It was a story that captured the world.

The rescue of pilot Ralph Flores and passenger Helen Klaben after they spent 49 days deep in northern B.C.’s frozen wilderness following their airplane crash in February 1963 made headlines from Whitehorse to New York, and beyond.

A big piece of history from the day was donated Monday afternoon to the Yukon Transportation Museum by the family of Charles Hamilton, the Watson Lake bush pilot responsible for the world-famous rescue.

The large section of the cloth fuselage bearing the registration of the downed aircraft was cut away and removed by Flores and Klaben so they could haul it down the mountain from the crash site to an area more open.

Attempts to draw attention to themselves in the five or six weeks following the crash failed.

The search had been extensive. Countless hours by numerous pilots were spent looking for the missing Howard DGA-15 and its two occupants. But the thick forest canopy would not surrender their location.

Injured, banged-up and bruised, they were largely immobile. Klaben’s feet had suffered severe frostbite.

It wasn’t until 10 days or so before they were rescued that Flores mustered the strength to travel down the mountain for a look.

When he returned a day or two later, it was decided they had to move down closer to the valley bottom, where they would be more visible.

It worked.

The piece of fuselage bearing the registration number N58856 – measuring about seven feet long by three feet wide – has been hanging in the recreation room of Hamilton’s home in Victoria for years.

Following his death last January, his daughter, Heather Hamilton, was going through things. She suggested to her mother, Marion, that they donate the piece of history back to the Yukon Transportation Museum. Her mother agreed.

Last Sunday, the two women travelled up from British Columbia as guests of Air North to be here for the unveiling. They were joined by Carmen Komish, Hamilton’s niece and a resident of Whitehorse.

Marion drew the curtain on the newest addition to the museum’s permanent display highlighting the story of Flores and Klaben, their miraculous survival and the circumstances of their amazing rescue.

Local aviation historian Bob Cameron emceed the event. For the 20 or so people on hand, he recalled the story of how Flores had just finished an 18-month stint as a mechanic at a Distant Early Warning Line site in Alaska.

He was going to be flying home to California for his two weeks off, before having to return for another 18 months. Flores advertised for anyone interested in flying with him to share the cost of fuel.

Klaben, a young, adventuresome 21-year-old originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., answered the ad.

The weather was nasty when they arrived in Whitehorse, Cameron told Monday’s audience. He said it was nasty when they left.

But in his haste to get home, Flores did not accept the advice from local pilots to stay put and let the weather pass before departing on the leg to Fort St. John, B.C.

They were south of Watson Lake in snowy conditions, and Flores was flying low in search of the Alaska Highway to help him find his way.

So low was he that when his first fuel tank ran dry, there wasn’t enough time to get gas flowing from the second tank before he lost altitude and crashed 75 miles south of Watson.

The pair’s injuries were substantial, but not life-threatening. They had little food on board: two cans of sardines, two cans of fruit cocktail, and some crackers.

Nothing else.

They lived on what they described later as a diet of melted snow water.

When they decided to move down the mountain, Flores used the section of fabric bearing the registration number as a toboggan on which to haul Klaben.

Off in the distance from their new shelter, they could see a large open slough. Flores would leave Klaben to go in search of the chainsaw noise they had heard.

On his way, he tramped out a big SOS in the snow at the slough they could see. Beside it, he tramped a big arrow pointing to the direction of Klaben and the shelter.

Hamilton ran a local flying business out of Watson Lake, the B.C.-Yukon Flying Services.

He and Jack George, a local First Nations hunting guide, were flying into a wilderness outfitting camp when Hamilton noticed something.

Marion said her husband was blinded by the glimmer of the bright sun off the snow, so he couldn’t make out the SOS, but something was tugging at him.

“So he leaned back and asked Jack George, who was in the back seat, if he could see anything, because he knew he had eagle eyes,” she recalled Monday. “Then Jack George asked him, ‘What does SOS mean?’”

Hamilton turned back for a second look, saw the arrow stamped in the snow beside the large distress signal and followed the direction. He flew over Klaben waving her arms.

He saw the registration number on the large piece of fabric they had used as a toboggan, confirming it belonged to the Howard aircraft that had gone missing seven weeks earlier.

Three aircraft from Watson Lake returned the next day, two of them landing first at a trapper’s cabin on Airplane Lake, where Flores eventually ended up. Hamilton then made the 16-km (10-mile) hop to pick up Klaben.

It was Hamilton who carried her some three miles through snow to his aircraft.

News of their unlikely survival spread like wildfire, right around the globe.

Klaben’s first thought when she awoke in the wrecked aircraft a half-hour after the crash, as she described to the Star from her hospital bed in Whitehorse: “Hey, I’m alive!”

It became the title of her book about the ordeal, and the title of the movie that followed in 1975.

Heather said her dad never really made a big deal of the part he played in the dramatic rescue.

“He was kind of modest about the whole thing,” she said. “He didn’t really like the big hoopla they made of it.”

But big hoopla it was.

Marion recalled how she and her husband were invited to New York, where Charlie appeared on a popular TV show featuring celebrity panelists trying to guess the identity of the mystery guest.

Given that Klaben was from Brooklyn, and given the story of their survival was still red-hot, it didn’t take long for the panelists to guess Charlie’s identity, Marion said.

She said they were also guests at the Playboy Mansion in New York.

The hardened fabric with registration number November 58856 was unveiled by Marion November 5. It’s among other artifacts recovered in 1998, when Cameron and three of Flores’ six children hiked into the crash site.

Nobody but Flores and Klaben, and an investigation team led by the late Alex Van Bibber a few days after the rescue, had ever been to the site.

Cameron, Flores’ two sons and a daughter were the first since March 1963.