Yukoners and the curator

Cover image credit: Photo by Hans Veth on Unsplash.

The Pilot

“At 15:30 on May 21, 1992, the Kluane National Park Warden Service received word from a local pilot that a group of four Italian climbers on the Hummingbird Ridge of Mount Logan (6050 meters) had broadcast a mayday and were requesting helicopter assistance. Pilot Doug Makkonen from Trans North Turbo Air used a Bell 206 Jet Ranger to reach the mountain by 19:45.

The altimeter in the helicopter read 4740 meters when the climbers were spotted on a small corniced platform on the steep ridge, 1200 meters below the summit.” Source: The American Alpine Club, 1993

The Writer

“In 2002, Doug won the coveted Robert E. Trimble Memorial Award for a series of rescues that defied both gravity and physics. With a huge alpine storm coming in, Doug repeatedly flew to this high camp and plucked the climbers off Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada.”

Source: Wolves of the Yukon, 2010 | Bob Hayes joins the Canadian Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame

The Curator

Rochelle Lobo-Holzer, an amateur rock climber, wasn’t destined to meet Doug the day she fell off the Red Ochre peak of Ruby Range while admiring the intricacies of a spider’s web. Her momentary lapse in judgment demanded an exchange, and a strong wind took her last breath away.

Jalo Monivilja is reading about Doug’s remarkable contributions in the book titled Wolves of the Yukon. He is drawn back to Rochelle’s first tour of Wolverine Creek, a Fort Selkirk volcanic field site, and her starstruck face as she is listening to the eruptive history that disturbed Yukon River at least five times.

The Poet

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could HEAR;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red,
the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you’ve a haunch what the music meant…
hunger and night and the stars.

Source: Robert Service, 1907

Was it the muck called gold that drew Rochelle to Fort Selkirk, or did a hereditary milk debt make an involuntary claim on her?

Fiction Alert

Three Yukoners in this post are real people, but Rochelle is a fictional character in my audiobook titled the chosen rock. She is a Yukoner at heart, curating the silence of this rugged territory to share its story of vibrations through time.

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