Light planes and choppers

In 1998 I met the Lancaster twins, outfitters Cam and Clay, in Northwest Territories and embarked on my fourth and last Dall sheep hunt, where I killed a 10-1/2 year old ram.
A decade later I learned that Cam was killed in a helicopter crash in that same Mackenzie Range. He was 36 and left a wife and four children.
Excluding combat in Vietnam, I have personally known a number of men who died in light planes and helicopters - the reason I regard them only as necessary evils to get into the backcountry.
In British Columbia’s Stone sheep country, I knew outfitters Lynn Ross, Frank Stewart, and Gary Powell. All were killed in light plane crashes.
I knew Jim Ford, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional supervisor and sheep aficionado, who was killed in a plane crash in western Montana as he was spotting sheep from the air.
One of the young guides on my very first sheep hunt for Rocky Mountain bighorns in Wyoming was later killed in a plane crash. So was another young fellow who was a friend of an acquaintance of mine who lived in Alaska. He and two friends flew in to an area of the Alaska Range and hunted Dall sheep. The hunter who got the only sheep had to depart for Anchorage for an appointment. He crashed into a ridge, his body and the wreckage weren’t found until days later.
In the early 1990s, a young, personable fellow stopped by the office where I worked and asked if anyone in the building was a sheep hunter. The ladies at the front desk directed him to my office. He was a guide offering a Dall sheep hunt in Alaska for $5,000 - a fair price in those days-but at the time I couldn’t afford it. Within a year I read where he and his partner were killed in a plane crash in Alaska.
A friend of mine is retired from 32 years as a mule deer research biologist. He once showed me a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of small helicopter crashes of New Zealanders who contracted with western wildlife agencies to perform net-gunning on big game animals - mostly bighorn sheep. The chopper zooms in on the animals, fires a net-gun that tangles up the sheep, the chopper lands, and the crew moves the animals to wherever they have determined. That’s when things go right. When things do not go right, someone usually dies.
Ironically, the man who owned the very company that my friend employed all those years was killed in Utah in 2007 along with his 32-year-old son, when their small helicopter crashed on take-off. I knew the father and had visited with him on several occasions.
So why do these crashes happen? Well, if you have spent any time in Alaska, the Yukon or northern British Columbia, you know that it can be a brooding country of shifting winds, downdrafts, rain, snow and fog. Many things can go wrong, and when they do, a pilot only has a couple seconds to make a decision to avoid a disaster.
Alaskans don’t like to talk much about plane crashes, but there are dozens that occur each year in that state. Several times I have flown in planes across Cook Inlet and through the pass in the Alaska Range to Lake Clark and Lake Illiamna to get to caribou country. Here and there through the pass you can see the wreckage of planes. It gives one an eerie feeling while the wind and drafts are buffeting your plane, making it heave up and down 15 or 20 feet.
Part of the problem I suspect is the daring and the nonchalance of the pilots too. I have known young pilots who think no more of flying around in the mountains in Alaska than I would to drive my pickup into the next county.
At the conclusion of a 2002 Stone sheep hunt, I got flown from a remote lake in the Pelly Mountains of the Yukon air terminal in Whitehorse. I mentioned to the young German pilot that I didn’t think I could ever feel entirely comfortable flying an airplane.
“Most people go whizzing down the highway in a car, passing within four feet of oncoming traffic, and they don’t think a thing of it,” he replied. “It’s all what you get used to.”
Bernie Kuntz, a Jamestown native, has been an Outdoors columnist for the Sun since 1974