LEARNING TO BE AN ALASKAN BUSH PILOT

The next morning was a disappointment, as the weather was a little unsettled, so we spent the first half of the day relaxing and waiting for it to clear.  Shortly after noon, the sun came out, the clouds disappeared, and we could see clearly across the inlet to the area we intended to hunt.  With that good omen, we loaded up the Cub and took off.  The trip to the foothills of the Alaska Range was pleasant, and we started flying a route where I had seen a lot of bears recently.  I had taken a hunter to the same area the week before, and he had shot a nice moose, so I went to that particular spot, knowing that the bears would have found the moose remains by now.  As we flew over the kill site, sure enough, a large black bear was on the gut pile.  I circled and made an approach to land in the same tracks I had left in a small swampy meadow the week before.  The landing was a piece of cake, and we scrambled out of the cockpit to go after the bear.  It was about five hundred yards to him, and we were a bit careless in our approach.  When we got to the spot where he had been, he was long gone in the thick brush further up the slope.  After a little more exercise, I gave up on the search, and told Jack that we would go find another bear.  We casually returned to the airplane, loaded up, and I taxied to the far end of the meadow for take off.  I noticed that the ground was a little wetter than it had been the week before, but didn’t feel it would be a problem.  How wrong I was!  When I started the take off, I could feel the drag of the water and the soggy ground, but continued the roll.  As we used up the distance and were still feeling drag on the wheels, I popped full flaps to jump the airplane off the ground.  It is a standard practice in the bush, and I still had no hint that we were getting into trouble with every passing second.  The airplane broke loose and got about two feet off the ground, but, due to the low airspeed and full flap configuration, refused to climb another inch!  There were several fairly large clumps of brush directly ahead, and before I could react, the right landing gear hit one of those clumps, ripped the front attach point out, and folded under the belly, causing severe additional drag.  We only had a few yards to go to get over the edge of a long downslope, and I fought to keep the airplane from sinking until we got there.  But, to my surprise, even when I dropped the nose a little, we didn’t pick up any speed and the airplane kept sinking out from under us.  We were now over the edge of the slope, in a rather narrow draw, and I looked directly ahead to see a large pile of big rocks that we were obviously going to go into in a couple more seconds!  I then did the only thing I could to prevent that.  I skidded the airplane to the right until the right wing tip hit the edge of the draw.  That resulted in a quick rotation to the right, the nose hit the edge of the draw, and then the left wing tip hit.  There was still enough momentum that the airplane then skidded backwards into the pile of rocks and came to a stop.  The entire sequence took only a few seconds, and both of us were stunned in the impact.  When I felt the airplane stop, I turned to Jack to check on him.  The cockpit section of the old bird was basically undamaged, and he didn’t appear to be hurt seriously.  He had a pretty good bruise on the right side of his face, and said his right hand had been hurt, but that was all.  I then began to check myself, and found that I had an impact tear and bruise on my left temple and that my knees had both been badly bruised by the radio stack between my legs.  With that assessment done, we got out of the cockpit and surveyed the scene.