It was just after 7 p.m. local time on August 15, 1935, a frigid day of patchy fog on the far northwest coast of Alaska. Famed flier Wiley Post and his good friend and fellow Oklahoman, the celebrated humorist Will Rogers, were sloshing around the shallow waters of Walakpa Lagoon on the Chukchi Sea coast some 15 miles southwest of Point Barrow. Tiny, remote Barrow, on the most northwesterly point of the North American continent, was to be the jumping off place for their planned flight to Siberia and beyond.
They were behind schedule and anxious to get started. Because of poor visibility, Post had gotten lost on the six-hour jump from Fairbanks to Barrow and had been forced to put the floatplane down in the lagoon to get his bearings. The pair had landed near an Inuit family headed by Clare Okpeaha, who had closed his summer seal hunting camp and was waiting for a boat to Barrow. After Rogers explained they were lost, the Inuit, despite his broken English, pointed to the northeast and guessed the town was about “twenty or thirty miles” away—his concept of “English miles” was limited at best.
Post was loathe to lose another day waiting for better visibility, the marginal takeoff minimums be damned. He had come to think of himself as a master of any situation and his assuredness must have swept Rogers into the moment. After a half-hearted attempt by Okpeaha to dissuade the men from attempting to take off in such poor weather, Post and Rogers climbed back into their single-engine Lockheed Orion. Post started the engine and taxied the awkward, nose-heavy machine across the lagoon and positioned it nose-to-wind. Following a hurried engine run-up check, Post throttled up the 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine and lifted off in such an
