Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve is a land of river canyons, flatlands, and gently-sloping mountains due east of Fairbanks, smack in the middle of Alaska’s long eastern flank. It’s very remote, it’s very rugged, and it gets very, very cold. To properly outfit yourself for an expedition there, you’d want plenty of wool baselayers, rain-proof outer shells, a four-season tent, a packraft, and, of course, plenty of food. And that’s just in shoulder season. In winter? Forget it. Let it snow, leave it to the bears.
From December 1943 until March 1944, Leon Crane spent nearly 3 months, through the dead of winter, in that land of icy rivers and freezing winds with almost none of those things.
Crane survived. That he did owes far more to his clear-headed resilience, and blind fortune, than it does to any wilderness skills.
Lt. Leon Crane’s ordeal began 25,000 feet above that lonely stretch of the Yukon on December 21, 1943. He was a co-pilot on a B-24 Liberator, a heavy bomber, on a training flight out of Ladd air base in Fairbanks, when they lost an engine 130 miles east of base. The pilots wrestled with the controls and as the big plane slipped into an uncontrollable spin, they told the crew to abandon ship.
Quite the story.
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