Bob Gauchie – 58 Days in the arctic

On February 3rd, 1967, pilot Bob Gauchie was making a flight from Cambridge in the northwest territories to Yellowknife in Canada when he ran into a bad storm. After becoming horribly lost and almost running out of fuel, he decided that his best choice would be to land on a frozen lake he had spotted and wait for help.

He managed to land safely and started to go through his supplies, which included little more than a box of frozen fish and a few flares. He remained in his cockpit for shelter as the outside temperatures could get as low as -60C, and the area had relatively few trees to make anything decent out of.

It was noticed he was missing right away, and an Aeriel search began which lasted for 2 weeks, but with no luck. A few of his friends even scraped together $4000 to keep a private search going, but after about 3 weeks of searching it was generally agreed that he couldn’t have survived for that long in such low temperatures and he was probably dead, but for all this time Bob was still sitting in his cockpit waiting to be rescued.

He claims that in the time he spent on the lake, in his white plane which didn’t help, he saw several small aircraft fly right over him but were unable to see him due to the weather and his unfortunately colored plane.

For the first 3 weeks, wolves circled the plane at night and crows during the day, waiting for him to die so they could get an easy meal, but the wolves actually helped Bob a little bit. He claims one of the worst things about being stuck where he was had to be the loneliness, claiming the wolves were his temporary “friends” during his time there and even howled back at them during the night just to achieve some form of communication with a living thing.

In his mind, he was convinced he was going to die, knowing how remote the area was and the chance of someone passing through who wasn’t in a plane was pretty much impossible. The wolves stopped coming after a while and he was left on his own, which he says was worse than the cold. After being certain the end was near he’d lost all hope of being found, which is when Ronald Sheardown flew over on a routine flight to Nunavut.

His passenger spotted a light coming from the lake that couldn’t be natural, so the plane circled around for a closer look and saw the plane sitting there right in the middle of the lake. They managed to land safely and approached the plane with caution, not knowing if they’d find a frozen body or someone driven insane by the isolation.

However, a weary-looking bearded man hopped out of the cabin holding a blue suitcase and asked jokingly if they had room for a passenger. After surviving alone for 58 days in temperatures as low as -60C, Bob Gauchie was finally rescued and holds to this day the record for longest solo Arctic survival by a downed airman.