Alaska: The land of disappearance

Almost 20 years have passed now since the plane with Kent Roth aboard disappeared somewhere into the wilds along the Gulf of Alaska. It happened in the spring of the year, but I always tend to remember in the fall because Kent, a fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, shared my passion for waterfowl and waterfowl hunting.

He had a passion for fishing, too, and in the end, it was what killed him. He flew to the Situk River in Yakutat, just north of Glacier Bay, in early May to fish the steelhead trout on their return from the ocean. The Situk is one of only a handful of truly great Alaska steelhead streams, and with the fishing season just beginning in the North in May, it is the place to be if fishing is your passion. One can fly into Yakutat, a community of only about 800 people, on an Alaska Airlines jet due to the oddities of air travel in the 49th state, but Kent decided to fly down on a twin-engine Cessna 340 with his two brothers -- Scott and Jeff -- and friends Brian Barber and Tim Thorton.

Jeff, a successful Anchorage attorney and an experienced pilot, was at the controls of that aircraft when it left Yakutat headed back to Anchorage after a successful fishing trip. After takeoff, his last report to Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers was that he was at 12,000 feet and heading on instruments to Anchorage.

The plane was never heard from again. There was an exhaustive search.

No sign of the aircraft was found. Jeff's wife, Gayle, went and listened to FAA air traffic tapes, and thought she heard a transmission from someone she thought could be her husband saying something about 6,000 feet and "icing conditions'' several minutes after Jeff's last known transmission.

"An enhancement examination of the tapes by the FBI laboratory failed to confirm this information,'' the official report from the National Transportation Safety Board later reported, long after the search for the plane's passengers had been given up along with all hope for the five men.

Sheila Nickerson, one-time Alaska's poet laureate and for a time a co-worker of Kent's at Fish and Game, later wrote about the incident in her book: Disappearance: A Map -- A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes:

We can only conclude that ice forced (the plane) down into the vastness of ice, into itself. The area includes the Malaspina Glacier and the Bering Glacier, the two largest glaciers in North America -- a torturous wilderness of snow and crevasse that has claimed many lives and left numerous mysteries. This immense area is sometimes referred to as Alaska's Bermuda Triangle.

But then you could sort of say the whole friggin' state is one big, Bermuda Triangle. To this day planes still disappear. The latest went missing out in Katmai National Park and Preserve in August. The National Park Service led a two-week-long search. It found nothing.

The search was called off Saturday.

Searchers knew exactly where Branch River Air Service pilot Marco Aletto, 47, picked up three young, Park Service employees. Brothers Neal Spradlin, 28, and Seth Spradlin, 20, from Girdwood by way of Indiana had been helping 26-year-old Mason McLeod from Jacksonville, Fla. rebuild a ranger cabin at Swikshak Lagoon on Katmai's Gulf of Alaska coast.

Searchers knew, too, the most likely route Aletto would fly across the park from south to north to deliver the three men back to park headquarters in King Salmon. When Aletto's deHavilland Beaver -- an aircraft out of production since 1967 that remains a workhorse for Alaska charter operators -- failed to show up on time, searchers in airplanes and helicopters went out and scoured that route.

When a hasty search found nothing, the search broadened. A fleet of aircraft laden with observers began combing millions of acres of wilderness with everyone always listening for the telltale, highway-patrol like wooping of an Emergency Locator Transmitter or any stray electric noise that might be coming from the ELT that was in the missing plane. Searchers neither heard nor saw anything.