FLYERS OF THE NORTH

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 33, 9 February 1931, Page 9

FLYERS OF THE NORTH

CONQUERING THE ARCTIC

A THRILL FOR A WIFE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, 7th January. Wasson and Walsh, aviator and miner, who recently rescued the two companions of Captain Burke, who died of' starvation and exposure six -weeks after, being forced down in the mountains north of the British ColumbiaYukon border, are types that are bringing the Arctic into the ambit of civilisation. ' Wasson, a youthful American, has been flying the Yukon for three years. He has just come out to claim his bride, who is now on her way north with him. Walsh, a Maritimes Canuck, brought his bride into the land of the Midnight Sun twenty years ago. She is still there. . • Of these Arctic types, Service wrote: "A race of men that don't fit in, A race that don't stand still; So they break the hearts of kith and "' ' kin ■. ■ And roam the worid at will." Walsh haa beeii both placer and hard rock miner. With the former, pay is prompt, at every washup. . But the lattor involves a long wait for payment, while ore is mined, sorted, bagged, and "rawhided" to the river at Mayo, there to be transferred to the Stewart Biver steamer, reshipped up the Yukon to Whitehorsc, then over the rail to Skagway, and 1000 miles by steamer down the coast to the smelter. The wives of those men deserve a special niche in the record. One of them tells of a tour' by air with her husband to inspect his prospecting operations in four distant fields, with Walsh in charge, in a letter to Mrs. George Black, F.R.G.S., wife of the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, who has represented the Yukon since he mined there as a sourdough in the days of the Klondyke rush: — "A TREMENDOUS THRILL." "Livingston was making the round of his prospecting parties, and asked mo if I would like to go with him. I was really a little timid, but could not miss such a trip. We flew out over the end of Mayo Lake, across the Stewart and Fraser Palls, on across the winding MacMillan, and a series of rather high mountains, with Dromedary and Lone Mountains outstanding, then across the Pelly with the Glen Lyion Range at our right, on over a sea of .jagged saw-tooth peaks in never-ending procession, and then suddenly found ourselves over a very stoop precipice with two lakes almost directly beneath us. ■ "We descended from 7000 feet very rapidly and taxied up to the first camp site, which we found deserted —the three men belonging there evidently out prospecting, or perhaps hunting, for we found no meat. Then out to Drury Lake to see another party. Found they had moved, but^left a cheese-cloth signal with arrow pointing to their now camp direction. So we took off again, and presently saw tho smoke of the new camp. "After ai sumptuous meal of moose tenderloin and blueberries, we took off again for a small lake in the M'Arthur mountains. The lake was set like a sapphire among green hillß. I was busy ■watching activities at a beaver dam on tho side of the lake, when suddenly the 'piano turned at an angle of 45 degrees and side-slipped into tho lake. But, at that, it was nothing to the turn we took when landing at Drury Lake; that must have angled sixty. "The'entire trip lasted from 10 a.m. to G p.m., so that I feel quite like a seasoned flyer—and really had a tremendous thrill."