 On September 14, 1992, I was involved in an aircraft accident. I was working with National Park Service, along with another seasonal ranger, Patty, and the Park Service pilot, Bruce. And we were flying in a 185 Cezna on floats. And we're on a routine hunting patrol. I was a pilot, and I had two observers on board with me. We stopped at this lake. We've been flying for a couple hours to get out and take a break. Before we landed on that lake, we were going to land on a certain lake prior to that. But there was ice on that lake. So what we did was we went a few more miles and picked this other lake, which is a pretty remote lake, pretty small lake on this, you know, the big pond. We had a real good landing. It's a little bit breezy, maybe 15 miles on our wings. And but as soon as we landed and got out, there was already ice starting to form on the floats of the plane. We got back into the plane and, you know, still getting a little bit more icy. It was pretty cold out. It was about 25 degrees, and now the winds are picking up a little bit. And the wind really picked up and became gusty and turbulent. Like Stan said, everything, you know, things started to ice up. That was a real concern of Bruce's. Bruce was scraping off the ice on the window and he was checking the rudders and just making sure there was no ice. I sailed back to the south end of the lake here and began my takeoff run. He started going across the water. The plane was taken off, you know, rather normally. The left float got off the water. The aircraft rolled gently to the right and it overturned. The wing hit the water. The whole plane just flipped forward. And then sitting in the front seat, I just, I saw the, you know, the water would appear at the water coming up, but we were flipping over. I was, had my, had opened my door as soon as I felt that the airplane was gonna overturn. As it turned out, this was very advantageous to our survival. It expedited us getting out of the airplane. And it just kind of rolled right over. And luckily, Bruce opened his door before we completely flipped over. Since we flipped over, I realized once I was upside down, hanging by my seatbelt, what had happened. And at that point, I still wasn't real worried about the situation. I knew what had happened, but I wasn't quite in a panic yet. And then almost immediately, water started rushing in. And remember, I was upside down. The door wouldn't open. I couldn't push it open. I didn't think of opening the window. I didn't think of kicking the window out. The only thing I thought of was, okay, I know the door on the other side is open. I'll just go out after them. Started to panic a little bit because I was underwater and I made a few sludges fall. I didn't know what was really in my way. My first reaction when I got out of that plane was to swim to shore. Bruce grabbed me and he yanked me and he got me up onto the floats. And he said, pull your life vest. I did not pull my life vest. I wasn't thinking about that. The very beginning of that plane accident is really, it was real traumatic for me. I inflated Patty's jacket. My life jacket did not inflate. I had an inflatable stern's jacket on. And I didn't even think of inflating my jacket until he said that. It just didn't even strike me even though I swam from the plane up. The windshield was down around 15 to 20 below zero and we were completely wet at this point. I knew that if we stayed on the floats that we'd our exposure would be dead. Probably, I don't know if we could have survived a couple of hours on there. Bruce asked if all three of us were ready to swim. We would not make it if we stayed on those floats. We would die of exposure, hypothermia. And at that point, I was feeling like I'm not gonna leave these floats. I'm gonna stay on these floats until somebody finds us. I just felt like I couldn't swim those 75 or 100 yards. And he finally talked to me into swimming. We decided we were gonna do this together. And I was real scared at that point. No one knows we're here. It's not like we wrecked, we get to shore and someone comes and saves us. It's not gonna be that easy. It was hard to be decisive, even make a decision. I could feel the hypothermia start to come in. He made that decision for us. Oh yeah. He took charge. He said, we're either gonna stay on these floats together and die together, which we don't wanna do, or we're gonna swim to shore. And we decided to swim to shore together and we were gonna stay together. Bruce and I were pretty much swimming alongside each other and Stanley was somewhere behind us a little bit, but not too far. And I started realizing, you know, I'm not doing too well. So while I was floating on my back, just getting a little break, trying to breathe again from choking. My body felt totally numb, especially my arms and my legs, feet and hands especially. And then all of a sudden, all the pain, you know, the pain of the water and the pain of the swimming, the pain of the stress was all going away. And it was a really light feeling. It did, it just felt so easy. It's like, okay, this can all be over. It can be so easy. All I have to do here is just keep laying on my back and it's just like I'm gonna fall asleep and it's gonna be real easy and it's gonna be over. It wasn't really even scary at that time. I wasn't scared. I wasn't pain. I wasn't even tired anymore. It was just relaxing. And then it hit me that, you know, what I was thinking because still I was hypothermic at the time and I could tell I was still thinking slow. And then it struck me that, hey, yeah, I will. I'll be here and it'll be all over, but then I'll be dead. And then it got to the, that's when it struck me that the feelings, the feeling I was having was feeling of death. I recall about midway through the swim to shore, I just started becoming numb, totally numb. I couldn't feel my arms anymore, my legs. And I just, I started becoming lethargic. I became, I got to the point where I could feel myself kind of, you know, my head started dropping and dropping and my eyes started closing a little bit. I was drifting away. And I started thinking to myself, this must be death. This is the start of death. And right before that, right before I closed my eyes, I had visions. I had two visions. I had a vision of my mom at my funeral. And I had a vision of all three of us floating on that lake and the people flying over, my friends flying over and seeing us there dead. And for some reason, those two visions made me come to life again or just gave me a whole different perspective on a whole different strength and from that point on, it was all positive, we're gonna do this. I started yelling, I remember, at Bruce, Bruce, we're gonna make it, we're gonna do it. And I kept yelling this, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it. But I could hear Patty yelling and that also helped a lot and gave me the motivation to keep going because I didn't know if they were there or not or if I was going the right way or, you know, but then when I heard them, it kept giving me the motivation to go and basically I thought, well, hey, if they made it, I can make it too. Even though when we got to shore, we were extremely hypothermic, pretty much clubbed from the knees and elbows down, I wasn't able to stand the first couple of times that I tried to here on the shore. So, Stan came into shore shortly after Patty and I got here and that was a tremendous relief to me just to know that we had all survived to shore but at that point we were in a real possible death situation because of our exposure. And because we're so remote here, the chance of being located quickly was very difficult. We met together on shore and started following Bruce up and Bruce came upon a real sheltered cut bank, dirt cut bank off of the lake. Bruce found a good little sheltered area that would keep us out of the wind. What Bruce started doing was gathering, he started gathering dried moss and dried grass but we couldn't, it's like we couldn't grab anything because our bodies, our hands were just shaking. It was just so cold. At that point, my clothes were starting to freeze and my hair was actually frozen, I can remember. My hair was frozen solid. Bruce, Stan and I began gathering dry willow and the willow that was around, there wasn't a whole lot but we got enough to start our fire. And we took out our matches and our matches supposedly were waterproof matches. The matches I guess were fine but what we struck them on was saturated and with water and that deteriorates it. So it was useless anyway. And luckily Bruce had got, he had a magnesium striker. And then we got a little fire started. The fire itself was very small. I mean, it was no bigger than about eight inches across. And it's amazing how little of a fire you can have to keep you going. I really believe that that fire probably saved our lives. I, without the fire, I don't think that we would have survived. It was just knowing that I had to keep this fire going in order to survive. Once we got that fire going, we realized, okay, we're going to live. We're going to make it. We told ourselves we're going to stay up all night. We're not going to go to sleep right now. That concept honestly scared me spending the night there just because it was just a fear of the unknown. What's going to happen? Is it going to get colder? Is it going to snow? Are we going to fall asleep and die or is the fire going to go out? We had this tiny little fire and Stan and Bruce and I were just, you know, just honkered around it. We were trying to get the fronts of our bodies around the fire just to dry out, but we were mainly concerned with our hands and our feet. Have never been as cold for a sustained period of time as I was that night and we were all probably as miserable as we had ever been or may ever be. Just we constantly communicated and that's what kept me going. I had no doubt in my mind that we were not going to make it. I knew we were. But the positive outlook was really good. That's what really kept us strong, kept us going, just us being together and us being positive together. It was just strong enough to keep us going. And we knew that it was important to keep a positive frame of mind and really believe that we were gonna survive the situation. We stayed up all night talking and singing and just keeping each other going, you know. Keeping each other warm, trying to keep a real good frame of mind about it. But we spoke a lot about trying to figure out the scenario of what they're thinking of in Kotspiew, what they're thinking of at headquarters. How are they gonna rescue us? When are they gonna figure out we're gone? How are they gonna rescue us? How much time are they gonna get? Are they gonna find us? Bruce understood the way the plan usually goes in Kotspiew and how the search is usually pressed. You know, the planes wouldn't come out at night, but they would probably come out in the morning. Bruce didn't really seem to be fluctuating. He seemed to be just stuck in that shiver stage. I think that I probably didn't regain my body heat quite as quickly as the other two people. It was just so cold. He had the cotton socks, which were soaked and his feet were just ice. So I tried to rub his feet, but they didn't seem to be getting very warm. Since his core temperature seemed to stay low and he wasn't really recovering, he stayed around the fire most of the night. Bruce would keep the fire going because that was very important to us to always keep that fire going for any reason. And I think that really helped out as far as his, you know, his morale or whatever. And it would be probably at least into the next day before there were search aircraft possibly here to locate us. Is that a plane? Can we start hearing planes in the distance? We could hear aircraft searching to the west of us and we heard an aircraft come from the east. One of them sounded like they were coming towards us and then it just veered off behind us. We never saw it. We heard it really loudly. And while we realized, okay, that plane is not gonna come find us. The second time, again, we heard a plane. We ran up the hill and it went up. It was up another drainage, you know, just in front of us. So we were sort of in the center. There was one behind us and one in front of us that went up two different drainages, but we were sort of just in this little void. You know, the planes were out there and they were looking for us, but they were just missing us. In those times, that's where we got, you know, at least I felt myself morale at least go way down, get real frustrated and actually real angry. You know, just at the whole situation, angry, just at the situation in general just because of the sheer frustration. We were real disappointed about that, but we were still real hopeful until it started to become dust that evening. I felt like we were very vulnerable here. A cold front or a storm coming down could literally kill us quite easily. And so when we weren't going to be located that second night, I became very concerned. Well, why aren't they here? Why aren't they up the no attack? We figured, you know, the search planes are going to come out. They're going to go straight up the no attack. How could they go wrong? There's something wrong. What's going on? Didn't they, you know, why aren't they here? We hear them off in the distance, but why aren't they here? And so it was kind of like the morale that we picked up all night by being so sure. It's like, okay, okay, all we got to do is make it through the night and they'll get us in the morning. And so it was kind of like a big let down disappointment. The airplanes that were out there weren't seeming to find them right away. And so I got kind of concerned that it might be more serious than our initial thoughts. Since I hadn't flown for the Park Service before and knew the area pretty well, I thought maybe I could be of some assistance. I knew the flight plan. I talked to Warren and I knew the flight plan and I knew the mission they were on because I'd done it myself. I knew they were doing a hunter survey. And as we proceeded up the middle no attack I noticed a party of hunters and decided that they might have some information. So I landed on a gravel bar and talked to them and yeah, they described the airplane approximately when it passed over they even noticed there was three people in it. So I thought, well, this is working out. I'll just, and they told me which direction they were going, what the wind, what the weather was and so on. So I figured, well, maybe the hunters are the best source of information. So I started up the river and I stopped and talked to a total of six different hunting parties and every one of them got me closer and closer to in the right direction. And as I approached Mock Creek, I don't know why I went up to check that lake up on the bluff. I didn't think they'd be there because there's no hunters up there but I thought, well, what the hell, I'm here, I'll swing by there. We're just sitting around the fire and then all of a sudden. Out of nowhere, we heard the plane. We heard a super cub coming low from the west and I'd given everybody the flares, aerial flares and both Stan and I shot flares at the airplane. We ran up and we're waving and making all kinds of commotion and shooting the flare off. And when I swung by, I found the floats of the 185 inverted in the lake. And we flew along the south shore of the lake and didn't see any survivors, didn't see any bodies. So we were concerned that they were still in the airplane and at that time, Patti and Stan came out of the willows where they'd been trying to stay warm. Of course, we felt pretty good about that. Yeah, well, first of all, seeing the plane, that's it really picked us up because we were just, we knew where we were at and we knew that, I'm sorry, we knew the park service knew where we were at. We knew that we could be located. We could see from passing over them that they had no survival gear at all, that all they had was the clothes they were wearing. So I, and I knew they had swum from shore. So I knew they must have been pretty miserable. So we tossed out every bit of survival gear we had in the airplane and Victor threw out his coveralls. He was a lifesaver for that. And they told us then that the helicopter was coming in but we didn't take anything for granted. Even though the two planes came in, they said the helicopter was coming in. And then finally the helicopter came in and even at that point, when members left the fire pit down we still never put the fire out. We still never took anything for granted. It was kind of like our trust was shaking that day. And we didn't trust anything. We didn't trust that the helicopter would run out of gas or rack or whatever. So we just realized it was very important we were taking no chances at that point. We stayed with our gear until the two EMT guys came in and we were hauling all of our gear into the helicopter and got all that taken care of and got into the helicopter and then they started checking us out. Then when we got the cops to view, everyone was there waiting for us. I'm glad to say that it worked out the way it did. I was overjoyed, elated when I saw that the three of them were all right.