Everett Louis Wasson (1908 - 1958)
Everett Wasson was raised in Geyserville, California.1) Wasson was involved with George Simmons in the founding of Northern Airways in Carcross in 1935. Wasson was a pilot for Livingston Wernecke in Mayo and flew a Fairchild FC2-W2 for Treadwell Yukon from 1928 to 1935.2)
Pilot Patty Burke and his passengers, Emil Kading and Bob Martin, went missing in an Air Land Manufacturing Company’s Junker on 12 October 1930. By the end of October, seven planes had searched for the plane without success. Of the seven, one plane disappeared enroute to the search area killing three people, two others crashed with no loss of life, and a third was grounded by weather. The remaining planes gave up the search at the beginning of November and Air Land asked Treadwell Yukon and their pilot Wasson to resume the search.3)
Wasson asked expert woodsman Joe Walsh for help and the two started their systematic search on November 12th. They were forced down repeatedly in bad weather and had to tie spruce bows to the skis to keep them from freezing in. To take off they had to build runways through the heavy snow. Walsh often had to run along by the plane and swing up into it after it was airborne. They searched for weeks and spent time looking near Teslin because of some bad information. Two months after Burke's plane went missing, Wasson and Walsh spotted it in the snow. Two days later they found Kading and Martin. They threw out food and landed on a lake 16 km away and snowshoed back to the men. The survivors were transported to Whitehorse on 10 December 1930. It is estimated that Wasson and Walsh snowshoed no less than 322 km during the search. The British Columbia government awarded $15,000 to Wasson and $5,000 to Walsh. Shortly after, Yukon required that all planes have survival gear.4)
In 1937, Wasson was the chief pilot for White Pass Air, a division of British Yukon Navigation Company (White Pass & Yukon Route). In May 1940, Wasson was appointed assistant superintendent of air operations for the company. He was mostly in the office but in June 1941 he flew supplies into the Barz brothers on Maragaret Lake as he may have been the only pilot familiar with the Bonnetplume River country.5)
When pilot Vaughan Woods and a passenger crashed at Fox Lake and Woods died, four men lost their licences. The mechanic who did the overhaul forgot to replace a cotter pin in a nut, the man who did the daily inspection didn't catch it, and the chief engineer signed for the overhaul. Ev Wasson was the head of aviation. He lost his licence as well and moved back to California to operate a fruit orchard.6) It was an unfortunate end to a brilliant career in Yukon’s commercial aviation.7)
The small lake that Wasson and Walsh landed on during their search for Patty Burke’s plane is named Wasson Lake. Everett Wasson was inducted into the Yukon Transportation Hall of Fame on June 2, 2005.