Flying Colours: The Toni Onley Story

Chapter 1: Wrecked on the Cheakamus

     After I touched down my ski plane on the Cheakamus Glacier on September 7, 1984, I measured my time there in the falling degrees of my engine temperature gauge. If it cooled too much, the engine would never start. Carefully, I wrapped the aircraft engine in a padded blanket to keep it warm. To get me home, I relied on a fragile piece of technology -- a small, silver ski plane, a Polish-built “Wilga” or “thrush” with canary yellow wings. For luck, I had painted the fuselage with the call letters C-FLUF -- “Fluff”-- for my mother’s curly blonde hair.
     At 55, I had already flown to the most remote parts of North America in search of landscapes. I had been drawing and painting for most of my life and art remained my great passion. I would have been a better husband and father if I hadn’t been so obsessed with painting.
     My destination that day, Cheakamus Glacier lay high on Mt. Davidson in the ring of enormous mountains in Garibaldi Provincial Park, slightly less than an hour’s flying time from Vancouver, 45 miles away. A thousand feet over Indian Arm inlet, I had caught an offshore wind. As the draft struck Golden Ears Peak and the other mountains on the inlet’s east side, it diverted upward and lifted my plane. Effortlessly, I’d coasted to eight thousand feet and sailed into the air space above the park. I tilted the aircraft toward Castle Towers and the vast white bulk of Mt. Davidson. Gusts of wind skittered across the rich China blue sky. Sunlight burnished the broad Cheakamus Glacier as I glided to a landing on the sheet of snow.
     I unlocked the door and stepped out. The snow felt wet and heavy underfoot. Taking off again was going to be a problem. But I kept any anxiety I felt to myself. I waved to John Reeves as he climbed out of the passenger side of the airplane, cradling one of his cameras in his arm, the other slung over his shoulder. Reeves, a celebrity photographer from Toronto, was shooting a photo essay on me for an inflight magazine.
     Squinting in the sunlight, I asked. “What did you say they were going to call the article?”
I am a short but solid-looking five-foot-six, and Reeves stood a head taller, a sturdy 47-year old with a long, drooping jowl that reminded me of Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple. He grinned, “I’m supposed to be shooting wonderfully evocative images of Canadian culture – misty mountains, ski plane, splendid artist, all that stuff.”
“Let me guess,” I said, scratching my greying beard, “they want to call it ‘The Flying Artist.’”
John nodded. “You’ve got it, Toni.”

     The Flying Artist -- I’d dreamed of that ever since I had been a kid on the Isle of Man and run down hills and leapt into the air. At last, I’d learned to fly while teaching at the University of Victoria in 1966 and living near the airport. After my show sold out in Montreal the following year, I bought a secondhand two-seater, a Champion Sky Trac for about $5,000 and criss-crossed North America, painting landscapes. I sold that aircraft in 1975 to purchase an amphibious Lake Buccaneer float plane with specially-designed landing gear and a boat hull so that I could take off from a meadow, land in the sea, roll up onto a beach, and start painting. The summer of that year, I flew that plane to the eastern Arctic, an extraordinary landscape, one with only the essentials -- an endless blue sky, white, almost blinding light, rock, and water. After I returned to the West Coast, I kept peering up at the mountaintops and wondering how I could reach the glaciers and find the exquisite simplicity I’d seen in the Arctic. Then I read a magazine article about the Wilga 80 which could take off or land in as many metres. Outfitted with skis, it would be the perfect craft to land on the limited surface area of a glacier. In 1981, when I sold the watercolours from my book A Silent Thunder for about $100,000, I bought myself the plane.
     John unslung the cameras on his shoulder and snapped a few photographs of me by the Wilga. I placed my sketchbook on the tail plane, then taped a sheet of watercolour paper about 10 inches by 11 inches onto the lid of my paintbox. My birchwood box opened in sections, the inside of the lid holding about 50 sheets of Arches rag-content paper, the rest of the box containing tubes of watercolour pigment, a wooden palette, a water container and several Chinese goat hair brushes.
     I stood in the snow, poised over the paper. Then I lit my pipe and dipped a paintbrush into the water container and onto the squiggle of lamp black pigment on my palette. I faced Mt. Davidson and painted it as if it were part of a big still life of rock and snow. I dabbed the brush into some French ultramarine blue I had squeezed onto my palette, then I dipped my brush into the water tray, lifted it out, shook the excess water from it and applied a thin blue wash onto my paper.
     In Canada, landscape painting is one of our strongest traditions, best known through the work of the Group of Seven, particularly in the warmth of A.Y. Jackson’s portrayal of the vanishing farmhouses in Quebec’s eastern townships or in a massive canvas like Lawren Harris’ monumental North Shore, Lake Superior where the white trunk of a huge dead tree towers over the broad lake. On the West Coast, Emily Carr created dark, sinuous firs with swirling green boughs in mysterious verdant green rain forests. My landscapes depicted the mist-shrouded West Coast mountains, ragged grey storm clouds and alpine lakes so dark that they appeared bottomless and supernatural.
     While I painted on the Cheakamus, the wind picked up. Taking off from a glacier in a strong wind could be tricky, even dangerous so I put down my watercolour, unfinished, and hurried John back into the plane. I twisted the ignition key. As the propellor revolved, I turned the plane, facing the nose toward the downward slope. As we taxied down the mountainside, the snow began sticking to the skis. Halfway in the run, I could see we’d never reach flying speed. I chopped the power, turned the plane and headed back up the slope.
"We'll take another shot at it," I radioed John over the headset.
Tightening the belt of his shoulder harness, he joked a little. "Whatever you say, Toni, as long as we’re back for supper.”
     On my first try, I had laid down tracks in the snow so this time, I swung the Wilga into the grooves. As we gained speed, I pulled full flaps, the lateral controls at the rear of the wings that create air resistance and lift the plane off the ground. Nothing happened. We were rattling down the glacier at 50 miles per hour. I glanced at the flaps. They dangled from the wings. Then I noticed the snow swirling past the window. That meant a tail wind had caught up to us and eliminated the air resistance. We careened off the tracks toward a gaping crevasse that sliced across the lower end of the glacier.
     I had to make a split-second decision. If I cut the engine and stopped the propeller, our momentum would still carry us over the glacier and the plane would drop into the crevasse. I left the power on. We leaped into the air and slammed into the far wall of the glacier.



A spasm of pain jolted me awake. Jagged strips of metal from the fuselage pinned my legs under the wrecked instrument panel. The engine had been rammed through the cockpit and had punched out the control panel. My shoulder harness had sprung open and my seat had been wrenched off its mounting. My hand still clutched the throttle. And my ring finger bled, cut to the bone. Probably, it had been caught between the throttle and the pitch control on the instrument panel.
     I turned to John. He seat had been almost thrust out of the aircraft. He sat buckled into it, his head slumped forward, blood dripping from his mouth. I struggled to free my leg, then shouted, “John, are you all right?” Once or twice, he flinched, indicating he lived, though apparently suffering from massive internal injuries. I reached over to John and slapped his face to revive him.
     His eyes snapped open and he twisted in his shoulder harness. "What kind of a place is this?...I hope they have a good wine cellar." He had lost his memory.
"We crashed, John...we crashed.”
     He turned to the window. The Wilga was wedged into a narrow crevasse. It had jumped the first crevasse, and slotted into a second, narrower one. Only 30 or 40 feet long, the smaller crevasse was little wider than the body of the plane. Like the crossed stem of a stubby “t,” the second crevasse ran perpendicular to the first one and in the direction of our descent down the mountain. I guess that we had skidded to a stop in it, shearing off the Wilga’s skis, wheels, and part of the undercarriage before the nose of the plane butted against the end of the crevasse. Precariously, we hung over the second crevasse, supported by the aircraft wings that rested on the snowbanks on either side of the first crevasse. If the plane suddenly tilted backward, it would pitch us through the rear window and we’d tumble into the first crevasse, about 90 feet deep.
     Fortunately, the blood trickling from John’s mouth only came from a cut lip. Except for a swollen cheek that made his face resemble that of a friendly, oversized chipmunk, he seemed all right. I helped him unbuckle his harness and he shifted to one of the other seats in the cabin.
I checked the ELT, the Emergency Locator Transmitter. It should have started operating automatically after the crash, but I had to switch the ELT on manually. I noted the time on my watch, 3:15 pm. Then I hunted for the radio. It had fallen through a hole in the cockpit floor and dangled from a cord attached to the instrument panel. I hauled the radio into the cabin, tuned it to an emergency band, and I pressed the mic. "Mayday! Mayday!" It was no use. The cable to the radio antenna had been shorn off. I crawled into the luggage compartment in the back of the plane to get the first aid kit to bandage my bleeding finger. The whole fuselage trembled as I moved. Very cautiously, I crept back into the cabin, sat on one of the passenger seats and stretched out my injured leg.
     “I think one of my cameras fell through.” John was peeking into the hole in the floor. With a crooked smile, he added, "Toni, I suppose you realize this crash scotches our story. CP Air isn't going to publish anything that ends in an airplane crash.” He turned to me. “So what do we do now?”
     "I turned on the emergency locator transmitter. We wait for help.”
“Wait for help?” John shook his head in disbelief. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
A finely-grained snow started to fall outside the plane. Gusts of wind blew the snow through the wreck and the powder settled on our clothes. I shuddered with the cold. I remembered the sleeping bag in the luggage compartment. I retrieved it and we wrapped it around our feet. I wore the head-piece and I made myself a pillow from a box of John's film and a carrying bag. I passed my parka to John and he squatted in a lotus position, attempting to rest.
     For the next little while, we kept shifting, trying to find a comfortable position in our cold, cramped quarters. At last I turned to him, “John, you have another camera, right?”
     “Yeah, what about it?”
     “Maybe you should shoot some photographs of the wreck.”
     He groaned, "I'm not a crash photographer."
     "For the record, John.”
     “Let other people chase ambulances. I”m not in that kind of business.”
     “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, John, but maybe we should document this in case we don’t make it."
"Instead of taking pictures,” he retorted, “I think we should get out of this bloody wreck and bivouac on the snow!"
     "With this wind, we'd freeze to death," I told him. "We've got the only shelter between here and Vancouver."


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