Father’s crash site found years later

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Thirty-eight years ago, Gail Thurber received about the worst news a 17-year-old girl could hear: Her father’s plane was missing.

The emotions the Washougal, Wash., woman felt that afternoon in 1968 came rushing back to Thurber earlier this month when her father’s plane was found by a hiker in the Canadian Rockies.

“I was just in a state of shock and pain,” Thurber said Thursday after receiving the news from her sister, Sherry Durnford. “I felt just like I did in 1968.”

When they heard, the women and their brother, Garth Thurber, decided they wanted to visit the site where their father died.

Last weekend, the three siblings took a helicopter from Golden, British Columbia, to a rocky site high in the Canadian Rockies. The scenery, at roughly 7,500 feet, was breathtaking. What they saw was heartbreaking.

Engineer Reginald Thurber, 49, and two other men were en route from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Edmonton in a twin-engine Cessna when the plane disappeared without word in January 1968.

The secret of the Thurber flight remained hidden until late last month when Bernie Schiesser, one of two climbers descending from a visit to the Robinson Peaks area near Golden, spotted a battered scrap of red aluminum, the largest more-or-less intact piece of the Cessna 320.

Nearly 40 years after the fact, human remains were barely in evidence. A local coroner and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who inspected the crash site found teeth and jawbone fragments but not much more. The wallet of young pilot Gary Foslien (Reginald Thurber lacked the instrument rating needed for that day’s flight) was found almost unharmed, its contents still legible after decades under snow and ice.

At the time he died, Reginald Thurber and Gail were rebuilding a Tiger Moth aerobatic plane, and she was working on her pilot’s license. That pursuit ended with his passing.

Now, she said, “I’m trying to look on the positive side.” That includes the success of her father’s namesake firm, Thurber Engineering. Next year, the company will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

At the Robinson Peaks scene, Sherry Durnford wanted to collect the aircraft pieces. “My dad was a very neat person,” she told the group. “He would have wanted it cleaned up.”

Gail Thurber’s view prevailed. “I said that I look upon the site as a grave site,” she said. “It is in an area that is so difficult to reach that the only people who would ever be there are climbers, and they respect anything they find.”

Durnford suggested that the group build a rock monument.

With only minutes before the helicopter was due to return, they posed for photographs with a bronze plaque that was cast in 1997, after the discovery of a nearby crash site at first believed to be that of the Thurber Cessna. “In loving memory of Reginald Cameron Thurber,” it reads. “Loving father, husband, brother and son/Top notch engineer and pilot/Creative, energetic and dynamic/We Miss You and Love You Always.”

As the helicopter lifted off from the rocky flank of Robinson Peaks, Gail Thurber turned to her brother, Garth Thurber, and said, “I have a tremendous sense of relief.”

She said she was relieved that all evidence points to her father dying on impact and she is glad he came to rest in a beautiful spot.

“For a pilot and a hiker and an avid outdoorsman like him, this would be the place he would want to be,” Gail Thurber said.