Family, friends celebrate a life cut short

PALMER — A solitary arrow and a pair of ice crampons stand sentry over a Dall sheep trail on the side of Pioneer Peak.

Colt Foster, a hunter, arranged them there the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 4. He was waiting at the time for the helicopter that would retrieve him and the remains of his friend, 49-year-old Roy Roth, from an elevation of about 3,000 feet. Foster thought the tribute fitting for the most successful sheep hunter he knew. He also needed a landmark.

“I figured it was a good spot to have a memorial,” he said. “I kind of assumed I’m going to lead a group of family and relatives up there probably sometime next summer. I wanted to be able to find the place again.”

Tragedy on the mountain

Foster and Roth had been stalking a few bands of sheep that day, and they were crossing a high ridge with cliffs on one side when Roth lost his footing and his pack carried him over the edge. Foster had come along to help carry extra water, extra food, and possibly a goat. Instead, he was witness to tragedy.

Foster was 10 yards away when Roth fell.

“It’s obviously a terrible feeling,” said the 33-year-old dentist. “Because I’ve been in the mountains enough to know. I’m a pretty experienced mountain hunter. When I saw him go over — and I could watch him the whole way down — I knew there was a decent chance that he was already dead. I don’t think he suffered, just because it was a horrific fall.”

Little time remained for grief. Roth’s death left Foster alone on the mountainside.

“I had to gain my composure to get out of that bad spot myself, too, for my family and for everybody else,” he said. “I still had to get out of there carefully and get down to him. I knew most likely he was already dead, but I had to get down to him and see if there was anything I could do to help.”

When he reached Roth, Foster used his satellite phone to contact Alaska State Troopers and his father, who relayed information about the accident to the Roth family in Wasilla. Troopers contacted the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group, but encountered a snag. Weather in Anchorage would prevent helicopters from reaching Pioneer Peak until the following day. So for the next 22 hours, Foster kept a vigil over the body of a friend he knew as “Uncle Roy.”

“I wasn’t going to leave him there, either,” Foster said. “It was one of those deals. I could have hiked out (but) I wouldn’t have been able to live with it. When they said they were not going to be able to get in to get us until the next day, there was no way that I was going to leave him there.”

Foster spent the time gathering up equipment lost in the fall, constructing the memorial, and remembering his friend.

“I wanted to collect his bow and arrows for his kids. I was able to go find that,” he said.

One of a kind

Roth is survived by his wife Jill; sons, Taylor and Justin; daughter, Ellen Brandt; and a one-year-old grandson, Trevor —whose first name is Roth’s middle name. A nationally-known hunting guide, local construction contractor, coach, father and grandfather, Roth died doing something he loved dearly, his daughter said.

“He was always hunting,” she said of her father, who grew up in Oregon and moved to Alaska in 1994. “From September through November he’d either be hunting here or in Kodiak.”

Hunting trips were Roth’s passion and also way for him to connect to his family. Brandt shot her first bear at 11. A younger brother shot his first bear at 4.

“That’s just what we did,” she said.

Roth’s stature as a celebrated hunting guide took him to speaking engagements out-of-state, and landed him in national magazines. After word of his death spread, memorials flooded online outdoorsman’s forums and the Facebook page for his hunting guide service.

Professional bow hunter Cameron Hanes wrote a glowing tribute to Roth for Bowhunter magazine in 2010. Hanes described a time when Roth severely burned his hand on a pot of boiling water. The heat charred Roth’s skin.

“Anyway, he had a deep burn, seemingly to the bone, on the back side of his second knuckle where the pot handle had rested as he lifted the pot,” Hanes wrote. “We stayed in the wilderness for a couple days after that, and he never mentioned it again. He just wrapped his fingers in duct tape and kept on keeping on.”

Numerous Mat-Su friends shared similar stories about Roth, the kind of story that became so common his name was used as a verb by friends who gathered recently to talk about the man.

“The term ‘Roy Roth-ing it’ came up quite a bit,” said Tim Popowski, an assistant football coach at Palmer High. “You do whatever it takes to get the animal you want to get. Just being out in nature and it doesn’t matter what the elements are, just kind of prepared.”

Popowski’s favorite story was the time Roth took two walking sticks and put them above his head to imitate caribou antlers.

“He kind of had a smile on his face the entire time,” Popowski said. “Personally, that’s always going to be my favorite story. I asked him why he did that, and why he thought that it was appropriate. He said it works all the time.”

Palmer’s Brad Hanson recalled a time when Roth was coaching a Little League all-star team in the district championships. Roth and an umpire got into a disagreement, and Roth was ejected. The ejection meant he was suspended for an additional game. Roth was undeterred, Hanson remembered.

“In true Roy fashion, he donned his camo gear and went into some nearby woods,” Hanson said. “He had a vantage point in his hunting camo. He managed to watch the game, and then coached the rest of the tournament.”

The team eventually won the championship, Hanson said.

Roth was also generous with his business services and construction expertise. When he found out Palmer city officials were working to replace dugouts at baseball diamonds near the Mat-Su borough building and Sherrod Fields, and had constructed one already, Roth stepped up to build the remaining seven dugouts using materials purchased by the city.

“He knew we were going through it, and it was his first year in Palmer Little League,” Hanson said. “He brought his guys in and they did it, no questions asked.”

Hanson said Roth was the kind of coach who would attend hockey games for other people’s children

Foster recalled when he was taking his driver’s license road test, with a driving instructor watching his every move, he spotted Roth’s pickup truck in his rearview at a mirror.

“I was about 16,” he recalled. “There I was trying to do this driver’s test and (Roth) recognizes me in his truck at an intersection. He was crowding me, creeping forward. He was about to tap my bumper. Then the light changed and I took off. He told me later that he decided not to tap it because he didn’t know who was in the truck with me. He would have been doing my parents a favor.”

The memories live on

On Monday, Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group were able to land a Department of Public Safety Helicopter at about 2,300 feet on Pioneer Peak. A technical team hiked up to the 3,000 foot mark. There, they found Roth and Foster in scrubby alpine brush above the tree line. By 5:30 p.m., the last of the rescuers was off the mountain, said Bill Romberg, a member of the technical team that conducted the rescue and recovery.

The family is trying to carry on in the spirit of Roth’s legendary toughness, Brandt said. She plans to return to the hunting fields as a memorial to her father.

“I just want everybody to remember how fun he was, and how he never complained,” she said. “I never heard him complain about when stuff was hard. He always used to tell us when he was having a hard day: ‘You have two options: you can either sit here and cry about it or you can get moving and get to safety.’ That’s what we’re all trying to do right now.”

Family members have established an account on the popular fundraising site GoFundMe.com (http://bit.ly/1jdFDgo), and a Wells Fargo account for memorial donations under the name of the Roy Roth Legacy Fund.

A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 10 at Palmer High School. The public is welcome to attend.

Reach reporter Brian O'Connor at brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com