Helo pilot saves trio of hunters from Talkeetna River flooding

TALKEETNA — As stories from last week’s flooding go, they don’t really get much more harrowing than Jim Stocker’s tale.

On Wednesday, Stocker, 57, his wife Beverly, 49, and his friend Paul Woodward, 55, flew to a landing strip on a Talkeetna River gravel bar near Yellow Jacket Creek, a spot in the Talkeetna Mountains northwest of Chickaloon and southeast of Talkeetna.

“My wife had a caribou permit for one side of the river and my friend Paul he had a permit for the other side,” Stocker said.

They set up their tents near where they landed. Woodward had bagged his caribou and had the meat and antlers sitting next to his plane. Everything was fine until Thursday.

If you’re keeping track, Thursday at 4 p.m. is when the Mat-Su Borough says rivers started rising and what had been a slow-moving incident turned into a full-on flooding emergency, that by Friday had been declared an official disaster.

For Stocker and his party, that meant rapidly rising water flooding their campsite.

“We were in our tents and we kept moving and we got to the highest ground and before we got in them the water just surrounded them, went under the tents,” Stocker said.

He and his wife got into his plane, a PA-11 Piper Cub. Woodward opted to tough it out in his tent, hoping his raised-up cot would keep him relatively dry. Stocker got on his satellite phone at 8:32 p.m. to call for help, according to an Alaska State Trooper account.

“Due to severe weather and rapidly rising water (they) were unable to take off, had no flotation devices, and were unable to make it to shore,” troopers report.

Stocker said, and the trooper account confirms, that the first attempted rescue was with an Alaska Air National Guard Blackhawk helicopter. But weather forced back the helicopter.

“It was pretty demoralizing when they said they were going to be there in 15 minutes and then they called back and said that they were aborting the rescue,” he said. “I told the dispatch gal, ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it. I don’t think we’re going to make it.’”

They hunkered down for the night. He said he tried to get Woodward to join them. It would have been tight in the small plane but at least it was dry. But Woodward never did take him up on the offer.

First thing in the morning, trooper pilot Mel Nading had trooper helicopter Helo-1 in the air.

“Apparently the troopers had a helicopter and they sent him up to check on the weather,” Stocker said. “I guess he just decided, forget about checking on the weather I’ll just shoot on in there.”

The helicopter arrived, Stocker believes, in the nick of time and was able to carry all three of them out at once without a problem.

“They saved us, man, that helicopter pilot,” Stocker said.

He wasn’t back in town long before he went back out in another plane to assess the situation. He realized when he got there that he needed to act quickly to get his plane out. Woodward’s plane had already gone into the water and his was about to meet the same fate.

Stoker said a helicopter was able to lift the plane to another gravel bar and then he flew the plane back to his private strip near the Knik River. He almost landed before he realized he didn’t have a place to put down.

“My whole strip is underwater, now it’s five feet underwater,” he said.

The Knik flooded later than the Talkeetna, it had only recently started receding when Stocker spoke Monday.

So he said he had to turn the plane around and land in Palmer instead. He didn’t know where to park there but found some rope and tied his plane down. He came back to check on it Saturday.

“I found that my plane had almost been ripped off the ropes and flipped upside down,” Stocker said. “I was like man when is this going to end? It was almost like there was a ghost following me.”

He bought 100 feet of rope and lashed it down tight.

But however bad Stocker had it, it was worse for Woodward. They had to slice his plane’s belly open to let out the gallons and gallons of silt and mud that had filled it up. And they had to pull it out of the bank in which it had gotten lodged.

“We spent most of Saturday getting it out and his was helicopter-ed out to the nearest road and they’re taking it apart today and putting it on a trailer and bringing it back,” he said Monday.

Asked if this was a singular experience for him, being in this much danger in the backcountry, Stocker, a taxidermist by trade and an avid hunter, said it wasn’t. He was in a pretty serious plane crash. He’s had other close calls.

“This state, there’s a lot of variables, it’s not a protected environment bubble that you live in,” he said. “When you’re flying in the mountains and you’re hunting you have weather to deal with and loads to deal with… flash floods right at dark.”

There are a lot of variables to consider. You can’t always get them all right.

“That airstrip has been there that I know of four 40 years,” he said. “The only time it’s ever flooded like that or got that crazy we just happened to be there.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.