THIS is the spirit of Canada.......

[Departed]

Pilot Bob Gauchie’s story of how he survived nearly two months in brutally cold wilderness before his rescue

Tristin Hopper | January 31, 2014 6:50 PM ET

On Aug. 31, 2013, legendary Arctic aviator Bob Gauchie died in a Victoria, B.C., nursing home. The founder of Buffalo Airways — the Yellowknife-based airline featured in the TV series Ice Pilots N.W.T. — Mr. Gauchie’s death marked the end of 85 years of life. In another sense, it also marked the end of more than four decades of borrowed time.

Bob Gauchie

Forty-seven years ago this Monday, on Feb. 3, 1967 Mr. Gauchie was flying solo from Cambridge Bay, N.W.T., to Yellowknife when he became lost in a storm in his turboprop deHavilland Beaver. Running out of fuel, he was forced to land on a remote Northern lake, isolated from any radio contact with the outside world.

Hundreds of Northern aviators — including some of Mr. Gauchie’s own friends — had succumbed to starvation, hypothermia or the madness of isolation when faced with similar circumstances.

But Mr. Gauchie held on, surviving on little more than a box of frozen Arctic char and enduring 58 days of high winds, -60C temperatures, circling wolves, badly frostbitten toes and, worst of all, several aircraft that passed tantalizingly close overhead, but failed to see the airman, his white aircraft or even the occasional flare he had been able to set off.

A two-week aerial search had indeed braved some of the worst conditions on record to comb an area twice the size of Newfoundland and Labrador for Mr. Gauchie. The pilot’s friends had even pitched in $4,000 to keep up a private search, but by late February, most everyone was ready to assume that the 39-year-old flyer might never be seen again.

Then, on April 1, as Mr. Gauchie mentally prepared himself for the end, he was spotted by a supply flight that happened to be off course.

His rescuer, Ronald Sheardown, still works as a bush pilot in Alaska. On that day in 1967 he had been on a routine flight to what is now Kugluktuk, Nunavut, when his passenger, schoolteacher Glen Stevens, spotted a glint of light from the ground.

They circled around to investigate, landed on the frozen lake surface and approached cautiously in case the ragged human figure before them had lost his mind.

Postmedia News
Postmedia NewsThe cold Arctic sun shines down on the aircraft that was piloted on Feb. 3, 1967 by Bob Gauchie.
Instead, they beheld a cheerful, bearded man calmly clutching a blue suitcase and asking, tongue-in-cheek, if they had room for a passenger.

When the news swirled through Mr. Gauchie’s hometown of Fort Smith, N.W.T., that “Gauch” was alive, most thought it was a sick April Fool’s joke.

“I talked to the wolves the first 25 days, and then they left me, and after that I didn’t have much to do but just try and survive, just ‘don’t quit,’” the ebullient pilot told reporters immediately upon his arrival in Yellowknife, as per a recording preserved in the CBC archives.

“Did you find it hard to survive?” asked an interviewer. “Oh, yes, certainly,” he said, his voice wavering with measured laughter.

To this day, Mr. Gauchie still holds the record for solo Arctic survival by a downed airman.

As he faced his life’s defining trial on the frozen surface of Samandré Lake, N.W.T., Mr. Gauchie recorded his thoughts in a diary that has since become one of his family’s most treasured possessions.

Its scrawled pages run the gamut from humour to despair to raw determination, and the document stands as the testament of a man who refused to go gently into an almost certain death.

By permission of the Gauchie family, selected excerpts of his diary are published below.

Feb. 16th, 1967 (First entry)

Day fifteen has now past and I still have not heard an aircraft. The Air Force will be packing it in tomorrow or the next day which cuts my chances down considerable. I must be a long way off course as I am easily seen here on an open area of the lake. Well if I have finally pulled the unlucky straw, I have no regrets. I’ve had a full life and have had the wonderful privilege of having shared over half of it with you and the girls. I can survive for many more days if my feet don’t infect, they are frozen and giving me a great deal of trouble. I have postdated cheques at Niagara, cancel them as the loan has a death clause, also the bank loan has one …. And now my darling if this is the final gun, and you may rest assured I am not quitting, I have a lot of life left in me yet. But if it is, I tell you, Love, that you were the greatest event in my life. I have always worshipped you and have never had any doubts about your love for me. The Lord knows there were times I didn’t show it. I don’t want you to grieve too long, Fran, you are a young and pretty woman and deserve a man around the house. Choose carefully honey, you are now not entirely poor.

Feb. 25

… This waiting gets so utterly depressing that if I had the courage, there are times I would have taken my life. Not hearing an airplane all these days makes you think why am I prolonging death, yet it is one’s will to live that keeps you going, hoping against hope that something will turn up in your favour ….

Feb. 26

… It’s so disheartening to sit here on such a beautiful clear day and to know no one is looking for you. At six thousand feet an aircraft could be two and a half miles away. You must be going through great anguish, Fran, and if I live you shall never have to go through it against for there are many ways to make a living which do not constitute the suffering that I have put you through so often in the past six years. If I live I feel we can take life a little easier now …

March 8

… Terribly cold and weak. Right foot just starting to infect, not much time for rescue now. I am afraid, Fran. I hope I can make peace with God. My signs were all filled in by the storm. I love you Fran and the girls. Pen won’t write. Please pray for me I am so afraid …

March 13

… Getting some trouble from my right foot, I sure hope it holds out for me. I have gone so long now, have beat the cold weather, I can lick it all now if the feet hold out … if I don’t make it honey, make sure and get something really nice for Andy and Eileen’s new baby because we never got them a wedding gift, which I am sorry for … Remember when Lynda tried to barter off some stones for an ice cream cone down the hill in Fairville, when we lived there. They don’t make those deals anymore these days or I would barter off an aircraft for a seat in my living room with my crew right now …

March 15

… The waiting and loneliness are starting to have their effects now. I am very low. The nights take so much out of me now, I have to spend at least 18 hours to get two or three hours sleep. … The nights are getting terrible to endure. How much longer can this go on …

Postmedia News
Postmedia NewsBob Gauchie with his rescuers after spending 58 days stranded,
March 16

… My feet giving a lot of agony at night now just about all I can stand. I hope they don’t get worse or I’m sure I will get delirious. The odds are stacking up against me more each day now so that my luck is going to have to be extremely good if I am to make it. These long silent days make me realize how utterly fruitless it seems. I am asking God’s help every night now and I am trying very hard to believe that He can and will help. I miss you and the kids more each day Fran, it is getting so lonesome and I get so afraid everytime I think I might die. I do so want to live that I can’t explain it in words. Perhaps if I do live my future actions will explain for me …

March 18

… The time I have sat here and thought I wonder whether Chuck McAvoy [a Yellowknife bush pilot who vanished in 1964] perished this way. At one time I didn’t think so, but now there is certainly the possibility that he did. Not perhaps quite in the same manner, as he was down much later, but his aircraft could have been on a lake like me and sank with the thaw and he and his companions could have perished trying to walk out …

March 20

… It just feels as though the world has forgotten me. I am so utterly helpless here, all I can do is wait and wait and wait some more … However, I now feel that I am on track to somewhere. There isn’t much traffic going there but when it does it goes close to me. If I can only hold out God permitting I will eventually be seen, but my God when is eventually? …

March 21

… I can’t wait forever for better days, although that is exactly what this is, a waiting game. If I wait long enough and be patient and feet hold out I win, if I don’t, I lose. To be quite frank I don’t think I’ll be picked up until April if I am picked up at all. By then the weather will have had time to warm up and I will have plenty of time outside, both to watch and to give signals. Right now that’s not a very encouraging thought as April is 10 days away yet. I am not eating too well, but facts must be faced if I am going to make it and those are the facts whether I like them or not. Although right along I have looked at the long range view to survival and it has paid off. One can only plan for the worse and if something better happens then it’s a break in my favour, if not, well the worst was expected anyway so then you’re not quite so disappointed …

March 22

… Boy, how I long for a hot shower and clean clothes. I itch all over and smell worse than a hog. Sure miss everyone, I try not to think too much of home as it makes things so much harder, but at times it is impossible not to …

Courtesy of Patricia Gauchie
Courtesy of Patricia GauchieBob Gauchie: Later in life and in 1967
March 23

… I’m getting some terrible spells of depression now and when you look at the odds it’s no wonder, but the will to live seems to be staying with me and I suppose as long as I have that I have a chance …

March 28

… I pulled a real dandy a couple days ago. I tried to walk to shore and build a fire from dried bush. I didn’t realize how weak I was and I came so close to perishing, it wasn’t funny. I dropped things on the trail and just barely staggered back to the airplane. If it would have been 50 yards further I would not have made it. If I survive, I’ll tell you the whole story, if not it doesn’t matter anyway … A couple of ravens not far away along with last night’s wolves, perhaps they sense death, I’ve read that they can. I hope it is wrong … I imagine by now you and the girls must have given me up for dead. Well, honey I don’t have much time left but at least you know that I sure tried to come back to you …

March 30

… If my premonition works I have four more days to go. It would actually scare me I think if it did come true. Personally, I’m ready to go right now. There are so many things now I can contact health wise that it scares me. My resistance is so low that the flu would finish me for sure …

On April 1, pilot Ronald Sheardown was on a routine flight to what is now Kugluktuk, Nunavut, when his passenger, Glen Stevens spotted a glint of light from the ground. The pair circled around to investigate, and soon spotted Mr. Gauchie standing next to his disabled plane, calmly clutching a blue suitcase.

As Mr. Sheardown would famously recount for years afterwards, Bob Gauchie — the man everybody had given up for dead — looked like “he was waiting for a bus.”

National Post

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/31/pilot-bob-gauchies-story-of-how-he-survived-nearly-two-months-in-brutally-cold-wilderness-before-his-rescue/

 

[Departed]

Another great Canadian story......great photos if you follow the link as well.

Decades-long hunt for mysterious French filmmaker yields rare look into the forgotten past of a Canadian tribe

Republish Reprint
Joe O'Connor | February 13, 2014 | Last Updated: Feb 13 9:58 PM ET

Frank Andrew wasn’t even three years old, and so his memory of the “Frenchman” is blurred at the edges, a childhood recollection so distant to him now that it almost feels like a dream.

But one image from the summer of 1957 sticks, wedged in his mind in sharp relief to be scrutinized, every now and again, every time someone in Tulita — a tiny community on the banks of the Mackenzie River that is home to the Tulita Dene Band, of which Frank Andrew is the chief — would ask the question no band member ever had an answer for: what became of the Frenchman?

And, more importantly, what happened to the film he made in 1957 of the Mountain Dene’s summer trek, for what were then a nomadic people, into the Mackenzie Mountains to hunt caribou, sheep and moose before floating back down from their alpine stomping grounds in a 42-foot moose skin boat?

“The only memory I have of the Frenchman is of him getting into the boat — the moose skin boat — and that is about it,” Mr. Andrew says, from his office in Tulita. “In the years since there would be conversations in our community about this gentleman, this man who walked with us into the mountains.

“He had a camera and he had taken movies, but nobody knew where the man went. All we knew was that he was French.”

Tom Andrews, Territorial Archaeologist at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, first heard the story of the mysterious French filmmaker in 1995 while working on an oral history project with some Mountain Dene elders. The elders asked him to find the movie. Mr. Andrews replied: no problem.

“I thought I’d be returning to them the next year with the film tucked under my arm,” Mr. Andrews says, chuckling. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

Ah, no, it did not. It didn’t work out for another 20 years while it evolved into an international search — complete with a cameo by Farley Mowat, the author of Never Cry Wolf — for a near-mythical 16 mm film that none of its stars or, for that matter, no Canadian had ever seen before the good and patient folks of Tulita packed their local school for a special screening of it this month.

But we can get to that later.

First: the Frenchman. His name is Jean Michéa and, indeed, he is French, and a 95-year-old anthropologist in delicate health living in Paris who, during his working life, had a fascination with the Canadian Arctic and taught at the esteemed Paris-Sorbonne.

Professor Michéa spent 18 months living with the Inuit near Baker Lake after the Second World War (where he befriended Farley Mowat). He hiked from Labrador to Hudson’s Bay in 1948 — an epic walk he filmed for the National Film Board of Canada — and, in 1957, he showed up in the Mackenzie Valley, camera in hand. It is a detail Tom Andrews confirmed when he found a written account of the professor’s trip — “Connaissance des Ameriques: Esquimeaux et Indiens du Grand Nord” — published in 1967 by the Société Continentale, Paris.

“The search for the film wasn’t something that was pushing me every day,” Mr. Andrews says. “It was the kind of thing you keep on the corner of your desk, tracking down leads when you can.”

There were lots of leads. And plenty of dead ends: The Mowat angle petered out after the author wrote to the archaeologist informing him that he and Professor Michéa quit exchanging Christmas cards around 1964 and lost track of one another thereafter. There were emails. So, so many emails, to this and that colleague at this and that university asking if any knew of anyone who actually knew Jean Michéa.

Then, in 2007, a breakthrough: Christopher Fletcher, at Laval University, knew of a former colleague, Monique Vezinet, who lived in France and, once upon a time, studied under the elusive French anthropologist and, by way of a tangled family tree, was actually his distant relative.

Phone calls were placed. Letters written. Several more years passed until: Voila, a reply, penned in elegant French cursive and signed, Jean Michéa. Yes, he had the film, but not in Paris, at his cluttered summer residence in the southeast of France amid all the other artifacts — including footage and still photographs from the Mackenzie Valley trip that didn’t make the movie’s final cut — from a lifetime of fieldwork.

The aged academic dispatched his daughter to find the 25-minute film, shot in colour, without sound. Then he had it digitized and mailed a DVD copy to Christopher Fletcher in Quebec City, imploring the Canadian searchers to have “fun” with it.

The fun, the film and Tom Andrews were in Tulita this month for old home movie night, a standing room only engagement at Chief Albert Wright School. The atmosphere was electric. People smiled, laughed and cried out names as images of their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, of their younger selves, flashed across the screen.

“I saw my Mom with a young boy beside her, so I am assuming that it is me,” Frank Andrew says. “I recognized some of the young boys in the movie that are still around today, but some of the elders who are gone, it is like they are alive again, walking around.
.
National Post

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/13/decades-long-hunt-for-mysterious-french-filmmaker-yields-rare-look-into-the-forgotten-past-of-a-canadian-tribe/

 

[Spursex]

ST2 will be gunning for you too soon...

 

[Greavswasthegreatest]

Canadians like beer best, not spirits!

 

[Departed]

I would just like you all to know that Quebecers just performed a truly Canadian act yesterday by throwing Pauline Marois and her pack of xenophobic lunatics out of office in a resounding defeat.

The Charter of Rights she put forward for Quebec was nothing short of Stalinesque. This is a victory for everyone. No matter what their political stripe.

I love this country!

 

[Departed]

Sunrise in Muskoka...

 

[Departed]

Sunset at 50mph......

 

[freundorfoe]

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/28/meanwhile-in-canada-3/

 

[Departed]

freundorfoe - 28/8/2014 18:03

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/28/meanwhile-in-canada-3/

How did you find my house?

 

[freundorfoe]

80deg16minW - 28/8/2014 22:15

freundorfoe - 28/8/2014 18:03

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/28/meanwhile-in-canada-3/

How did you find my house?

pressed "home" on a sat nav I found

 

[Departed]

freundorfoe - 28/8/2014 23:23

80deg16minW - 28/8/2014 22:15

freundorfoe - 28/8/2014 18:03

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/08/28/meanwhile-in-canada-3/

How did you find my house?

.
pressed "home" on a sat nav I found

The quotes should have been on found

 

[Departed]

More Muskoka fun......

[youtube=fZdXqAg4fvc&sns=em]

 

[Spursex]

Nice, great fun. 'Aboot' time we saw his Dad having a go... :10:

 

[Departed]

Waterskiing only for me. Wake surfing and wake boarding are for the immortal youth.

 

[Departed]

November 18th, 2014. View out of the back door of a friend's chalet. It is November. I haven't even tuned my skis yet!

 

[Nick Real Deal]

If an old piece of furniture has square headed screws is it likely made in Canada. Robertson screws. ?

 

[Departed]

Nick Real Deal - 19/11/2014 23:09

If an old piece of furniture has square headed screws is it likely made in Canada. Robertson screws. ?

It's not old if it has screws.

I should add that most Canadian pine antiques were tongue and groove and dowel. Pretty much all fitted. And old for us is 100 years.

 

[Nick Real Deal]

Robertson invented the square drive screw in 1909. The screws in question are in support blocks under the seat of chairs, any visible fixings are finished dowels so look ok. I have read that Robertson square drive screws were used mainly in Canada being invented there but little used elsewhere. I am estimating these chairs at 1920s to 30s but am trying to confirm origin. The antique 100 year barrier is not really important anymore, it's era now, i.e. art nouveau, arts and crafts, Art Deco and retro, that's what younger buyers want.

 

[Departed]

[youtube=B9oVlS-qNUk#t=47]

 

[Nick Real Deal]

Watched a two part documentary on Canadian Wolves . Ellesmere Island, fascinating insight into their exsistence and pack ways. It is easy to understand how wolves and man grew to trust each other and become companions as we know dogs today.

One man virtually integrated into a pack, and possibly could have, given more time.