I knew we were going to crash.

Wonderfully remarkable. From Helen Klaben Kahn, Survivor of a 49-Day Yukon Ordeal, Dies at 76 by Richard Sandomir. The obituary of Helen Klaben Kahn is the opportunity to recount an astonishing adventure.

Helen Klaben, looking for adventure, left Brooklyn at age 20 in the summer of 1962 and drove to Alaska with a woman she had met through a newspaper ad. After several months in Fairbanks she was ready to move on, perhaps to explore Hong Kong or India.

But first she had to reach San Francisco, her portal to Asia, so to get there she took a flight from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory, in early 1963 on a single-engine airplane piloted by Ralph Flores, an aircraft mechanic from California, sharing the expenses with him.

After being grounded for three days by snowstorms, they took off on the next leg, to Fort St. John, British Columbia, on Feb. 4, despite still-dangerous weather.

Flying for hours through blinding snow and harsh winds, Mr. Flores tried to find his bearings by taking the plane above the clouds. When he descended, he hoped to follow landmarks or the path of the Alaska Highway to reach Fort St. John.

But Mr. Flores, an inexperienced pilot, did not know how to fly using only the aircraft’s instruments — an essential skill in poor weather conditions — and did not bring adequate food or basic survival gear, like an ax, sleeping bags or a rifle. (A few months after the crash, his pilot’s license was suspended for a year by the Federal Aviation Administration.)

“I knew he didn’t know where he was, and he wouldn’t say we were lost, but I knew we were,” Ms. Klaben later said in an interview with The Saturday Evening Post. “We were flying by a mountain and I saw trees right below us. I knew we were going to crash.”

Mr. Flores recalled, also to The Post: “I said out loud, ‘O.K., Helen, here it comes.’ I saw the right wing tip hit the trees and I just closed my eyes.”

The plane crashed into a desolate, forested stretch of a mountainside near the Yukon-British Columbia border.

But they not only miraculously survived the crash, Ms. Klaben suffering a broken left arm and Mr. Flores fracturing his jaw and several ribs; they also went on to endure 49 days of subzero temperatures, some of that time huddled inside the cabin of the plane’s wreckage, some of it in a lean-to Mr. Flores built, until they were finally rescued.

She lived a full life. Read the whole thing at the link for details of the adventure. I like that she and her pilot remained friends the rest of their lives.

In 1975, she and Mr. Flores — they stayed friends until his death in 1997 — were advisers to “Hey, I’m Alive,” an ABC television movie based on her book starring Sally Struthers and Ed Asner.