Michael Warville, Zha Cho (1944 – 2013)
Michael Warville was the eldest child of Arthur and Martha Warville. His First Nation name, Zha Cho (Big Sky), was given to him by his great grandmother Ellen Wood. He grew up in the Stewart area and attended the Dawson Public School, living for a year at St. Paul’s Hostel until his family moved to Dawson. After his family moved to Whitehorse, he lived with his uncle and aunt, Arthur and Eva Anderson. When Michael quit school, his father took him to a wood camp where he learned how to operate a cat. He drove equipment at Clinton Creek, in Dawson, and then at the Highway Maintenance Camp on the Dempster Highway where he lived at Ogilvie Camp. His story of a rescue on the Dempster Highway was published in a January 1983 edition of the Readers Digest.1)
During a storm in December 1979, Dempster Highway foreman Gerry Grenon left the Eagle Plains Grader Station travelling north in a pickup truck. He and Ivan Harrison, driving a Kenworth tractor-trailer, were going to build a detour around a snow-filled rock cut at km 450. Very high winds caused them to turn back, and about 78 km north of Eagle Plains, Grenon’s pickup stalled in drifting snow and Harrison got stuck just behind him. Grenon called for help, and they waited in the Kenworth that was running and warm.2)
Grader operator Jim Graham was 131 km south of them when he heard the call for help. He was rescuing Andre Tremblay who was stuck with his plow truck. They both started out, Graham estimating a five-hour trip and Tremblay thought he could reach Grenon and Harrison in four hours. Meanwhile, the Kenworth stalled and Grenon and Harrison were shivering in -30-degree weather and high winds. They called Eagle Plains and John Green, the Eagle Plains mechanic, started out with food and fuel but was stopped by drifting snow after 35 kms. The plow truck reached Green’s pick-up but the fuel line froze when Tremblay tried to get through the drift. They fixed it but had to wait another hour for the grader to blast through the drift at full throttle. They were 40 kms from Grenon and Harrison. Green hurried on through more big drifts and finally got Grenon and Harrison warming up in his pickup. Their clothes were coated in ice. They started back and picked up Tremblay whose plow truck was stalled on the road. Graham was in the grader ready to lead them back to Eagle Plains, but the wind forced the pick-up into the ditch. They moved into the grader but got less than 200 metres before the grader’s engine stopped. All five men were then in the pick-up that had to travel on full throttle just to keep going slowly against the wind. They ran out of gas and tried re-fuelling, but the wind was throwing gravel against the side of the truck causing sparks and it was too dangerous. It was 2 am, and Grenon tried calling again for help. McNiven, at Eagle Plains, started out with a snow blower but it ground to a halt after an hour of travel, leaving McNiven warm but immobile.3)
Six vehicles and six men were now stuck on the Dempster Highway in a very bad storm. The men in the pick-up built a little fire in Harrison’s lunch box with paper and upholstery material. Grenon and Graham were in the backseat with their wet feet pushed into each other’s armpits. There was no one left at Eagle Plains who could come to the rescue and the truck radio was not strong enough to reach the Ogilvie Grader Station 246 km to the south. Grenon’s wife called Ogilvie Station from Eagle Plains and Mike Warville miraculously heard the call at 3 am. He and Martin Farr started out in graders and foreman Tommy Taylor followed in a plow. They reached Eagle Plains at 10 am. Taylor went ahead, fixed McNiven’s broken air line, and reached the stranded travellers after 2 pm. It was 6 pm before everyone was back at Eagle Plains. Grenon and his men had been gone for 36 hours.4)
Mike Warville loved fiddle music and he regularly attended the Fiddle Festival in Fairbanks. He had many cousins in Eagle, Alaska and often visited them. He was one of the first to respond after the 2009 flood in Eagle, bringing building materials, food, and supplies, as well as collected donations. Michael was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. He was predeceased by his parents and brother Kenneth and was survived by brothers Norman and Walter Warville, and sisters Arlene, Catherine Wedge, Martha Jean Tiwana, and Barb Allen.5)