By Steve Douglas, CSAR state coordinator and retired SAR team member
My name is Steve Douglas. I’m now 79 years old, so I’ve been around for a while. I’m retired from my most recent career as an emergency manager and my volunteer work as a team leader for Pueblo County’s search and rescue team, but I continue to volunteer as a state coordinator for the Colorado Search and Rescue Association. For most of my adult life I have volunteered for a variety of things and find I miss it when I am not volunteering. I’m driven by a mix of wanting to provide a needed service, learning new things, and the fine people I get to meet and work with. I have been a backcountry search and rescue (BSAR) volunteer for 37 years, longer than I have volunteered for anything, and I’m not done yet. Some of my best friends are BSAR volunteers, including some that have been at it for 45+ years. I am particularly moved by those that continue to be BSAR volunteers for five, ten or many more years. Some of them have shared their reasons with me. My reasons aren’t better or worse than anyone else’s; they’re just mine, and they were shaped by two pivotal life experiences.
THE FIRST EXPERIENCE: SOMETIMES YOU GET TO WALK AWAY
Terry was a co-worker in Wyoming. At the time, he was a mining engineer and I was the senior geologist for Western Nuclear’s eight uranium mines and associated property. Somewhere along the line Terry developed an interest in flying and owning an airplane. In 1976 he bought a used Cessna 172, a single engine four-passenger aircraft. He took flying lessons in Lander, Wyoming and got his private pilot’s license. Over the next several months, I flew with him on a number of flights. He wasn’t a bad pilot and I trusted him. Our early flights together were not without incident, but they were not hairy enough to keep me from going again.
Where we lived there was almost no opportunity to own your own home or property. Most private land in the area was tied up in large ranches. Most of us lived in company housing in Jeffery City, but I lived miles from town, off-grid in a one-room homestead cabin. I met Paul Petzoldt, co-founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), in Lander through an old friend. In the spring of 1977, I learned that Paul had purchased the Hollingshead Homestead on the Idaho side of the Grand Teton, 14 miles north of Driggs. It was in rolling hill country with farmland, meadows and aspen groves, surrounded by amazing mountains. He had subdivided most of it into ten-acre parcels and was selling them for a reasonable price. A group of us decided to go look at the property – Terry, myself, and two other friends, Georgia and Delmonte. We made arrangements to fly over and meet Paul at the Driggs Airport on May 8th, Mother’s Day.
On May 4th the region had a pretty good spring snowstorm, but on May 8th we awoke to clear sky and decent flying weather. We flew west over South Pass, north along the west flank of the Wind River Range, over Teton Pass, down into the Teton Valley and landed in Driggs by mid-morning. It was a smooth flight over beautiful country. Paul showed us the properties and we fell in love. Between the four of us we bought three parcels that afternoon. Then we had an early dinner with Paul and got ready to fly home. We weren’t sure of our route yet. We could backtrack, but the thought of flying over the Tetons and seeing the Grand up close was tempting. Paul put on his “dad hat” and told us how, in 1953, he had been tasked with packing out the remains of 20+ people that had crashed in a DC-3, on Mount Moran, just north of the Grand. He was clear that he didn’t want to do that again and urged us to be careful. We promised we would.
Paul dropped us off at the airport. Terry had the fuel tanks topped off for the trip home. In retrospect, full tanks and four adults made for a full load – not the best scenario for a flight over high mountains in a small single-engine airplane. We looked at the weather. It had clouded up, but it wasn’t socked in. We decided to head east over the Tetons, over Togwotee Pass and then south down the east flank of the Wind Rivers and home.
We took off from Driggs, circled until we were above 12,000 feet, higher than the pass north of the Grand we were aiming for, and headed east. I’m sure Terry continued to try and climb more as we went east, but he didn’t have much, if any, success. I think we were fighting a subtle downdraft much of the way, but we didn’t talk about it. When we crested Green Mountain and got over the head of the North Leigh Creek drainage, the problem became obvious. We were caught in a downdraft, hemmed in by ridges, couldn’t turn, and weren’t climbing as fast as the mountain was coming up under us. The downdraft wasn’t radical, but it was like a big hand pushing down on us. Near the head of the drainage, we had an option to bank south, go over a divide and down into South Leigh Creek, but there were trees on the ridge and we were about level with them. The other option was to continue east over the snowfield, try to make the crest, and fly down Moran Canyon. Terry chose the east option and probably saved our lives as a result. We had open snow fields and relatively gentle slopes in front of us all the way to the divide, but we didn’t quite make it. We missed it by about 200 vertical feet.
The stall speed alarm went off, tripped at 42 knots, when we began to nose into the snowfield, almost as if we were landing on purpose. What we didn’t recognize was a series of rock ledges that crossed the slope at roughly right angles to our direction of travel, all the way to the divide. We plowed up about 50 feet of the snowfield and hit a ledge with our nose wheel, flipping the plane so we landed tail-first, upside down, without even bending the propeller, nose cone (aka spinner) or wings. I was in the co-pilot’s seat, next to Terry. Georgia and Delmonte were in the back seat. Earlier, I had unbuckled my shoulder harness so I was free to take pictures of the Grand out my side window. When I realized we were in trouble, I set my camera in my lap but forgot to buckle the shoulder harness.
When we hit, I got a face full of controls and was knocked out. Luckily, my head went between the hand grips and hit the smooth part in between. When I came to, my head and neck hurt, but I could move. We were all hanging upside down by our seatbelts. I looked left, saw blood dripping from Terry’s nose, looked right and saw fuel dripping from the wing tank. It was quiet. I asked if everyone was all right and got no answer. The thought that we were all screwed came to mind, but then everyone started talking. After a bit, we unbuckled our seat belts, fell on our heads and got out of the plane. Our injuries were minor, just a few cuts and scrapes. We were extremely lucky. The problem was that we were at about 10,000 feet, in three feet of new wet snow, had about an hour of daylight left and minimal provisions, and knew we weren’t going anywhere for a while. We were all dressed in hiking boots, cotton jeans, jackets and hats, but none of us had a daypack with food, water or extra clothes. I don’t recall if we did that to save space and weight in the plane. Looking southwest we could see Fred’s Mountain, which marks the top of the Grand Targhee Ski Area’s Bannock Lift, but the ski area was closed for the season. Terry and I estimated we were about ten miles from the nearest road.
About that time, Terry mentioned that he had not filed a flight plan. He was going to wait until he knew which way we were going before filing one. He had about 260 hours on his private pilot’s license and still had a lot to learn, like we all did in our 30s.
It was clear that we were on our own, so we set about making a plan. We didn’t want to spend the night in the upside-down plane, so we needed shelter. It didn’t seem like the plane’s radio was working, so Terry began trying to fix it. In the process, he discovered that our ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter) didn’t go off on impact, so he manually tripped it. Georgia and Del got the job of gathering firewood from the few spruce trees nearby. My job was to dig a snow cave.
Months before this flight, I had helped Terry put together a survival kit for the plane, but he left half of it on the floor of his apartment in Jeffrey City. What was in the plane was comical in many ways – we’d laugh about it later. We had no water or any container to melt snow in; no food, except 12 dum-dum suckers; no shelter supplies, except one wool blanket; no first aid kit; no extra clothes, except a pair of thermal underwear bottoms, which I claimed because I knew I would get soaked digging the snow cave. There were three cotton gloves; I can’t remember if there were two rights and a left, or the other way around. Terry did have a cheap toolkit that probably came with the plane, with a screw driver handle and about five attachments, one of which was an Allen wrench that fit the screws the spinner was mounted with, and another a hex wrench that fit the bolts the airplane seats were mounted with. I used the spinner as a snow shovel. We put the seats in the snow cave, which allowed us to stay off the wet spring snow. We took the walls apart in the aircraft cabin and used the fiberglass insulation to wrap ourselves in that night, in lieu of blankets. Del had a lighter, so we built a campfire just outside the mouth of the snow cave. The spruce firewood provided more smoke than warmth, but I think it was good for our spirits. In retrospect, we could have used the spinner to melt snow in. All in all, we didn’t have much, but we had enough.
As we were preparing ourselves to spend the night, we started hearing aircraft overhead. The cloud ceiling had dropped to the mountain tops, so we couldn’t see the planes and they couldn’t see us. At first, we thought they were just part of normal air traffic in the area, but then we could hear a pattern to the flight, like they were flying a grid and searching. We still didn’t know if our radio was working; we couldn’t hear any radio traffic. We broadcast a simple message: If you can hear us, give us a sign. Right after that, as a plane passed overhead, we saw a flare fall from the clouds and drop to the ground. I still choke up at that memory. We later learned that the plane was a C-130, and I have loved C-130s ever since.
By then we had shelter for the night, weren’t seriously injured, and didn’t want anyone trying to come in at night to get us, so we radioed that we would be OK until the next day. With that, we went back to work getting ready for the night.
We didn’t sleep much that night, maybe 30 minutes total. The smoke was miserable; we weren’t very warm, and each of us probably had our own thoughts about what might have happened. By daybreak we were ready to do something, even if it meant slogging down to the road through hip deep snow. We had no desire to spend another night there. We thought there would be some sort of rescue attempt, but we didn’t know what or when that might be. We decided to clean up our mess and carry the seats and other stuff back to the plane. As we were just depositing the last load of junk, we heard a helicopter. As if on cue, it landed with a two-man crew. It was an Air Force bird out of Ogden, Utah. They took a look at us, realized we didn’t have any serious injuries, loaded us up and took off. We flew east over the pass we missed the day before by 200 vertical feet, down the east flank of the Tetons, over Jenny Lake and landed at the Jackson Hole Airport, about ten miles north of Jackson. It was beautiful.
While enroute, the crew filled us in on some key details. First, they were happy to announce that we were the first survivors in the last 39 missions they had flown. That was sobering. Then they told us we weren’t the subject of yesterday’s search. Remember, we had not filed a flight plan and it was too soon to have been reported missing or overdue by friends in Jeffrey City. They were searching for two other aircraft, missing since the storm a few days before. A twin-engine plane with four passengers had gone missing on the 4th and a single-engine Cessna 152 with two on board had gone missing on the 6th. Civil Air Patrol had organized a search for the two planes and picked up our ELT signal first. Once the crew had us on the ground and handed off to local authorities, they excused themselves and left to rejoin the search for the other two planes. It was some time before those planes were found, and they had no survivors. Of the ten people on board those three planes, we four were the only survivors. We got to walk away.
We were met by a crowd at the airport. There were representatives from the sheriff’s office, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, the FAA, and a reporter. It seemed like we answered questions for nearly two hours, during which time we weren’t offered any food or first aid. We were all feeling sore and a little banged up, and indicated that we would like to go to the hospital in Jackson to get checked out. No one offered to take us there, so we hitchhiked. The other problem was that we were 180 miles from home and our ride was upside down in the Tetons. We called a friend in Jeffrey City and he agreed to drive over to get us, but he was a good three hours away.
We walked into the hospital with Del wearing the spinner (a souvenir) like a dunce cap and were met by a lady at the reception desk. We identified ourselves, stated that we had been in a plane crash the day before, and asked to see a doctor. She nodded, asked us if we had been camping (we smelled of spruce smoke) and went back to her desk work. We repeated our request a couple of times and got the same response. Finally, we saw a doctor walking by and told him we would like to be checked out. He got right to it and about an hour, several x-rays and some bandaids later he confirmed that we were fine. Later, we learned that Jackson was having a disaster drill that day and the scenario was an airplane crash. The receptionist thought we were just part of the drill.
We walked from the hospital to the town square, where we sat in the grass and counted our blessings. That was about all we had to count, as none of us had much money. We went to the Cowboy Bar, where Ken met us and drove us home. Before we left, I called my mom in California. It was my habit to call her on Mother’s Day and I knew she would be wondering why I hadn’t called the day before. As luck would have it, I talked to her just before she saw the story of our crash on TV, carried by a San Francisco station. The reporter that interviewed us at the airport put the story out on the UPI wire. It must have been a slow news day, or maybe someone thought it was special that we got to walk away. We certainly did.
I had learned two lessons that were useful to me later as a BSAR responder and emergency manager. The first had to do with patient care: Make sure subjects get medical care, even if injuries appear minor, offer food and water, and make sure they have a way home. The second had to do with disaster exercises: Be sure to know how to recognize a real-world event, break off exercise play and respond to the real thing, even if the subjects are acting happy and a little goofy … and smell like smoke.
THE SECOND EXPERIENCE: NO ONE HAS BEEN ABLE TO GET IN TOUCH WITH JASON
It was October 17, 1989, and I’d been working long days. I was sound asleep when my brother Larry called. As soon as I answered the phone, he started talking nonstop. He was excited and was telling me who he had contacted and how they were. I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me about the Loma Prieta Earthquake that had hit the San Francisco Bay Area a couple of hours before.
I grew up along the California coast; earthquakes are a part of life there. I knew that from personal experience and from studying geology. But this one was beyond my personal experience. The initial quake was a magnitude 6.9 quake; not as big as the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco, but big enough. Records from the 1989 quake indicate there were 63 killed and 3,757 injured.
Most of my immediate family was in California in 1989, especially within 100 miles of San Francisco. One way or another, Larry had been able to determine that all those folks were OK, with one exception. No one had been able to reach my son Jason, who was a student at UC Santa Cruz, six miles from the earthquake’s epicenter. People have described having their “heart in their throat” at moments of extreme stress. At that moment, I learned what that felt like. I told Larry I was going to hang up and try to reach Jason.
In 1989, cell phones and the internet were just a dream for most. People relied on hard wired land lines for telephone service. I have since learned that when a major emergency happens, the local telephone circuits can get overloaded well before the long-distance circuits do, and that might be why I was able to reach Jason when no one in California could. It took about 30 minutes of trying, but I got through to him at his apartment. He had been on the third floor of a university building when the earthquake hit. I don’t know how much the building was damaged, but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t get out on his own. He was clear that it was a pretty scary experience. He was busy packing a few things to go to a classmate’s home in Santa Barbara. Our conversation was short, just long enough for him to tell me he was OK, and for me to tell him I loved him and that I would call his mom to let her know he was OK.
My family, friends and I were very lucky that day, but 37 years later I still remember what it felt like to know my son was in an extremely dangerous situation and not know how he was. Personal experiences have shaped who I am and how I attempt to care for others that are having what may be the worst day of their lives. I realize that what my friends and I do to help others is also what we trust our counterparts will do to help our families and friends when confronted with terrible and terrifying events of their own. When we help move strangers out of harm’s way, I know others will do the same for my loved ones. I’m no different from any of the rest of you. We are all in this together and I’m glad for it. My thanks to all who care for those around you. It matters.