Whipped Cream Difficulties

Helen Klaben Kahn passed away on December 2nd. She was 79.

I know, I know, but I’m a sucker for a good survival story.

Ms. Klaben (at the time) was a young woman and had been kicking around Alaska for a few months. She wanted to visit Asia, so she hopped on board a single engine aircraft piloted by Ralph Flores. (She was planning to make her was to San Francisco, and to Asia from there.) On February 4, 1963, they took off from Whitehorse heading for Fort Saint John.

Unfortunately, the weather was bad, and Mr. Flores was not an instrument rated pilot. They ended up crashing into the side of a mountain near the border between the Yukon and British Columbia. But: they survived the crash.

Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores crashed in terrain that was waist-deep in snow, with temperatures as numbing as 48 degrees below zero. Without wilderness survival training, Mr. Flores adapted nonetheless. He wrapped Ms. Klaben’s injured foot in her sweaters, covered the openings of the cabin with tarpaulins and tried, without success, to fix their radio to send out a distress signal and build rabbit traps.
What little food Ms. Klaben and Mr. Flores had brought on board — a few cans of sardines, tuna fish, fruit salad and a box of Saltine crackers — was rationed and gone within 10 days. They drank water, some of it filtered through shreds of one of her dresses and boiled in an empty oil can. They ate bits of toothpaste that they squeezed from a half-filled tube — and virtually nothing else, they said.

They survived for 49 days before finally being rescued.

When she returned to New York City less than a week after being rescued, the toes of her frostbitten right foot were amputated. She soon began writing her book (with Beth Day), and shortly after its publication told her story on an episode of the game show “To Tell the Truth.”

…

The appetite for adventure that she nourished as a child did not leave after the crash. Mrs. Kahn, as she became known, had no fear of flying and no nightmares and traveled widely with her family to Europe, Asia and the Caribbean.
“We’d travel with her from one European city to the next, meeting kids from other countries,” her son, Dr. Kahn, said in a telephone interview. “She was a global citizen, whether we were in fancy places or campsites.”
She also taught survival skills to the Girl Scouts, schools and other groups.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2018 at 9:14 am and is filed under Obits, Planes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.