Do the bush days of flying still exist? We set out hitchhiking as far north as we can to find out. By Tim Querengesser

At 16,000 feet Craig Eisan steps from the cockpit of the small plane he's flying and back into the passenger compartment. From a blue cooler sitting on the front-most seat he produces several "Stackers" snack boxes and bottles of water, which he begins handing to the six passengers in the 19-seat aircraft.

"Are you Craig?" I yell, above the thrum of the twin propellers.

"Yeah," Eisan yells back, confused how I know his name. Honestly, I'm confused too. This is the first time I've talked to a commercial pilot while they’re flying (relax, his young female co-pilot has control) and likely the only instance one will serve me cheese and cold cuts. This is Northwestern Air Lease flight 908, from Edmonton to Hay River. For many it's a two-hour commute home, but for me it's the first of an eight-flight hitchhike to the Arctic.

By flying north 1,900 nautical kilometres, the distance between Edmonton and Las Vegas, I'm attempting to head back in time. If every flight takes off I'll end up not in Vegas but in Tuktoyaktuk – if being the operative word.

My trip is all about how I'm going to Tuk: It won't be aboard jets that cruise to the weather-free stratosphere. Those are for sissies. No, to discover whether the culture of bush planes still thrives I'm hitchhiking north in propeller planes, some as small as a mother's minivan, as cold at takeoff as a school bus on January mornings and most flying at what feels like Frisbee altitude. The passengers won't be watching in-flight movies either. They'll mostly be aboriginal people heading to small communities, which the planes will stop at like they're delivering the mail (actually they will be), along with squealing dogs, cranky miners and patients bound for hospital. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In almost every sentence that a Northerner speaks about bush planes, the word “still” creeps in – as in “bush planes still fly here.” The territories were opened with bush planes in the early part of the 20th century. While roads and rails did the same for much of Canada’s west, and later flowered into a network, the North – most especially the Northwest Territories and Nunavut – remains terra incognita to asphalt or locomotives. Where the unforgiving landscape made roads impossible, the small plane filled the gap. And still does. Thanks to floats and skis they’re able to land almost anywhere, making them the North’s only all-weather road. To this day, they carry adventurers, doctors, police and prospectors into places you’ve never heard of and bring the sick, convicted and stranded back to civilization.

Like most with a pulse I'm a sucker for a bit of danger. Fittingly, I’ve grown weary of modern air travel with its inhuman security and corporatized banality – ‘Would you like a headset for your movie? Three dollars please.’ No, I grew up on stories that featured travel as an event. Like the stories, travel back then pulled you from your world and into another, an experience where you could dream lives you’ve never lived in places you’ve never been. So with this as my only mantra, and small planes as my only vehicle, off to Tuk I go.

After a night in Hay River spent digesting the largest plate of Chinese food I've ever tackled, I hail a cab to the airport. Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz blares over the stereo (I wish that I could fly/into the sky/so very high). It's the theme song for the Ice Pilots show. I'm hoping it's auspicious. You see, Buffalo Airways is run by "Buffalo Joe" McBryan, who earned his nickname flying bush planes in Wood Buffalo National Park. He’s a 66-year old man known for being charming around women but indifferent toward men, so I spend the ride hoping the song means he'll be friendly when I try to talk to him as he commutes to work in Yellowknife at the helm of a DC-3

“My son Mikey arranges all of these things,” Joe says, when I introduce myself at the Buffalo desk. He stands aloof behind it, wearing a black bomber jacket and an aviator toque with fur trim. He’s correct, Mikey McBryan did arrange my flight, and also suggested I talk to his father only in the air. (“When he’s flying he’s really relaxed," Mikey said. "Everywhere else he’s like a rubber band waiting to snap.") Here on the ground, Buffalo Joe hardly looks at me. “I’m a very busy guy," he says. "Just go get on the airplane. Then you’ll be out of my way.”

Thankfully the airplane speaks for Joe. Like all good bush planes, it has sexy, timeless lines. It's a 1940s Douglas DC-3 with two Pratt & Whitney 14-cylinder engines and a 2,700-kilogram cargo capacity, a design that revolutionized the aviation industry . . . 75 years ago. Where the plane is now a museum attraction in the south it’s still a viable workhorse for Buffalo, thanks to its short take off and relatively high cargo capacity. In fact, three million kilograms of freight heads north aboard Buffalo’s 14 or so planes like this each year.

And thus it rouses romance. Everyone seems excited a newbie Buffalo flyer is in their midst. "Ever been on a 3 before!?" ground workers ask. And inside the DC-3's yellow-lit cabin, with cargo-boxes piled to the ceiling on the right and seven rows of twin seats on the left, an older passenger gets on and guffaws, “Ever flown on a 3 before!?”

Finally, McBryan marches on. And promptly walks right past me. I stare out the window at a worker sweeping the plane's wing, swearing quietly to myself for missing my chance to interview what is likely the most "bush" pilot in the North. Then Buffalo Joe yells back: “Hey what’s-your-name? Come up here!”

In Norman Wells, a large picture of two German Junkers F.13s hangs in the North-Wright Airways office. The planes, owned by Imperial Oil, were the first to fly into the territory, 89 years ago this March. "I wish they would have kept one of the originals," says Warren Wright, the founder of the airline and a history buff who once went to Germany to research the planes. He figures, of the two, one's destroyed, "and the other's at the bottom of some lake."

It’s a fitting end. In the 1920s, while the Canadian west had rail-towns, most of its Northern territories were beyond limits to non-aboriginal settlers. Instead of arriving by rail, the decade saw Canada’s frontier spread north by air. Those first planes brought people looking for oil, uranium and gold, and civilities like the mail, police and dentists. On return flights, pilots often overloaded their primitive machines with furs, fish or minerals, often with disastrous consequences (i.e., “the bottom of some lake”). And before television entertainment, bush pilots like Wilfred "Wop" May and Clennell "Punch" Dickens became celebrities, cemented when May assisted the RCMP tracking Albert Johnson, known as the Mad Trapper, near Aklavik in 1932.

Romantic stuff it was, and heroes were quickly born. May and Dickens came first, then Grant McConachie, who launched scheduled flights to the Yukon and discovered flying over the North Pole was the quickest way to Asia. There was Max Ward, who started Wardair in Yellowknife in the 1950s, growing it to become Canada's third largest airline when he sold it for $250 million in 1989. And Tom Lamb, an old-schooler who spoke Cree, had six pilot sons and flew in the Eastern Arctic.

Their disrespect for authority made them sky-cowboys, trading the horse for planes like the de Havilland Fox Moth and later, the Noorduyn Norseman and de Havilland Beaver. Lamb once told the CBC that, if he damaged a propeller flying in the bush, he wasn't afraid to "saw the end of the other blade off and make them even. You might have a little vibration, but you'll get home." He's in Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame. In 1989, on the subject of bush flying, Max Ward told Up Here, "We tied all kinds of things to the outside [of planes]. Shiva wheels, big tanks, canoes, even upright pianos."

When we say “modern” air travel we mean the removal of the discomforts and dangers of flying – those upright piano moments. Still, while much has changed, some of these remain in the North. Passengers "come prepared," says Andrew Bailes, a senior pilot and manager at North-Wright. "They've got their warm clothes (North-Wright requires passengers to have winter clothing on winter flights) and if there's a delay for weather or mechanical it's just sort of, 'Oh well, it's one of those things,’” he says. There’s also an intimacy you won’t find elsewhere – pilots serving you biscuits or squeezing past to get to the cockpit, and the camaraderie a small group of people traveling together in a confined space tends to have. This is true whether you’re on a scheduled flight, like mine, or flying with the hundreds of Northerners who own their own floatplanes, some of them parked in lakes beside their houses.

Just like the golden bush days, the region remains a place for commercial pilots to make their name. Craig Eisan, 28, who served me lunch on Northwestern, told me, "The North's more of a training ground now” for young flyers. He doesn’t plan to stay his entire career, but instead is gunning to fly commercial jetliners. But with WestJet and Air Canada expanding to Northern cities, change is coming. "It's getting easier and easier to fly to those places,” Eisan says. “Yellowknife isn't that far north anymore."

He's right. While the bush arguably remains in the smaller carriers, the North's big airlines are suddenly in the south. Airlines like Air North, Canadian North, First Air and Air Inuit, which base their far-reaching Northern networks on lucrative connections with southern cities, are now facing pressure from Canada’s biggest carriers. WestJet landed in Yellowknife in 2009; along with increasing its service to Whitehorse recently, in March, Air Canada Jazz will begin flying to Iqaluit.

A price war has resulted, seeing money-losing $50 seat-sales between Yellowknife and Edmonton replace the gravy days of $500 (or more) one-way tickets. Many fear an entire Northern airline may fall as a result, potentially isolating Arctic residents. At the Nunavut legislature, MLAs recently debated an outright ban on these southern carriers. Enuk Pauloosie, an MLA from Gjoa Haven, urged the legislature to take a "strong stand" against Air Canada, and Fred Schell, MLA for South Baffin, called the company "an unwelcome predator."

Some say Northern governments are themselves part of the problem, making the bush days sticking around longer than necessary (the prefix “bush” is contentious now, as some feel it suggest sloppy standards). Wright and others have been pushing for longer runways in NWT communities in order to fly more modern aircraft, which require longer runways. Until they're built, Wright and other NWT airlines have been reduced to carrying only nine passengers in their older planes in order to comply with increasingly strict regulations. "We're on the 11th hour," Wright says, frustrated. "They [the government] do runways. We do airplanes."

When he first came to the North, “You didn't have to put a seat in your airplane to carry your passengers," Wright says, laughing. "We've come a long way. Now you've got rules that are strict. [But] the method of the south is that in the North we're all bush pilots. That's not the real truth anymore. We're running airlines up here just the same as an airline in the south."

As Buffalo Joe prepares for takeoff in the DC-3 cockpit, I’m wondering why he’s invited me. What I thought would prompt a chat has only resulted in him acknowledging my existence, then forgetting it again. Now I’m sitting behind him and he's clearly too busy, checking gauges, blowing a kiss to workers on the ground, then throttling up those Pratt & Whitney behemoths. Then, “This is something you won’t see anywhere in the world," Buffalo Joe says, through the headset, perhaps even to me. "Five prop planes out there, all the same colour.”

With that serving as Buffalo Joe’s last comment in my direction, we lead his antique air force down the runway, with DC-3s and Curtis-46s queuing behind us. The 3’s frame flexes and twists as the engines hit takeoff power. They produce a sound that's part farm tractor, part dragster. And the madly spinning props vibrate so much it's difficult to see. Then, after a short take off, I realize why everyone asks if you've done this before: In the air, a DC-3 is magic-carpet smooth.

Because they'd be grounded if they didn't, Buffalo Airways has absorbed nearly all of the world's remaining stock of war-era surplus parts for DC-3s, 4s, and C-46s. In just one of the countless byzantine parts rooms in the Yellowknife hanger (they also have a hangar in Red Deer, Alberta) sit nearly a dozen unopened boxes of magnetos for DC-4s. Manufacture date: 1942. Rod McBryan, one of Buffalo Joe's three children who work with him, is in charge of finding parts. "I still had shit in my diapers when I first started going to [parts] auctions with my dad," he jokes.

Such a company attracts certain types. Like junior Buffalo pilot Scott Blue. He grew up dreaming of being a racecar driver but, at 6'7", that wasn't an option. "To work here you have to have a real love of the planes," Blue says. "I'm nostalgic. I thought it'd be really cool to fly the old iron before it's out of the sky. How much longer can they keep going?"

You can't escape a thought like Blue’s, that you're taunting the forces of obsolescence, as you fly in a DC-3. Buffalo Joe seems to get it, too.

“We operate a pinball machine, not a video game,” he says, after hitting cruise altitude.

“Yeah, the new planes are video games,” responds the co-pilot.

“Ha!” Buffalo Joe says. “This is paint by numbers.”

After landing in Yellowknife, I wait for Buffalo Joe to emerge on the tarmac. Sure enough, he sees me. And literally runs right past me towards the hangar.

"Hey Tim -- how much do you weigh?"

It's Christmas: That means everyone in the Tim Hortons-sized North-Wright hangar in Yellowknife has gifts to send to Deline, Tulita and Fort Good Hope. Steve Sheradan is trying to squeeze the maximum weight on to the nine-seat Beech 99. "Some people get pretty upset," Sheredan says. "One guy just refused to say his weight when I asked. Finally he just stared at his newspaper and said, '210.'"

Everyone knows everyone here, and everyone (other than me) is speaking North Slavey. The Air Canada executive lounge it's not. An elder gives out $5 bills to tween girls and boys, and every few minutes, he's the first person people see when they drop off boxes for transport. This results in a round of handshakes. During my hour wait it happens 10 times.

Finally, it's time to get on the plane. A hush falls over the nine passengers as we taxi to the runway, recognizing we should be quiet to allow the pilots, who squeezed past us to get to their seats, to concentrate. The windows are foggy and require you to rub them to see out. You can even see your breath before the heater kicks in.

After the short take off, the haunting beauty and sameness of the Northern landscape comes into view. You don’t see this in jets flying above the clouds. How confusing this landscape must have been for the first generation of Northern bush pilots, navigating without radios, GPSs or, because of the proximity to the magnetic North Pole, a compass. I can make out our altitude, 4,500-feet, by the altimiter, which is in full view. Having never been able to see pilots at work, it's a revelation that they do what I do during a long flight – read the newspaper, chat and joke.

“Look at the sun!” a Dene man beside me says, tapping my shoulder and pointing with his beaver-fur mittens. The sun, setting in late December at only 3 o'clock, looks squashed, separated and split. We're viewing a Novaya Zemlya sun and the horizon dances with heat squiggles. Instead of watching our approach to Deline, I'm pulled into a scene free of signs of man. It's a near religious feeling I've only experienced in the North.

The airport in Deline is the size of a school portable. Still, it's bustling with what seems like a quarter of the town's 530 or so people. They're here to pick-up passengers. As we sit, another plane lands, and one of our pilots rushes out and -- as if the plane was a pickup truck -- starts one of the engines and re-parks to allow the other to get to the terminal.

A man who's the only passenger other than me not getting off in Deline -- he's continuing on to Tulita -- has an envelope thrust into his hand by an excited woman.

"Are you going to Tulita?" she asks. The man nods. "Could you give this to George?"

So here I am in Inuvik. My flight to Tuk is cancelled: The ice road has opened; people are driving instead. An Inuvialuit woman with a baby cocooned in her amauti sits in the airport. A pilot informs her the flight to Ulukhaktok is cancelled for the second day in a row because of weather. "I'm used to it," she says, resigned. I’m guessing flights to Sachs Harbour are similarly grounded. My trip north has officially peaked.

It's taken me five days and seven flights to get to here, well above the Arctic Circle. Other than being given a key to someone else's hotel room in Norman Wells, resulting in one screaming (but thankfully, clothed) woman, I've heard a woman on a plane hint she's going to become a prostitute and made another scream by sneezing. I’ve recognized a friend flying a lumbering C-46, which landed with a rumble in Fort Good Hope as I boarded a plane. And I've met a Nigerian priest, Rev. Fr. Michael Okafor, who flies to communities near Norman Wells monthly. "I'm having a good time," he said, with a huge smile.

It isn't the holy bush plane experience I was hoping for, but it was a trip at human scale. I floated at dream-altitude above nearly the entire Northwest Territories, an experience that allowed me to remember that flying, in the beginning, wasn't about where you were going, but how. Romance still alive? Check.