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"Then I felt someone tugging on my foot. And it was Paul [Archambault]. And he had found me — he had come back to the plane to find me. There was great agony, with him pulling off chunks of plane before he even got to the dirt that encased me. And I was completely disoriented and I didn't know where I was or what had happened. And it took me probably 10 minutes before I realized the plane had crashed. And I can remember sitting in the plane. I remember looking out the open, broken fuselage at the snow falling and in the far distance I could see the glow of a fire. And we got by the fire and that's where we sat most of the night."

On the struggle to maintain the fire Archambault had started

Deschamps: "There's a forest of trees — trees, trees everywhere, but not a branch to burn. And that's the truth. You have no axe; you have no way of gathering wood; you can't find fallen wood because there's three and a half feet of snow. And we sent Paul on a constant vigilance for anything that would burn. Fire was life, Steve, fire was life, and at different times during the night we had no fire. And I've been on many search and rescue situations as a Mountie where you'd go into these camps looking for lost hunters or motor vehicle accidents in the back bush and you find the people, eventually, but you find them as frozen corpses. And I figured that's how we'd be found."

“ I've been on many search and rescue situations as a Mountie ... you find the people, eventually, but you find them as frozen corpses. And I figured that's how we'd be found.