Yellowknife (Mar 11/05) - Helen Turner remembers the early morning hour when one of the North's most enigmatic figures stepped towards his tragic date with destiny.

There was a brief farewell, and then the sound of a bushplane engine revving up and skidding across the still frozen lake.

Helen Turner, now 98, was the last person to see McAvoy and his passenger Doug Torp and Al Kunes, alive.

Chuck McAvoy's Fairchild 82 would not be seen for another 40 years. It's rusted-out skeleton was discovered last summer by geologists in a remote gully 585 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife.

The missing aircraft had become the stuff of legend over the years. McAvoy himself often boasted before his disappearance, "If I crash, they'll never find me."

Turner, 98, and now a resident of Kamloops, B.C., remembers McAvoy's declaration well, but in the early morning hours of June 9, 1964, she didn't give it much thought.

Turner and her late-husband George did not realize that they would be the last people to see McAvoy and his two young passengers, Al Kunes and Doug Torp, alive.

The three men were moving over to Itchen Lake to set up another prospecting camp when their plane disappeared.

"We were in bed, and he came in to say goodnight and goodbye to us," says Turner.

"They had the plan to set up another camp at another lake. They hadn't planned to leave until morning so they came and told us they were going to leave that night."

She said it was a perfect night for flying. The sun in June is high in the sky over the Barrens, and the weather was calm.

Within a day or two, however, the Turner's quiet prospecting camp at Bristol Lake was boiling over with search crews, looking in vain for the missing plane.

The company the Turners and the two geologists had worked for - Roberts Mining Corporation - had put heavy pressure on the Canadian government to find the missing men, and thus, one of the largest air searches in Canadian history commenced.

"All the planes landed on the ice at Bristol Lake," said Turner.

"They were planes from all over the place searching. I cooked for whatever ones happened to be there."

By the end of that short Arctic summer, it had become clear that McAvoy would prove an elusive target.

Turner would spend the next four decades wondering what really happened to the three men. Despite McAvoy's prediction, she thought it wouldn't take that long to find them.

"We thought surely they would find them because we figured they had gone down in a lake," says Turner. "And if they went down into a lake with all those little gas barrels on, we figured there would have to be some of those little barrels floating around."

News of the plane's discovery last August re-awakened many memories from her time at the prospecting camp.

Snapped some photos

She happened to snap some photographs of McAvoy - although they went undeveloped for many years - including a shot of his plane the day before it disappeared as it was being loaded.

McAvoy was often the Turners' only link to civilization during the early 1960s.

She said he was a gregarious man who was always ready to share a laugh.

Turner was also fond of the two geologists, Torp and Kune, who briefly shared their camp before planning to make another at Itchen.

She said Torp talked constantly about his baby daughter back home in Wisconsin.

"They were nice young men," says Turner.

"Doug was so proud of that baby. He talked about his family all the time."

Yellowknifer spoke with Torp's daughter, Kris Baker, last year. She was 18 months old when her father died.

As for the charges that McAvoy was a reckless pilot who took too many chances, Turner summed it up as confidence.

A year or two before he disappeared, Turner was flying with McAvoy as they made their way to another camp at a lake they named after themselves, Turner Lake.

A narrow ravine guided their approach to the body of water. Turner recalls asking him to stay above it so she wouldn't be scared by being so close to the canyon walls.

McAvoy laughed, and flew down the ravine anyway.

"I don't think he was wild, but he was a real bushpilot," says Turner.

"He wasn't afraid of anything. He was just a daredevil."