of Alaska from certifying the election results. While allowing for the possibility that his legal team may be in possession of facts not known to the general public, it begins to look more and more like desperation. 

• Alaska State Children's Services staff picked up the wrong kids from a local elementary school yesterday, leading the children's mother to think they'd been kidnapped ... and then when she found out that State workers had picked them up, that they'd been taken to some foster facility. Remember when accountability and responsibility were hallmarks of public service? Nope, me neither.

• A locally-based soldier admits to flashing the workers at several coffee kiosks, but won't (or can't) explain why. Go figure. I just wish he'd been taught to keep more than his mouth shut. 

And finally, there's this:

That's enough for now, I think. Have a great Friday.

Wreckage of Missing Park Service Flight Found

A passing helicopter pilot on Tuesday night spotted the wreckage of a floatplane that vanished carrying four people more than a month ago in Southwest Alaska. There was no sign of survivors, the National Park Service says.

The de Havilland Beaver disappeared Aug. 21 after taking off from Swikshak Lagoon for what was to be a short flight across rugged terrain to King Salmon. On board were pilot Marco Alletto and three National Park Service employees: Mason McLeod, 26, and brothers Neal Spradlin, 28, and Seth Spradlin, 20.

King Salmon helicopter pilot Sam Egli was flying a trip unrelated to the search at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday when he spotted the wreckage along the northeast coast of Katmai National Park, the Park Service said.

Click the link for the whole story & map.

Update: Search for Missing Plane Continues

According to a copyright story at the Anchorage Daily News website:

A search for a floatplane that disappeared over the weekend in Southwest Alaska entered its fourth day today.

Searchers on Monday combed the mountains and Pacific coast in the Katmai National Park area but found no sign of the plane.

The de Havilland Beaver vanished Saturday during what was supposed to be a short trip across rugged terrain between Swikshak Lagoon and King Salmon. The plane carried pilot Marco Alletto and three National Park Service employees ... The intensive hunt follows a string of aircraft crashes that have killed at least 17 people since June 1.

Read the whole article at the link.