The crash, the trapper and a plane load of missing gold – by Josh Wingrove (Globe and Mail – July 6, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

EDMONTON — The flight began uneventfully, with the hulking DC-4 propeller plane, loaded down with gold, rising up from a remote airstrip near a northern B.C. mine.

It was headed to nearby Alaska where its 16,600 pounds of gold concentrate would be processed. It’s a coarse, grainy substance of varying quality – nothing like solid gold, but nonetheless valuable.

At 460 metres (1,500 feet) above sea level, things went wrong. The No. 2 engine whined, cut out and fell off the left wing altogether. The plane banked right to return to the airstrip, but the other three engines couldn’t support the weight, sending it crashing onto a sandbar along the raging Iskut River, not far from the mine, on Aug. 14, 1996. The pilot’s body was never recovered, while the two other crew members made it to shore.

So began a mystery of a doomed B.C. plane and its load of gold, a tale emerging again after the plane reappeared – empty. Barrick Gold, which had since bought up the smaller outfit that owned the now-closed mine, rushed to the remote crash site and, this week, reported that the plane had already been stripped clean. The company does not know where the gold is.

Shortly after the crash, the Transportation Safety Board conducted an investigation, which essentially ruled the tragedy bad luck – the 51-year-old plane wasn’t overloaded and had been properly maintained. But all the TSB could examine was one wing and the No. 2 engine, found four kilometres away. By the time inspectors had arrived, the wreckage was buried by sand and water in the fast-moving river, entombed.

That is, until early last fall, when the shifting sands of the river lifted the plane into sight again. Work crews in the remote area noticed it in late September.

“I knew right away which aircraft it was, and whose it was originally,” recalled Dave Yeager, a geologist who flew over the wreckage while working with a company now called SnipGold Corp. The plane appeared heavily damaged, most of its paint stripped off. The large industrial bags of gold come with opened tops, and might have been washed clean by the fast-moving water.

“More and more of the plane got exposed as time went on,” Mr. Yeager said, adding people in the area all knew about the crash, and would know what had been on board. Rumours began to spread that a local trapper had first noticed the plane had resurfaced from the sandbar, and had begun hauling out gold concentrate, bit by bit. “It became lore, yeah. There were those who knew, and I mean it was a remote area,” Mr. Yeager said.

For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-crash-the-trapper-and-a-plane-load-of-missing-gold/article4393806/