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

Handsome Alaska bush pilot with salt-and-pepper hair and a trimmed beard standing beside a small floatplane at golden hour

She’d hired me to fly her to a remote lodge for a magazine story. Forty minutes out, the engine coughed twice and went silent. I put the plane down on a gravel bar in the middle of nowhere. The radio was dead. The nearest town was ninety miles away.