Treasure Hunt Becomes Personal Mission for Pair of Adventurers

Pushing on the throttle, the pilot guides his single-engine plane toward the icefall, nose aimed straight for the mountain. For a moment, everything swirls in a sea of white--the clouds, the ice, the snow.

He doesn’t think about what happened 51 years ago. He doesn’t think about his reason for being here. Flying in near-whiteout conditions, he thinks only about maneuvering his little red-and-white Super Cub safely out of the canyon.

A sudden updraft and the fragile two-seater will be slammed into the mountain. A sudden downdraft and it will spiral into the glacier. He’s packed survival gear, his tent and his Colt .44. But he knows that if his Super Cub goes down, the rescuers will probably find him long after the grizzlies do.

At 7,000 feet above an unnamed glacier, over unforgiving land in an unforgiving sky, the last thing on his mind is the Chinese gold.

*

March 12, 1948. The aurora borealis was so dazzling that folks said they could hear the lights dancing. In the tiny town of Glennallen, people marveled at the celestial display as they filed out of the bunkhouse movie theater and made their way home.

Twelve-year-old Helen Cameron saw it first, “a big red fireball that lit up the sky.”

“Look!” she cried, from the doorstep of her log-cabin home, pointing east toward the Wrangell Mountains, 45 miles away.

At first she thought a volcano had erupted. But she was staring straight at Mt. Sanford, and everyone knew it didn’t smoke anymore.

Aiming a ski pole toward the spot, her father estimated the coordinates. He called the radio station at the Gulkana air strip, four miles away. Fire on Mt. Sanford, he said. Looks like a plane has gone down.

At the airstrip, Layton Bennett shoved a fire pot under the engine of his Luscombe. He dusted the snow off the plane’s skis. He yelled at student pilot Jerry Luebke to load up emergency equipment. We’re flying over that mountain, he said. Maybe we’ll find some survivors.

At 35 degrees below zero, it took nearly two hours to get the engine started. By the time they lifted off, the flames on the mountain had flickered out.

Bennett, a seasoned bush pilot, had flown in all kinds of weather, landed on all kinds of terrain, on skis, on floats, on tundra tires. But this night he experienced a different kind of flying, one that even five decades later, the 80-year-old aviator remembers well.

“The sky was all starry and clear, you know, you could see the mountains and the valley,” Bennett recalled. “And then, BOOM. It was like flyin’ straight into a hanging curtain of lights. They were all shimmering and blinding. They blocked the mountains right out.

“I knew exactly where Mt. Sanford was,” Bennett continued. “I just couldn’t see it.”

There would be no rescue attempt that night. Reluctantly, he flew home.

The next day Bennett warmed up the Luscombe again. In a deep glacial valley, in the clear white snow, he saw the blackened imprint of a DC-4. It had hit the mountain at about 11,000 feet elevation, the wreckage sliding down chutes of snow and ice and tumbling into a glacier.

Bennett flew as low as he could, but there was no way he could land. Rocks and ice were falling down the chutes. The wreck would be buried within days. It was clear there were no survivors.

The plane, a Northwest Airlines charter, had been en route from Shanghai to La Guardia Airport, New York, carrying 24 American sailors. They were returning home after sailing a tanker from Pennsylvania to China. Relatives were told that the sailors, along with an airline crew of six, were presumed to have died instantly.

Later, the accident report suggested that the pilot, flying about 15 miles off course, had been trying to take a well-known shortcut around Mt. Sanford. Blinded by the Northern Lights, he had missed the dip between the mountains.

It was the worst airline disaster in Alaskan history. Newspapers from Anchorage to New York carried the story, along with photographs of the sailors and heartbreaking snippets about their lives and loves.

Glennallen, a bunkhouse community of laborers working for the Alaska Road Commission, had never seen anything like it. For a week, it seemed as if the world had descended upon the tiny town about 155 miles north of Anchorage. Officials flew in from the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aeronautics Administration and Northwest Airlines. The Air Force’s 10th rescue squadron flew up from Anchorage. The FBI arrived too.

Even as rescuers tried unsuccessfully to fly a helicopter to the site, as dog teams were turned back by the treacherous terrain, as a memorial service was organized for victims, the rumors began.

The plane from China had been on a mission, people said. Sure, it was flying sailors home. But it was also carrying a secret cargo, one that was hidden in the hold in a great wooden chest.

It was filled with Chiang Kai-shek’s gold.

*

Mt. Sanford is 16,237 feet high, one of a range of dormant volcanoes that towers over the Copper Valley in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest national park in the country. It is a 13.2-million-acre wilderness of icefalls and avalanches, of jagged blue-ice glaciers that cut through rocks and valleys and melt into raging, silty rivers; a place of spruce and fireweed and frost-covered tundra, where grizzlies pounce on mountain sheep and eagles swoop up the remains. There are prehistoric Athabascan archeological sites here, and derelict copper mines, and die-hard panners still dreaming of gold.

Vast, remote, dangerous, it is the perfect setting for lost treasure.

For years they flocked to the mountain, expedition after expedition, from Italy, from Australia, from all over the Lower 48. Glennallen got used to the outsiders who arrived every summer with climbing gear on their backs and the glint of gold in their eyes.

Carol Neely put them up in her bed-and-breakfast. Sarah Luebke fed them at the lodge. Layton Bennett and Jack Wilson and Cleo McMahan flew them over the glacier.

With every new expedition, the treasure fever grew. Folks said there had been a bag of diamonds on the plane, as well as gold. Secret surrender papers from World War II. Secret war tapes. There was even a suggestion that the sailors had been paid in gold because Chinese currency was worthless at the time.

As China fell to the communists and Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949, the stories grew. Old pilots told of cargoes of jade and other treasures loaded onto planes and shipped to Taiwan. They had seen the bounty with their own eyes. Was it such a stretch to believe that a chest of gold had been smuggled to America?

Was it buried in a glacier in Alaska?

“The rumors were floating up and down the valley and just got wilder and bigger every year,” Bennett said. “Hell, if I’d believed half of them, I’d have been up there diggin’ for treasure myself. Nobody found anything that I know of. But they all thought they were going to find gold scattered on that glacier.”

*

Marc Millican, a Northwest pilot from Anchorage, heard the stories in the cockpit of the 747s he flew from Seattle to Asia. Kevin McGregor, a Delta pilot from Denver, heard them on a ski trip in Colorado.

Separately, secretly, they began to search.

The two men have a lot in common. Ex-Air Force pilots, they flew C-141s together at Travis Air Force Base and served in Operation Desert Storm before becoming reservists and flying commercial jets.

Millican is 42. McGregor is 44. Both single, they had time, energy and means to devote to research.

In the early 1990s, McGregor began scouring libraries and archives. He pinned copies of old newspaper articles to his wall. He studied photographs of the sailors, learned their names and their stories: Wayne Worsley, the 31-year-old schoolteacher turned navigator, who wrote poems about heaven and flying; 23-year-old Wilfred Beswick, so proud of the headlines he made as the only man to be sworn into the U.S. Navy in Britain; 21-year-old Robert Delaney, who survived two ships torpedoed from under him during World War II and was heading home to be married.

While McGregor was getting to know the sailors, Millican was studying Mt. Sanford. In the early 1990s, he flew over the crash site, taking photographs, familiarizing himself with the shape of the mountain and the 10-mile-long glacier that curves down its side.

In 1994 the two old friends ran into each other at the Travis Air Force Base officers club. Over drinks, they started talking. Before long the subject of Flight 4422 surfaced. Cautiously, they exchanged information.

McGregor has a bent for research and a passion for climbing. He’s climbed the Kala Patar, west of Everest. He’s climbed Mt. Rainier. He knows the thrills and the risks of hiking on ice.

Millican had just bought a Super Cub, a lightweight, high-performance plane that bush pilots in Alaska use for their trickiest flying. A “big kite with an engine” is how he describes it. With its sleek fabric wings and 30-inch tundra tires, it can land almost anywhere, even on glaciers.

The pilots talked for hours. At the end of the night they struck a deal. They would use Millican’s flying expertise to get to the site. They would rely on McGregor’s climbing experience to get to the glacier.

Together they would search for Alaska’s elusive plane of gold.

*

There was never any secret about where the plane had crashed, or about who was on board. The big secret was what it was carrying and how far the glacier had moved since the crash.

Newspaper accounts of the time listed the names of the passengers and crew. McGregor dug up copies of the crew and passenger manifests, filed in court documents related to the crash.

But he couldn’t find a manifest for the cargo. Northwest Airlines said it doesn’t keep records that old. Court documents don’t mention it either. It seemed to have vanished.

“It was one more mystery,” McGregor said. “And there were already so many mysteries surrounding this crash.”

One more mystery. One more reason to believe that perhaps there had been a secret cargo on Flight 4422.

*

Even in midsummer, glacier flying can be treacherous. Horizons vanish in ice and fog, winds loud as freight trains rush down narrow valleys, the sun’s glare can be blinding against the crystallized snow.

Landing is as precarious as flying. Deceptive patches of green hide gaping crevasses. The depth of melting snow is impossible to gauge from the air.

Two, three, four times, Millican swept over the canyon. Finally the Super Cub bounced to a halt on a scrubby patch of rock and the two pilots clambered out.

July 1997. They landed a few miles below the icefall, as close as they could get to the crash site by plane. They still had a 12-hour hike ahead.

For several years they had flown to this mountain, one year hiking high, the next year, low. They had braved snowstorms and avalanches, been almost swept away in rivers of melting ice, been trapped in whiteouts and fog. Once, the Super Cub ripped a wing as it was blown away in a sudden blizzard. Once, McGregor got stuck alone on a ridge for three days.

By 1997 they were used to the backbreaking terrain. They were used to the thunder of constant avalanches. They were used to the idea that the treasure wreck, if it was buried on the mountain, might never be found.

Securing the Super Cub with ropes and rocks, they strapped 70-pound packs on their backs and started their ascent. For 10 hours they stumbled and scrambled and slid up rolling gravel ridges.

It was near midnight when they pitched their tent in the rain and fog.

For hours the next morning they peered through telescopes, theirminds playing tricks with the shadowy outline of the ridges and the horned Dall sheep that peered curiously from the rocks. But they didn’t see anything that looked like a plane wreck.

The sky turned dark. Millican eyed it nervously, worried about the Super Cub, worried about getting stormed in.

McGregor ignored the storm warnings. He was staring at the glacier.

“Marc, how would you feel about backpacking right down the middle?”

Both men understood the risks. Glaciers are groaning, heaving rivers of ice and rock. One misplaced step and a hiker can fall into a crevasse and disappear forever. It happens every summer in Alaska.

But glaciers are also guardians of the past, gradually releasing frozen relics of centuries--tools, artifacts, even human remains. Mt. Sanford’s glacier was melting fast, like chocolate chip ice cream, McGregor said. If the wreckage of Flight 4422 was in the mix, chances were it would surface among the chips.

There was just one way to find out.

Hoisting their packs, they scrambled onto the silty mound of red and gray rocks that formed the center of the glacier. Ice groaned underfoot. Subterranean rivers roared below.

Slowly, carefully, they inched their way down.

Millican was the first to spot it, a piece of twisted aluminum about 3 inches long, lined with rivets.

“Wow, Kevin!” he cried. “Look at this.”

It looked like an aircraft part, but there were no markings, nothing to indicate its significance. Was it a piece of the DC-4? Hearts thumping, they hiked on.

The sky was black. They were drenched with rain. But there was no turning back now.

Again Millican saw it first: a gleaming propeller blade standing three feet in the air, sticking upright from a 30-foot mound of ice and rock.

“Kevin, check this out,” he cried. But McGregor was already exclaiming at his own find, an old radial engine with twin rows of cylinders perched precariously on the edge of a glacial stream.

Scattered all around were aircraft parts: a steel nose strut, a strip of green corrugated aluminum that looked like a piece of the floor, another propeller, a warped stainless steel knife stamped with the letters NWA, for Northwest Airlines.

“There were pieces of wreckage everywhere, all shiny, almost factory new,” Millican said. “We couldn’t believe our eyes.”

But there was more. At Millican’s foot lay a four-by-three-inch piece of aluminum stamped with the inscription, “Engine serial number 107507.”

Was it the engine plate of Flight 4422? Or had they found something else?

For hours they combed the rocks, photographing, identifying, measuring. They didn’t remove anything; park regulations prohibit that. They just filled their logbook with details and sketches and marked down the coordinates so that they could return.

The rain beat down. The wind picked up. Exhausted, exhilarated, drenched, they collapsed into their tent.

After all these years of searching, they had finally found a wreck. Was it the wreck they were hoping for? Would they also find a chest of gold?

They didn’t get a chance to find out.

“We have to leave.”

Millican’s tone was urgent as he shook McGregor awake. They had rested for about four hours. But sleep comes hard on a cold glacial grave when the wind is howling through the canyon.

Millican’s head swam uneasily with what he had found, and with the echoes of what had happened 50 years before. McGregor felt it too.

The weather was getting ugly, prodding them on. All their instincts were urging them to leave this place and head back to the Super Cub parked miles below. In the pouring rain, they packed up their tent and gear and scrambled down the mountain.

If gold was buried in the glacier, they would have to find it another time.

*

For two years Millican and McGregor kept their discovery a secret as they verified the engine numbers and researched other crashes. Finally, when there was no longer any doubt, they asked the National Park Service for permission to remove portions of the wreck.

The highly unusual permit was granted only after the pilots promised to contact as many relatives as possible. It required them to take photographs of everything they found and to keep a detailed logbook. It made clear that everything collected “will remain the property of the National Park Service.”

It didn’t mention gold.

On July 23, 1999, Millican and McGregor climbed into the Super Cub and headed to the glacier one last time.

Again they saw the propeller and the engine and wreckage strewn among the rocks. But this time they found personal items, an engraved wooden box, a silver cigarette lighter, a frayed shirt sleeve.

And then McGregor saw it, the image he had dreamed of. Reaching out of the ice, frozen and white, was a fully preserved human arm.

Their names flashed through his head: Wayne Worsley, the navigator-poet; Robert Delaney, flying home to get married; Travis McCall, the union steward; Edwin Mustra and his friend John Rapchinski; purser Robert Haslett; Captains Robert Petry and James Van Cleef.

Whose remains was he staring at, lying on the ice, the long, thin fingers, so human, so frail?

“It was the ultimate confirmation of the glacier as a grave site,” McGregor said. “To me, the arm could have just as easily been that of one of my own family, my own brother.”

The fingers were pointing toward a ring, lying on the rocks a few feet away. Silver and square, it was engraved with the outline of a mosque and stamped with the words “Iran 1946.”

*

Millican and McGregor insist they are not treasure hunters. What began as a grand adventure, they say, became a personal journey. McGregor, in particular, speaks of the project’s purity of purpose, of the 30 miniature American flags they planted on the glacier--one for each family--of the emotional “reunions” he has had with some. The arm is being tested against fingerprints and military records of those who were on Flight 4422. The ring is being checked as well.

“We wanted to answer questions about this legendary wreck,” McGregor said. “We wanted to bring some kind of closure.”

“They’ve done so much,” Pearl Ault Beswick, sister of one of the sailors, said of the pilots. “They’ve set my heart at rest.”

But Holly Byerly, niece of one of the sailors on Flight 4422, thinks closure lies in the remoteness of the crash site. She is saddened by the continuing quest for answers. Let the wilderness and the glacier and the bones be, she says. Let the mysteries rest.

“The fact they are mysteries,” she says, “is what makes them so intriguing.”

But the mystery of Mt. Sanford is too seductive for that. As long as there are rumors about treasure, people will be willing to hunt for it. They will fly to a mountain and hike down a glacier and search for the plane that crashed when its pilot was blinded by the Northern Lights.

Maybe they will find a chest of Chinese gold.