Alaska Army National Guard aviation team receives DUSTOFF Association Rescue of the Year award

WASILLA — The Alaska Army National Guard re recently announced that four members of Detachment 1, 2-211th General Support Aviation Battalion, 207th Aviation Regiment, received the 2021 Rescue of the Year award from the DUSTOFF Association in early February for their efforts in a rescue completed during the fall of 2021.

The rescue occurred at approximately 1:30 p.m. Sept. 15, 2021. It involved a stranded sheep hunter who was suffering minor cold-weather injuries and malnourishment near Cottonwood Creek, 40 miles northeast of Anchorage, down the Knik River Valley.

The hunter was stranded at an elevation of 5,750 feet for two days on a three-by-three-foot ledge that was on a 50-degree slope when it started snowing and made it impossible to descend.

Once the AST received the hunter’s distress signal, they immediately requested assistance from the Guard through the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center who sent the request to the 207th AVN, where Capt. Cody McKinney accepted the mission as the pilot in command and prepared to launch a hoist-capable HH-60M Black Hawk helicopter with a medevac crew.

“When we got this call, the [cloud] ceilings were forecasted below the hunter, and we knew that it was a technical rescue if we could even get to him,” McKinney stated in the press release. “We thought ‘what type of medevac unit are we if we don’t try?’ so we decided to launch knowing that we might not be able to get up to him, and we just talked through the mitigating factors.”

McKinney, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bradley Jorgensen, the mission co-pilot, Staff Sgt. Sonny Cooper, the helicopter crew chief and hoist operator, and Sgt. 1st Class Damion Minchaca, the flight paramedic and hoist rider, departed Bryant Army Airfield on base at approximately 2:30 p.m. within an hour after the hunter distress signal.

Time was of the essence since weather forecasts predicted that the early-winter snowstorm would only get worse, which would leave the hunter stranded for at least another couple of days.

“We saw a small hole [in the clouds] tucked up against the mountains, so we took our opportunity to go up through there,” McKinney stated in the press release. “Once you get in between two layers like that, there’s a risk that the hole closes up if there’s cloud movement, and there was. At that point, we were fully committed to this guy and to finishing the rescue.”

The medevac team hoisted the hunter into the helicopter during white-out conditions and safely transported him out of his predicament.

“It’s basically as if we were inside of a ping pong ball where everything around you is white and you don’t have a good visual reference,” McKinney stated in the press release. “And when you’re trying to do a hoist at almost 6,000 feet to a one-foot section, it’s fairly technical because a lot could go wrong… Normally, when we go on a mission we know that certain variables are taken care of, and in this case we just didn’t know. We had a low probability of actually being able to get to him, and we went anyways, because that’s what we do.”

The rescue team will be offically honored during the DUSTOFF Association Annual Awards Banquet Ceremony in San Antonio, Texas May 21.

“It takes a tremendous amount of people involved in a rescue like this,” said McKinney. “The expectation is that we go out and do that, and it’s not possible unless we have trust of leadership, the RCC that’s willing to give us the mission, the Air Guard that cross-trains with us. Even though we’re getting highlighted, it was very much an Alaska National Guard joint operation.”

For more information, visit ak.ng.mil.

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com