Canada: THE DOMINION: Off the Highway

At the controls of the little Stinson on the reach south from Anchorage was a confident pilot with 365 hours logged. Taking her 11-year-old son to Washington, D.C. to school, Frances Lintner, 38, had set out to follow the Alaska Highway to Edmonton. Skittering along under low clouds just short of Fort Nelson, she mistook a logging road for the highway, crashed into 4,000-ft. Steamboat Mountain. She was killed. Desperately injured and pinned half upside down in the wreckage, Michael Lintner somehow lived through 40 hours until rescuers reached him.

In a hospital at Edmonton, doctors treated his skull fracture, set his shattered arm, put him under a metal-framed tent to keep the bed clothing off his frostbitten feet and knees. To his father (also an aviator), who had flown in from Washington, dauntless little Mike told what had happened:

“We took a wrong turn left, instead of right. The road sort of died out. Mom was just going to turn back when all of a sudden the fog socked in on us. Couldn’t see a thing. Mom tried to climb . . . Then we hit. The left wing sheared off. Both wings were off and we toppled over. Mom breathed roughly for a while and then was still. I knew.

“Dad, I knew I had to get out or get the sleeping bag. [The temperature went down to 12°.] But I was weak and I couldn’t get loose. Once I got almost turned around to get the bag. But I was too weak. I almost got out one time—I don’t know how long after. Then I fell asleep again . . .”

With his father at his bedside, Mike was winning his fight for life. He also won another fight, important to an eleven-year-old—he was still dry-eyed as he said: “Dad, it’s going to be awful lonesome, ain’t it?”