My Bush Plane’s Engine Quit Over the Alaska Wilderness With a Travel Writer in the Passenger Seat. We Had Four Days to Get Out

My name is Erik Halvorsen. I’m 51, and I fly bush planes in Alaska.

I live on a homestead outside Talkeetna, at the foot of Denali. Forty acres, a log cabin I built myself, a greenhouse, a dock on the lake and a 1962 de Havilland Beaver that I love more than most people.

For twenty-five years, I’ve flown hunters, fishermen, scientists and tourists into places where there are no roads. Glaciers. Rivers. Lakes so remote the fish have never seen a lure.

I’ve been married once. She went back to Seattle after the third winter. Alaska is hard on marriages. Also on women who like daylight.

Last August, a travel magazine hired me to fly one of its writers to a wilderness lodge on the Kuskokwim River. Two hours out from Anchorage.

Her name was Jenna Wright. Forty-four, from Boston. Short blond hair, green eyes, a waterproof notebook and a camera that cost more than my truck.

She climbed into the passenger seat, buckled in, and looked over at me.

“You’re the pilot?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Huh,” she said, and wrote something in her notebook.

“What did you write?”

“Nothing,” she said, and turned slightly pink.

Forty minutes out of Anchorage, over the Alaska Range, the engine coughed.

Then it coughed again.

Then it went completely silent.