In the summer of 2007 I spent a week sitting in front of a microfilm reader on the third floor of the Rasmuson Library at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

For part of that time I was researching Russ Merrill and Noel Wien’s attempt to reach Barrow on a tandem charter flight in 1928. The floor was empty every afternoon as I pulled the rolls of film from back issues of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner looking for articles that tracked the increasing concern for the two pilots who were lost with their three passengers.

Wien Alaska Airways had been hired by Fox Films that May to charter two aircraft up to Barrow where the filmmakers planned to record scenes of “Eskimo life.” Noel Wien offered Merrill, who operated Anchorage Air Transport, half the work. At this time the Arctic slope was unsurveyed and maps reflected only the larger mountain ranges and rivers. Neither of the pilots had flown in the region before. The pair decided to fly with wheels rather than skis as the runway in Fairbanks was dry and they anticipated that Barrow would be as well. They took off on May 13 carrying heavy loads and flew through the mountain passes because they couldn’t climb up high enough to clear the peaks. Two hundred miles out of town they stopped in the gold mining camp of Wiseman and refueled. From there a radio message was sent to Fairbanks confirming their departure. This was the last message received for weeks. Four and half hours out of the camp, north of the Endicott Mountains and after crossing what they believed was the Colville River, they ran into a bank of solid fog. With no other options the two pilots landed on a frozen lake to wait out the weather. The next morning Wien’s aircraft, which had larger tires, was able to take off, but Merrill’s was not. Wien lightened his cargo and took one passenger, planning to fly on to Barrow and return with skis for Merrill. He reached Barrow later that day but a strong wind and blowing snow obscured the route he had flown and he could not locate Merrill’s plane again when he tried to return. Then a blizzard blew in and forced Wien to stay on the ground in Barrow. It raged for six days and there was nothing he could do; there was nothing anyone could do. Russ Merrill and his two passengers were left to try to survive on their own.

It was 80 degrees that July; I wore shorts and flip-flops as I scanned pages telling the saga of the missing men. Sitting in the artificial coldness and quiet of the Alaska Collection, I read every issue of the newspaper for May, June and July of 1928 looking for Wien and Merrill. The story shifted quickly from one of anticipated triumph: “Start Sunday on a Second Commercial Flight to be Made to Continent’s Tip” to uncertainty: “No Word Received Overdue Aviators.” In his brother’s absence Ralph Wien set off for Nome with the mail that had to be delivered to fulfill the territorial contract. Two main stories ran through the front page in the days that followed his departure; one Wien missing and possibly dead while another flew in the opposite direction to get the job done.

When they arrived in Barrow, Noel Wien and his passenger were confident of where they had left Merrill and the others. They told Charles Brower they had traveled about 100 miles from the frozen lake where Merrill’s aircraft was stranded. From their recollection, they had flown north after takeoff and then, after seeing “a herd of deer near the coast” had followed the coastline west until they started seeing houses. That was how they found Barrow. They thought it would be easy enough to relocate the reindeer camp and then fly south until they hit the lake. Brower was skeptical and after two days of trying the men had to admit that the snow and fog had masked the landmarks they were so certain of. Or perhaps their own confident memory of what they had seen was actually far off the mark.

Brower recounted his early conversation with the two men in his memoir, Fifty Years Below Zero:

“Were they sure it hadn’t taken longer to reach the deer camp than they had thought when they first came out? And how about the wind? That would make a difference too.

"From what they said now it seemed to me that the lost plane might be farther south than they had estimated; perhaps even south of the Tashicpuk River and near the Colville.”

Wien had never been to Barrow before and while Brower and the other residents of the village had not seen the area from the air they did have a relationship with the region that the pilot could not approach. More importantly, they were able to remind him how easily everything could change in the north and how foolish it was to ever be confident when it came to country covered in snow. This was particularly true of a place where every mountain was foreign to Wien, where every dip in the landscape was just one more chance to forget where he had been.

Brower organized six dog teams who left on May 23 for the deer camp and points south. Noel Wien also left that day to search again and then a few hours later a new pilot, Matt Nieminen, arrived from Fairbanks. It had taken this long for a relief aircraft to arrive there from Anchorage and launch north seeking word on the missing men.

Nieminen arrived just in time to begin multiple searches for Wien, who had vanished for a week in the fog. When he returned it was with news from Cape Halkett, about 120 miles to the east, where he had waited out the weather. Wien had met a native hunter who reported seeing two planes several weeks earlier when he was camping at an area far to the south. After talking to him, Wien realized he had indeed gotten off track in his search and Brower was correct; Merrill’s plane was further south then he originally thought. There was another wait for the weather to break, but now, with the hunter’s camp as a guide, they had an idea of where to aim. On June 2 both pilots departed and a few hours later Nieminen sighted Merrill’s plane.

None of this was reported in the newspapers I was reading, though. The editors only knew that Wien and Merrill were overdue, and now, so were Nieminen and a passenger who had taken a wireless along and planned to update the city on the search (as Brower recorded, they were unable to do this because of broken equipment). In Fairbanks the residents just saw more pilots fly north and disappear, and the tone of the articles became increasingly desperate.

“With another day gone by without word of the seven flyers who are missing somewhere in the Arctic,” reported the News-Miner on June 2, “the persons in Fairbanks most intimately connected with the flights feel the need for a second relief expedition to be imperative and are doing everything in their power to make arrangements for the sending of another plane north.” The headline read: “Relief Measures For Lost Flyers Are Urged Here.”

For the searchers, discovering Merrill’s plane yielded clues but no survivors. From Merrill’s carefully maintained log, the rescuers learned that at first the three men stayed with the plane but on May 19, after the weather cleared, Merrill’s two passengers set out on their own. The group was nearly out of supplies and they knew they had no choice but to try and walk to Barrow. The men all thought it was only about 60 miles north to the village, a miscalculation of their location similar in scope to Wien’s. Going on the notes in the log, Nieminen immediately flew north. A few hours later he found the passengers; one of the men had lost 30 pounds and the other 40, but they were alive.

Russ Merrill, unfortunately, was not with them.

Two days after his passengers left, Merrill had tried to take off again but damaged the plane in this attempt and then was left with no alternative but to walk out as well. He left his logbook behind with a note and directions on where he was headed. The last words he wrote were “Dearest love to my wife, boys and two fine brothers. R.H. Merrill.” And then, on May 24, he started walking as well.

After finding his passengers the search for Merrill kicked into high gear. He was finally found on June 4, forty miles from Barrow, by a dogsled team led by trapper John Hegness of Halkett Station. By then Merrill had shot, killed and eaten raw lemming to stay alive, and, overcome with exhaustion, was lying down in the snow. Although at first he appeared to be in excellent health at Barrow, over the next few days and weeks he became very ill and because of his increasingly weak condition it was almost two months later, on July 26, before he made it home to Anchorage. He was later believed to have contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever during his ordeal.

Writing about the episode 30 years later in Wien Magazine, Ada Wien still remembered the uncertainty she suffered until she received word that her husband was alive:

“For three and one half weeks we had no news of them. In Alaska three and one half weeks usually seems as fleeting as a moment but this particular three and one half weeks seemed endless to some of us. There was so little anyone could do.”

It was Thyra Merrill I thought about, though. She is rarely mentioned in the news reports but the pages of the book her son later wrote about his father’s career reveal much of what she went through in those months. Thyra rushed to Fairbanks, he wrote, and “…steeled herself for the shock of seeing him after his two months of suffering.” But that didn’t prepare her for the change in her husband, who’d been so “… strong and healthy when he left Anchorage in mid-May,” but now “…looked old and frail.” Still, he was alive. “When she saw the life that still shone in his eyes, she knew he would be fine.”

But Thyra was wrong on that score. Russ Merrill disappeared forever on September 16, 1929, on a flight between Anchorage and the New York-Alaska Company mine at Nyac, near Bethel. That time, all the weeks of waiting and searching did not bring him home.

The biggest drama in the lives of three families played out as the pages glided by on the reader, but the only sound on the entire library floor, where I was always completely alone, came when I hit the print button to collect a copy. Everyone I was reading about was dead—Ralph Wien and Russ Merrill in 1929, Noel Wien decades later. Charlie Brower, who’d organized the search from Barrow, asking Noel for every recollection he had of a mountain or river which might aid them, died in 1945.

Everyone who knew this search as something that mattered was long gone.

The town’s collective fear and concern that summer was history so dusty I had to search it out in newspapers no one else was reading. This was a flight where no one died, no place was explored and no discoveries were made. In those ways it was more like the Fairbanks flying service I worked for in the mid-1990s than anything else; the world didn’t change because of the 1928 Barrow flight and it didn’t change because of what we did every day either. The only thing transformed by the Wien/Merrill flight was an understanding of the northern landscape shared by a handful of pilots. Back then that was a lot, though; for Alaska aviators, knowing the ground beneath you was life and death and more. The lessons learned in the 1928 Barrow flight were about when you couldn’t find your way, or worse, when you couldn’t find your way back.

Sometimes that still happens in Alaska.

Standing on the ramp in front of the company hangar looking toward the White Mountains all you could see were the hills north of town. The morning ritual, after the downriver flights were gone but the 9 a.m. flight to Fort Yukon was still waiting, included walking outside to see if the hills were clear. Talking over cigarettes, coffee, and my first jolt of ice tea, we had discussions about whether or not going north to take a look was worth it. There is a whole different class of weather reporting in Alaska now from the dark days of the late 1920s, but still it’s not nearly as technologically advanced as it should be. On days of snow and fog I had to call the village agents and ask them how it looked on the ground; if it was clear across the river, if the hills were open, if they could even see out their window. The chief pilot and director of ops smoked, the cargo guys waited for a decision and collectively we looked north. We all wanted to know what could happen up there, if the plane could get in or would have to turn back, if it was worth it to try, if it was pointless to launch.

Mostly though, we wanted to send a flight that we knew could get where it was going. The pilots had their own opinions which varied from extremes of supreme confidence (they could get in no matter the weather), to absolute uncertainty (they could only guarantee getting in if it was clear) and even complete paranoia (if they were being asked to do anything illegal then they were not going to fly so they needed to know for sure it was going to legal from start to finish before agreeing to take the flight).

But standing out there looking at the hills was no way to know for sure that a flight would be successful, just like calling the agents didn’t promise that, nor did sending out the most determined pilot. It was habit that sent us outside more than anything, and we went there nearly every day to make the same observations: It was clear or it wasn’t; it was snowing or it wasn’t; it was foggy or it wasn’t. The flight would make it in or it

wouldn’t.

Nature isn’t going to tell you anything about flying in Alaska, except when it’s a very bad idea. But everyone always wants to take a look; they want to stand on their front porch and see what the sky will tell them and they want to take off and climb and see if the horizon will reveal a secret.

On a bad weather day getting in or not is mostly just a crapshoot. Well, that and the difference between pilots who know what the fog is hiding and those who never took the time to learn what the ground looked like when it was good. Tony (not his real name) flew the downriver run so often that he could get into Nulato with less than a mile visibility. “You fly down the south side of the river,” he would say, “and make your turn for right base right where there was this one specific old tree. It wasn’t dead but it was almost dead and it stood out from the others; I knew that tree. Once I could make the turn then I flew on from there a few more seconds until I caught the bank on the right side of the river and turned for final. It was easy when you knew what to watch for.”

You have to know every lake, every stream, every bog, every bend in the river and the trees around the village and near the runway. The turn at Beaver Creek was marked by “Big Rock” and knowing that specific rock from all the others near and far from it, could get you into Fort Yukon. One pilot crashed because he didn’t know the distance from Bettles to the south peaks of the Brooks Range; on a crap day he let down too early and flew right into the side of a mountain—the last mountain between him and home.

He should have known to stay high until he was clear of that mountain; he should have known that range like his hometown, like his neighborhood, like his backyard.

“I can get in,” one of the pilots would tell us, looking at the fog obscuring the hills. If he was someone who knew the ground, then we let him go and do it one more time.

Don Sheldon knew Denali like no other pilot before or since. Bob Reeve knew the routes in the Aleutians so well the military asked him for help during World War II. Noel Wien, Ben Eielson and Harold Gillam flew the Interior, memorizing sloughs and dog sled trails, and Russ Merrill even had a pass through the Alaska Range named for him after he established it as a short cut to the Y-K Delta.

First they flew blind and then they learned and then they knew. And to a certain degree, that hasn’t changed. “I can get downriver at less than a mile any day of the week,” said Tony and he was right. He didn’t need good weather to fly he just needed go in the direction he knew; to the place that was as familiar as his own house, on a route that lived in his memory better than any map.

Landscape can change, though, and it is at its most fluid where people live. Cape Halkett, home to the native hunter who recalled seeing Merrill and Wien’s aircraft and the trapper who rescued Russ Merrill, was completely unknown to us at the company. Brower mentions it several times in his book and traffic between Halkett and Barrow was common in his day. It was used as a whaling station in the late 19th century, and then a camp for a time after the whaling dried up in the 1920s. But even though the name is still on the nav charts, I had to look in history books to discover why Halkett had ever mattered. For all intents and purposes, it has vanished, ceding its significance to other places. Flying the North Slope doesn’t mean looking for Halkett anymore; now those routes are all about other places, other names, other personal landmarks.

The maps can’t tell you the places you have to know—the ones that matter. That’s what you discover on your own, flying on the good days and paying attention. You build your own map in Alaska, if you’re smart. You build your own map and you never forget it.

Colleen Mondor worked four years in the 1990s as lead dispatcher for a Fairbanks-based commuter. This is an excerpt from her manuscript The Map of My Dead Pilots.