Nobody in the Alaska of today much seemed to notice when Harmon Helmericks, a man firmly rooted in the Alaska of yesterday, passed away in Wickenburg, Ariz., at the end of January. Bush pilot, adventurer, guide, businessman, author and more, "Bud" -- as almost everyone knew him -- was for decades an institution on the North Slope. He lived, fished, worked and raised a family at the mouth of the Colville River west of the oil-pumping moon station known as Prudhoe Bay.

The Anchorage newspaper did run an obituary noting his death at age 93. The Associated Press picked it up and did a five-paragraph story that circulated in newspapers here and elsewhere. Dermot Cole, the talented and prolific columnist at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said this week he's been meaning to write something, but just hadn't gotten around to it.

Maybe that's the way Helmericks would have wanted it. Though he wrote a lot over the years and was often written about, he wasn't what you'd call a publicity hound. He was from that old school of Alaska adventurers who did things mainly for the experience, not for the attention or the possible income.

Doug O'Harra, who used to write for a Sunday magazine the Anchorage newspaper used to publish, remembers being a little shocked at discovering in 1992 that Helmericks had flown a single-engine Bush plane more than 2,000 miles on a tricky flight from Alaska to the North Pole and back nearly four decades earlier. Helmericks didn't make a big deal of it at the time or after. O'Harra stumbled on the story largely by accident.

One of those fine storytellers who worked at a newspaper when the Alaska media-barons considered storytelling something of value, O'Harra can relate the particulars as good or better than I. Here's what he wrote in a now extinct publication called "We Alaskans" way back when:

Before preparations for summer and spring subsistence activities, Bud took a notion to do a little exploring. He decided to fly to the North Pole.

By then, Helmericks had been in the Arctic more than a decade. A member of the international Explorers Club since 1947, Bud and his first wife, Constance, had traveled the Brooks Range extensively and published a series of books read all over the United States: "We Live In the Arctic," "Our Summer With The Eskimos," "Our Alaskan Winter" and "Flight of the Arctic Tern."

But the marriage had ended, and Helmericks had not yet brought his new family, Martha Helmericks and her 8-year-old son, Jim to join him in the Arctic.

"I had the time and I had the fuel, so I just decided to fly out and fly back," Helmericks says now, describing his decision to try to fly to the top of the world. He shrugs off any notion that his trip was heroic or dangerous.

"I just wanted to see what was out there," he says. "All you needed was enough fuel, a way to refuel, and a way to navigate."

So Helmericks loaded 200 gallons of gas into the Arctic Tern (Alaska's first Cessna 170) more than enough, he figured, for the 2,200-mile round trip. To refuel, he would land on frozen leads, newly formed expanses of ice as flat as paved runways.

Navigating would be more difficult. By flying north of the magnetic pole, a compass would be practically useless, and 24-hour daylight made navigation by stars impossible. So Helmericks decided he'd use the sun. He drew up a diagram correlating the sun's position as it circled the horizon with time of day, a foolproof compass as long as he had the correct time. To ensure there would be no mistakes, he took along three timepieces: the airplane's clock, a gold watch and a cheap wristwatch.

Eleven hours of flying due north at 100 mph, and Bud Helmericks figured he'd be there. Before he took off, Nanny Woods ran out and gave him a loaf of fresh bread. Then he was gone.