Clarence Rhode

Clarence Rhode (d.1958) served as supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s aircraft division in Alaska following his World War II tenure as a bush pilot. Becoming the agency’s regional director in 1948, Rhode remained a bush pilot at heart, flying dignitaries and guests around the still-remote Territory in his amphibian “Grumman Goose.” On August 21, 1958, Rhode, his son Jack, and game management agent Stanley Fredericksen planned to fly over an area now encompassed by the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during a round-trip mission from Porcupine Lake to Fairbanks. Their “Grumman Goose” was last sighted over Arctic Lake about noon on that ill-fated day. The trio’s disappearance prompted the greatest air-sea search-and-rescue effort ever mounted in the Territory, in a futile three-and-a-half-month attempt to locate the plane in a remote, 147,000-square-mile region. On August 26, 1979, hikers reported the discovery of remains at the 6,000-foot elevation of a craggy mountain pass in the isolated Brooks Range, thus ending one of Alaska’s most enduring mysteries and a chapter in the history of the Fish and Wildlife Service when bureaucrats remained close to the wild places they managed.