The drama of Helen Klaben’s and Ralph Flores’ survival is one of the Yukons best stories. After the two survived a plane crash and 49 days stranded in the Yukon wilderness in the winter of early 1963, the story swiftly spread around the world.

As a testimonial, a photo of the then 21 year old Klaben smiling in her hospital bed hangs permanently on a wall of the Star, captioned by her famous quote to her mother, “Hey, I’m alive!”

The last the Star had heard of her came from a short article in a southern newspaper in 1969, reporting that Klaben was happily working for a New York publishing firm.

“How could I come and not say hello to everybody?” she asked cheerfully. “I just really wanted to say hello to Whitehorse, and thank them for treating me so well.

I always have such fond feelings for Whitehorse, and Watson Lake too.”

The former New Yorker says she’s happy this return trip is in the summer.

“I don’t like the cold anymore. Well, I do ski, but I’m more prepared.”

Kahn also hopes to arrange a return to the crash site, southeast of Watson Lake.

Looking at photos recounting her story, she says, “ Wow, wow..When I look at it, it’s like someone else.”

Ancient history, Kahn calls the crash.

“I hardly ever think about it. It’s not part of my life, the crash, the book (that she co-wrote in 1963); if happened 33 years ago. But it’s fun to have had it so I can talk to you about it, she says with a laugh.

“People like the story. It’s a good story.”

A photo depicts the SOS scratched in the snow by Flores, the pilot, that led to the rescue.

The plane crashed in a February storm en route to Fort St. John B.C. Flores had been trying to land on the Alaska Highway, and the low-flying plane brushed some trees.

A Star headline read, “Little Hope for Missing Plane” and search efforts were called off after two weeks.

After 10 days, their food supply ran out. In a lean-to constructed from plane wreckage, the pair lived for days on melted snow and toothpaste.

When rescued weeks later, both were undernourished: Flores had lost 26 kilograms and Kahn 18 kilograms. The two had also sustained injuries: Flores suffered from cracked ribs and a broken jaw, and Kahn had a broken arm and frozen feet.

The return is not traumatic, says the 54-year old.

“I never thought of it that way. I always feel pretty lucky to have had the experience-because it was so intense. It’s like nothing you can imagine, and yet to have survived it and come back and tell the story..I always think of myself as putting my toes across the threshold of death.

The toes on one foot were amputated, she adds.

“I thought we were going to die. Well, I didn’t feel as if we were going to die, but as it was pretty painful, it was very cold and it was long and dark. It was very hard, and I couldn’t walk around because my toes were frozen. There’s not very much you can do. I kept thinking, Well, if I’m going to die, let me go.”

But her life force persisted, she says, and the crash showed her what she was capable of.

“You know how tenuous life is. We could have just as easily died, I mean, the distance between life and death is so close that it gives you the courage to live, especially knowing that you can die tomorrow.. I seize life as much as I can. I have a pretty conventional life, mostly, but I don’t have the same limitations”

More significant on her life than the crash was the fact that she’d determined at 20 years old, to set out from Brooklyn N.Y. to see the world. She joined a woman advertising in the New York Times to share driving costs across the country.

“I wanted to see the rest of the world and I wanted to learn how other people thought and what was going on.”

Kahn spent six months in Fairbanks, then decided it was time to continue her trip around the world, so she hooked up with Flores.

The world’s reaction after the two survived was even more profound, she says.

“I mean, I could have had the crash and gone home and nobody would have even heard of it. But because of the crash, it allowed me access to situations and experience I wouldn’t have had, such as being on the cover of Life magazine, eight publishers vying to write my story, you know, and writing a book. That’s really pretty heady stuff.”

The intense fame lasted for over a year, trailed by anniversary stories: “Whatever happened to Helen Klaben?” she says. “Curiously, at the time, I discovered from this experience that I didn’t want to be famous.. Having told the story and made the film and wrote the book, it’s kind of enough. I mean I’m telling it again,” she says, and laughs.

“In certain situations, it’s fun. Here it’s great. You know, where else could people appreciate and enjoy it as much as than where it’s happened? But you know, I don’t make a fetish of it.”

Kahn says she may only tell her story to the Sierra Club at the end of the trip.

“Otherwise, people (would) say, ‘Oh, there’s the woman who...I don’t want to take on the identity.”

The past lingers in other ways, and Kahn recently attended Flores’ 50th wedding anniversary.

Kahn is now on to the next adventure in her life. Five years ago, she relocated to San Francisco, where she’s enjoying suburban life, and has taken up triathlons.

“I finished the child-rearing, and I finished the home-making, and I’m very happily separated for 25 years, and so I have to figure out what the next thing to do is.”

She’s not afraid of change.

“I think I’m afraid to get stuck.”

This is Kahn’s second return to the territory, as she came up for a few days as technical adviser for the 1975 television movie on the crash, Hey, I’m Alive!

“I do a lot of interesting things,” Kahn says about her life, “Nothing could compare on this scale, because it is kind of survival history.”

Kahn and Flores’ story is remembered by others in the territory.

Whitehorse’s Dr. Nesta Leduc looked after Kahn when she was admitted at the hospital.

“It was pretty exciting when they found them..We didn’t think they’d survive that long,” she said today, “I think the main thing I remember was how excited she was that she was actually alive.”

Leduc was there when Kahn went to the nursing station of Whitehorse General Hospital to phone her mother in New York and tell her she was alive.

“It was just so dramatic,” Leduc recalls.

Dorothy Sorensen was the staff nurse in charge of the medical ward that evening. Her diary on Monday, March 25, 1963 notes that a man and woman were found alive and brought into the surgical ward, and “millions of phone calls” followed, she said today.

Star publisher Bob Erlam, who interviewed Kahn 33 years ago, remembers a nurse telling him the pair would not have lasted for three more days.

“Hell, she was just as bright as anything.” he said last Friday.

The Whitehorse Star, July 15, 1996