In 1956 a military plane on a routine training mission vanished into the thin air above Whistler.
In its wake, two wives - Mary and Olive - lost their husbands. Six children lost their fathers. Parents lost their sons.
Gone in an instant. Lives changed forever. And an enduring, unanswerable, gnawing question remained: what happened to First Officers James Miller and Gerald Stubbs of the 409 Squadron of RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force)?
The answer is buried somewhere in the Callaghan Valley.
Every so often the Callaghan gives up another clue but it hasn't revealed the whole story... not yet. Then again, it may keep this mystery a secret forever.
"Missing person files are fascinating," says RCMP Staff Sergeant Steve LeClair. "I feel that they should be investigated until all possible leads are completely exhausted."
On March 22, Miller and Stubbs set off on an instrument flying practice flight in a T-33 Silver Star. The flight was scheduled to take an hour-and-a-half and was supposed to be within a 100-mile radius of the air force base in Comox on Vancouver Island.
They took off two minutes before 10 a.m.
Twenty minutes later, at 10:17 a.m., they were last sited by radar entering bad weather.
They were never seen again.
Until... November 1974. That's when the canopy of their plane was found in the Callaghan Valley.
That's not where the search and rescue was focused in the 15 days after the disappearance.
The military scoured all the ports and covered 11,700 square kilometres for the pair, all for naught.
It took almost 20 years until there was the first inkling of what happened to Stubbs and Miller.
Brad Sills, who owns Callaghan Country Lodge, ran into two of the gentlemen who found the canopy years later when they were back in the valley, looking for more clues to the mystery.
"I wouldn't say they were driven by it but it was something they would from time to time embark upon," recalls Sills.
Sills too was intrigued. Looking the clues, wondering about what happened to these pilots has been a part of his life for almost 30 years.
In July 1998 the plane's fuselage was found in the area about a kilometre away from Sills's lodge. Another clue.
In October 2010 the remains of a flight helmet were found, identified by the squadron colours. It belonged to either Stubbs or Miller.
Sills believes one, or both, survived the plane crash. In fact, he says he thinks he found their primitive camp... he just didn't know what it was at the time.
That was back in the late '70s when he and his partner were traversing the Callaghan from one end to the other looking for the best trails for ski touring as part of their proposed Nordic centre.
More than 30 years later Sills still recalls there was a bench seat made out of a log, rolled back tins of sardines, and most significantly, lots of parachute chord tied around the trees. He simply assumed it was an abandoned prospectors camp from one of the companies that had been active in the area in the '60s.
"It wasn't until later on that I found out about this whole incident and linked things together," says Sills. "The parachute chord was integral to the story and I realized that I had probably at some point in my earlier years come across the camp that either one or both of them had survived in for a period of time....
"That's what's propelled me all these years," he says. "At the very least I'd like to find that camp again."
A monumental task, as Sills, the head of Whistler's Search and Rescue, only too well knows.
There's another reason he keeps looking Stubbs and Miller.
When he was building his backcountry lodge in the late '90s, his employees said they saw ghosts appear.
"The apparitions would come in white dress jackets and would just appear in the night," says Sills. "And we had no idea why they were coming until we linked it up - possibly it could be the white officers' jackets."
Sills still remembers the day they saw them. It was March 22, 1998 - 42 years to the day the plane went down.
Did the pilots eject? Did they parachute to safety? If so, did they know where they were? How did they survive? What happened in the end?
They were military men trained to survive tough odds.
But this was deep in the Callaghan in 1956. This was true B.C. wilderness. The nearest form of civilization was the railroad and it was miles and miles away. And it was winter.
"Whether they knew where they were or not is a bit of a mystery," says Sills. "Certainly a pretty desperate situation to find yourself in - in March in a snowpack that was at least five or six metres deep and with no communication."
The RCMP does not close missing persons files until the person reaches 110 years of age.
Stubbs went missing on his 32 nd birthday 55 years ago. He would be 87 years old today.
He was married to Olive and together they had four children - Sally, Gerald, Violet and Lucille.
He had one brother, Sergeant Kenneth Stubbs. He served with the South Saskatchewan Regiment and was killed in action on April 7, 1945 - one month before the end of World War II.
It is not clear how old Miller was at the time of the flight disappearance. He was married to Mary Ford and two daughters, Michelle, 20 months and Marilyn, almost four months.
When asked why it's important to find the answers of what happened to Stubbs and Miller, RCMP Staff Srgt. LeClair says: "This is a case where there's two missing people. There's some evidence that's been found over the years. I'm still in the process of trying to locate the families."
Sills intends to keep looking for answers too.
In October after the first snow comes and goes and before winter truly sets in, Sills will coordinate a search and rescue grid search for the area hosted by Whistler SAR. SAR teams from adjacent communities will also participate.
Maybe then the Callaghan will be ready to let go of one more clue to the half-century mystery.
