Sam Kallik had flown the Wrangells for 22 years when his engine went quiet over the upper Nabesna Glacier on the morning of February 18, 2025. He was ferrying supplies to a research camp and was alone in the aircraft, a 1978 Piper PA-18 Super Cub on skis. The temperature outside was minus 31 Celsius. The ceiling above the icefield was clear; the passes below him were socked in.

He had perhaps four minutes to find a landing surface. He found one, a sloping snowfield at roughly 7,800 feet on a southwest aspect, and put the Cub down without damage. He was, he estimated, 40 air miles from the nearest road and 12 miles from the research camp he had been heading toward.

He stayed with the aircraft for six days.

The decision to stay is the one bush pilots are trained to make and the one passengers most often resist. An aircraft is visible from the air; a person walking through deep snow is not. An aircraft has a cabin, a survival kit, and a battery that can run a radio in short bursts. A person walking has none of those things and burns calories at a rate that cannot be sustained in deep cold without resupply.

Kallik, 58, originally from Eagle River, had built his survival routine around the aircraft over two decades. He carried a kit that included a sleeping bag rated to minus 40, a one-burner stove with two liters of white gas, a foam pad, a wool blanket, three days of high-calorie food, a satellite messenger, a handheld VHF radio with a spare battery, and a small folding shovel. He had a tarp. He had matches in three separate waterproof containers.

No helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft was going to reach him for several days. He had told them as much in his message.

The satellite messenger went out within the first hour. He sent a short message to his wife and to the air taxi operator he flew for, giving his coordinates and stating that he was uninjured and intended to remain with the aircraft. The message was acknowledged. The weather forecast for the upper Nabesna over the next 72 hours was for low ceilings, blowing snow, and winds at altitude over 60 knots.

No helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft was going to reach him for several days. He had told them as much in his message.

He spent the first afternoon building a snow wall on the upwind side of the Cub to reduce drifting under the fuselage and to create a small protected pocket near the door. He drained the engine oil into a coffee can and brought it inside the cabin, a standard cold-weather practice that would let him preheat the engine if a chance to restart the aircraft arose. He ran the battery only to check in once a day on the VHF, which he did at noon Alaska time on a frequency the air taxi operator was monitoring.

He melted snow for water on the small stove. He ate roughly 1,800 calories a day from his food stores and from a second cache in the supply load he had been carrying. He kept a written log of his fuel use, his food, his water, and the weather. The log, which has been excerpted in an Alaska aviation safety publication, is striking for what it does not contain. There are no reflections on death, no notes to family, no philosophical entries. There are temperatures, wind directions, fuel levels, and times.

The weather broke on the afternoon of day six. A Civil Air Patrol Cessna 206 spotted the Cub from about eight miles out, confirmed his condition by radio, and called in a Pave Hawk from the 210th Rescue Squadron based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The Pave Hawk reached him just before last light. The crew offered to leave the Cub for later retrieval; Kallik asked them to wait while he secured the aircraft properly and pulled the battery.

He was flown to Anchorage and examined. He had mild frostbite on two toes and the tip of his nose. He had lost about three kilograms. He was, the flight surgeon noted, in better physical condition than most pilots brought in after a single overnight in similar conditions.

The Cub was retrieved two weeks later by another pilot, who flew it out after replacing the fuel line and warming the engine with a Herman Nelson heater. It is still flying.

Kallik has spoken about the experience in pilot safety seminars in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Whitehorse. He emphasizes three things: the discipline to stay with the aircraft, the discipline to maintain a survival kit that can support a week rather than a night, and the discipline to communicate clearly and briefly with the people on the ground. Long messages, he says, waste battery and create more anxiety than they relieve. Short, specific messages, sent at predictable intervals, are what a search-and-rescue operation can actually work with.

He still flies for the same operator. He has added one item to his kit: a second satellite messenger, a different model from the first, stowed in a different pocket of his parka. He calls it the rule of redundant simplicity. The kit, he says, has to work when the pilot is cold, tired, and slightly stupid. His was.

He turned 60 in the spring of 2026. He has no plans to retire.