Chapter 12 - Flying for Gateway Aviation
Wintering in the North
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By late summer, when the last of the forest fires were under control and the long days began to shorten, the work at Gateway shifted from supporting fire crews, to back to the usual business of the residents and visitors in the North. One of the annual end-of-summer jobs was to fly staff from Wood Buffalo National Park around the park’s perimeter. Their task was to ensure no oil exploration had encroached on the park’s southern boundaries, and to survey the scars left by that season’s fires.
That year, Walter was assigned to fly the crew on their inspection. His aircraft for the job was a Piper Aztec – a sleek, twin-engine machine that was both fast and comfortable. His passengers were in high spirits as they set out; the perimeter survey seemed to be considered something of a reward after a long season in the field.
Walter paid only casual attention to the banter among the group at first, but he soon noticed that most of it was directed toward one fellow in particular. It seemed the guy was famous for getting airsick. Even the smoothest flight destroyed the poor fellow, and his colleagues were merciless with the teasing. Walter almost felt sorry for him, since his colleagues obviously took no pity on him, until one of the guys told him the fellow insisted on coming each year, despite the inevitable result. In that case, Walter decided, the man’s misery was a self-inflicted wound.
Otherwise, the route went smoothly. Even in a fast plane like the Aztec, following the entire perimeter of Wood Buffalo National Park took the better part of a day. They departed from Fort Smith, tracing the park’s northern boundary. The northern areas were mostly muskeg, inaccessible by ground. They were a nesting ground for whooping cranes, the large white cranes named for their distinctive “whooping” cry.
At the northwest corner of the park, Walter turned the Aztec south and soon crossed into Alberta. When they reached a point on the park boundary called Fifth Meridian, named, as one might expect, for where the Fifth Meridian crossed the Peace River, Walter landed on the small airstrip there so everyone could stretch their legs and eat lunch. Unsurprisingly, one member of the crew showed little enthusiasm for the meal.
After the break, they took off again, heading south. Much of the park boundary had been slashed out years earlier, but over time, regrowth and fire had blurred it in places, making it difficult to see from the air. Walter flew by compass, using time and distance to hold their course even when the line on the ground disappeared beneath the trees. It demanded steady concentration, but he didn’t mind. The work was a pleasant change from his usual hauls of passengers and cargo – and best of all, he was being paid by the mile for a long route in a fast plane.
As the days shortened, the university students who had spent the summer working for the various government agencies began returning south for the new school year. One of them, a young man from one of the prairie provinces who had spent the summer working for forestry, reminded Walter of how easily the North could throw newcomers off balance.
The fellow met Walter on the dock on Instant Lake, and they made small talk while Walter prepared for the flight. Once he pushed off from the dock and began taxiing out, Walter pulled up the water rudders to free the clumps of waterlilies that had bunched around them. Muttering something about the lily pads, he was surprised when his passenger asked, “What are those?”
“Those big leaves you see floating on the water,” said Walter, “Don’t you have them where you come from?”
“Well, yeah,” the young man said.
“So what do you call them?” Walter asked.
“Lily pads,” the young man admitted sheepishly.
Something so familiar could seem strange, foreign even, when people encountered it in the North. Walter didn’t experience it that way. He was always curious how things worked, including the natural environment. He respected the land’s harshness, but he was also deeply interested in it.
By late September, as the season wound down and the summer pilots were preparing to head south for the winter, Barney approached Walter and asked if he’d like to stay on through the cold months. Walter accepted the offer without hesitation. He wondered what a northern winter would bring.
One thing he was sure of, his camper would never survive it, or, more specifically, he would not survive in the camper. He rented a trailer on a pad in a Fort Smith trailer park. It was primitive at best, but he didn’t need much. The trailer had an oil heater, but the first real cold snap froze the oil in the lines. Fortunately, Walter had access to aviation fuel additives designed to prevent ice formation in fuel systems. One of these, Prist, was commonly added to jet fuel to keep it fluid at high altitudes. It worked just as well in keeping the oil for his heater from freezing during the northern winter.
The water, however, was another story. When those lines froze, there was no easy fix. Walter went without running water for part of that winter.
By then, the lakes were frozen solid, and water landings were no longer possible. Floats were swapped out for wheel-skis – skis fitted with retractable wheels that could be raised or lowered hydraulically as needed.
One day, Walter was flying along the Slave River, where the gravel bars were dotted with trees large enough to cut into lumber. His passengers wanted to set up a small sawmill, and he was flying them in to inspect the timber. He planned to land on one of the snow-covered gravel bars.
As they approached, one of the men remarked, “That’s not very long.”
“Don’t worry,” Walter said, “These things stop on a dime.”
In the midst of their conversation about the proposed sawmill, Walter forgot that he still had the wheels down. When the aircraft touched down, the wheels dug straight into the hard-crusted snow, bringing the airplane to an abrupt and jarring stop.
There was a moment of stunned silence while the passengers collected themselves.
“I never thought you’d get that much drag out of skis,” one of them said, finally.
Once the men had gotten out to inspect the trees, Walter retracted the wheels so the plane rested properly on its skis, ready for takeoff. When the men returned, they looked skeptically at the short stretch of snow ahead, questioning whether the aircraft could take off with so much drag from the skis. But as soon as Walter opened the throttle, the plane glided across the snow and lifted off easily. The guys expressed their amazement.
“They’re designed for this kind of stuff,” Walter said, casually.
With fewer hours of daylight, the workday started late and ended early. There was a lot more sitting around than Walter was used to. George Fink had stayed at the base over the winter as well, and when they both had downtime, they spent their time in the pilot’s shack, playing cribbage for quarters. George smoked, and Walter won. He kept his winnings in a box that had previously held shotgun shells. As the weeks rolled by, the box grew heavier.
Although the pace of work slowed down as winter settled in, the flying that did come up carried new risks. Weather and darkness added layers of peril. Single-engine aircraft weren’t permitted to carry passengers after dark, which meant that a sudden change in conditions could easily strand a pilot and his passengers in small, remote communities that had few amenities for them.
On December 18th, 1969, Walter was assigned to take two government workers to Snowdrift, a small community on Great Slave Lake about an hour and twenty-minutes from Fort Smith. The lakes were frozen solid, and the Cessna 206 was on wheel-skis,
When they arrived, the weather wasn’t bad. But while his passengers were conducting their business, a storm began to move in. Visibility was getting worse by the minute, the weather was closing in fast. His clients hurried back to the plane, eager to get home ahead of the storm. Snowdrift had no café, no hotel, nothing, and the thought of staying there was far from appealing. Besides, it was only a few days before Christmas, and everyone, Walter included, had a serious case of “get-home-itis”.
Once everyone was onboard, he took off. As soon as the 206 lifted off, Walter lost sight of the ground. They were over a frozen lake, so it was an expanse of white on a good day, but now they were in complete whiteout. Walter climbed a few thousand feet, as he normally did, and headed for Fort Smith.
They weren’t far into the trip – maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes – when the propeller suddenly cycled to full coarse, which is essentially the feather position. The engine RPM dropped to about 500, which meant it was just loping along with no real thrust. It lasted only a few seconds, before the propeller cycled back to normal, but Walter knew immediately that he had a problem. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.
The propeller is controlled by engine oil pressure, and the governor that maintains its constant speed is mounted just behind the propeller on the crankshaft. Walter suspected something had gotten into the governor – maybe a bit of metal in the valves – jamming it in the wrong position.
Based on earlier reports about that engine model, he guessed it could be pieces of the thrust bearing. He always read the accident reports, and he remembered one about a pilot flying a Bellanca Viking, which used the exact same engine. That pilot had experienced identical symptoms. When he had reduced power to reduce strain on the engine, it quit. He had managed to land on a road, though not well, and he bent his airplane. He had been ok, and he had hitchhiked out.
Walter knew that if the same thing happened to him now, he and his passengers would not be ok. They were flying over frozen wilderness, in total whiteout conditions, with no possibility that anyone could come looking for them. If they didn’t make it back to Fort Smith, they would be camping, and they were not equipped for that. Walter always carried basic winter gear, but this was a serious storm.
He decided not to change power, because that’s when most engine failures occur. There was no point in turning back, there was no help waiting in Snowdrift, so he held his course for Fort Smith.
As he approached the air base, visibility was still zero. He was completely on instruments. He radioed ahead to request a straight-in approach. He didn’t want to risk circling and losing power before reaching the runway.
“The airport’s all yours – it’s closed,” the operator replied. “Nobody flying, the weather’s too bad,”
That was good news; he may still have serious trouble ahead of him, but at least it wasn’t going to be traffic. Walter knew that as an aircraft descends, the denser air helps boost engine power slightly, but he still didn’t dare touch the throttle. It was safer to descend at the current RPM, than risk the engine quitting too soon.
When he could finally see the ground, it was only about 50 feet below him. He was near the treetops, and close enough to see the airport. That was when he cut the power. As he’d expected, the engine quit.
It didn’t matter. The 206 was smoking along; he didn’t need any more push. He wasn’t too worried about the speed – the airplane had lots of drag, especially with skis on, so it would slow quite a bit on its own. When he felt the wheels on the ground, he braked just enough to turn off at the exit where the Gateway hangar was. The airplane rolled about halfway from the runway to the shed before coming to a stop.
After unloading his passengers, Walter went into the office told and Barney, the base manager and lead mechanic, to check the oil screen. He was sure that would reveal the problem.
Barney started blustering, as he often did, but Walter had no patience left.
“This is no time for that kind of crap,” he said. “Check the oil screen, and do it now.”
Barney pulled on his heavy coat went out into the storm, still muttering. Walter followed him. One look at the oil screen silenced the mechanic. He’d never seen anything like it – the screen looked like a ball of steel wool. The thrust bearing had been shredded. It was the first time Walter had ever seen Barney lost for words.
The engine had to be removed and rebuilt. The problem was a known defect in that model, and the manufacturer eventually redesigned the system to prevent future failures.
The fact that Walter had read about the issue in accident reports likely saved his life, and his passengers. He’d had other pilot’s experiences to fall back on, when his own situation turned critical.
As soon as the storm lifted, Walter began the long drive south to Kelowna to spend Christmas with his family. Each time he stopped for fuel along the way, he paid with quarters he’d won from George over the winter. He’d reached Kelowna before the box was empty.
After a living rough in his camper, and then in a rather primitive trailer in Fort Smith for the better part of the year, arriving at his parents’ home required a bit of acclimatization. Some of his fellow pilots joked about needing to be “house broke” again after a season in the bush, and Walter knew what they were talking about.
His parents were delighted to see him, reminding him more than once that they didn’t see enough of him throughout the year. On Christmas Day, the house filled with his siblings, their spouses, and their growing families. Gerda and Frank had moved to Kelowna from Vancouver, with their four children. Margaret and Corny had two daughters, and John and his wife, Shirl, had a son. The house was lively with kids playing, the air thick with smells of cooking and baking, and Walter and his siblings catching up – bantering like they had when they were younger.
Walter was happy to be there, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain distance. His siblings had their own lives and families now, while his life had taken a very different path. They asked superficial questions about the North, and he offered superficial answers. He held back the detail of how his life and work really was, partly because no one asked, and partly because he didn’t want to worry his mother. She carried enough grief and worry already.
He spent the holidays playing with his nieces and nephews, visiting with family and old friends. It was good to be with his family, but when it was time to return to work, he was ready. Spending the winter in the North was still a new experience, and he was eager to get back to it.
In the North, the most routine task could turn into a story that would be worth telling for years. One such memory came the day Walter was sent to a forestry cabin on a small lake about 150 miles east of Fort Smith. The Beaver was on skis, and he landed on the frozen lake. He hurried through his work at the cabin, but when he stepped back outside, he stopped in amazement – his plane was completely surrounded by hundreds of caribou that were flowing in a mass across the lake.
He waited for a while, just watching, but the animals kept coming. Finally, he began walking toward the plane. The caribou parted slightly to let him walk through but paid him no real attention. He could hear the soft huffs of their breathing as they passed around him. He got back to the plane and climbed in. The herd streamed by, tightening around the plane again, leaving no room for Walter to take off. He sat in the cockpit with the engine idling, not daring to shut it down for fear it might freeze.
He sat there for what seemed an age, watching the animals pass. Eventually, the herd thinned enough for a narrow opening to appear, just wide enough for a takeoff. Walter seized the moment. With no load, the Beaver climbed quickly into the air. Below, the caribou continued their crossing, undisturbed by the roar of the engine or the plane passing overhead. When caribou had somewhere to go, they were going, no matter what. It was one of the most awe-inspiring sights Walter ever witnessed in the North.
Back at the air base, Walter soon found himself with an unexpected offer to consider. Gateway was only one of several charter companies based in Fort Smith, and word was, there would soon be another. A pilot named Bob Gauchie was starting a new operation – Buffalo Airways – and he approached Walter about joining him.
Walter knew Bob and liked him. Everyone did. “Gauch” as he was known, was personable and easy going, with a reputation that reached far beyond Fort Smith. He’d survived 58 days on a frozen lake, when he ran out of fuel in a bad storm a few years earlier, in 1967. His story had become a northern legend.
As a pilot, Gauch was known for his determination. He focused on getting the job done, sometimes with less concern for how it was done. He told Walter he’d heard about the flight back from Snowdrift, the one where Walter had brought his passengers home safely despite the failing engine, and said that was the kind of pilot he wanted at Buffalo.
Walter was flattered by the offer, but he didn’t rush his decision. He had a steady job with Gateway and genuinely enjoyed the work. Gateway ran a straightforward charter business, flying clients across the North. They followed transport regulations, staying on the right side of the Department of Transport, and maintained a reputation for safety.
Still, after that conversation, Walter found himself paying more attention to what Gauch was working on. The idea of something new, working for a guy like Gauch, it was intriguing.
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Author’s Notes:
N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?”
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom, and you can read her story here, and now, “Learning to Fly” is the story of my dad.
Walter Harms was the oldest son of Mary and Jake Harms, Mennonites who fled to Canada in search of safety and the hope for a better future. He was a curious child, always interested in the land they lived on, and how things worked. As a young man, this curiosity led him to respond to an advertisement for flying lessons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Walter is my dad, and this is his story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024-25. The story is pieced together from Dad’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person.
N.B.2: The town of Fort Smith is located within Treaty 8 Territory, and encompasses the traditional homelands of Salt River First Nation, Smith’s Landing First Nation, and the Indigenous Metis people of Fort Smith.
N.B.3: The community of Snowdrift has reclaimed its Indigenous name, Łutselk’e, and is home of the Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation within Treaty 8 Territory
N.B.4: If you are interested in Bob Gauchie’s survival story, you can watch a short documentary about it on Youtube.