Ice fishermen rescue man after crashing through ice on Wasilla Lake

WASILLA — Ice fishermen managed to rescue a snowmachiner after he punched through thin ice on Wasilla Lake Monday.

“That man was a lucky dude,” Rick Willden, one of the ice fishermen, said shortly before 1 p.m. with an ambulance still on scene.

Willden said he and two buddies had been on the ice about two hours, and while fishing had noticed the man riding a snowmachine back and forth on the lake.

Willden said one of his friends stepped out of the small, red ice hut they’d been using and noticed the snowmachine wasn’t there anymore. Then he spotted the man in the water. He got his friends out of the shanty and Willden called for help.

“All we saw was his yellow hat,” Willden said.

Willden said one of his friends has military training and the other has medical training. They set to work to rescue the man.

“One guy crawled out all the way out on the ice as far as he could on his belly,” Willden said.

His other friend held onto the first man’s feet. They managed to grab the man in the frigid water and haul him out.

Central Mat-Su Fire Department Assistant Chief Michael Keenan said the snowmachiner was put in an ambulance to warm up.

“He was very cold, very hypothermic and he was transported to the hospital,” Keenan said.

Keenan said the area of Wasilla Lake where the snowmachine crashed through — the northeastern corner of the lake near Northshore Drive, where a channel connects one half of the lake to another — is one that has been particularly problematic. In practice, that channel of water doesn’t freeze up the same as the rest of the lake and often is a factor when people fall through the ice into Wasilla Lake.

“We’ve had vehicles go through there several times, and snowmachiners and people walking there as well,” Keenan said. “It’s just a bad area on that lake.”

Mat-Su Borough Emergency Manager Casey Cook, who was also at the scene Monday, agreed that flowing water in that area leads to some perpetually thin ice.

“That stays open all year-round,” he said. “You might not want to be snowmachining or walking there.”

Willden said that by that point in the afternoon, he and his friends had caught two fish. He said he was probably done for the day. As a rule, he said tried never to engage in outdoor recreation alone.

He said the response time of borough emergency responders was stellar — they were on the lake five minutes after his call. But even so, in a situation like this where every minute was crucial to the man’s survival, he said felt he and his friends really didn’t have much of a choice but to try to rescue the snowmachiner when he went through the ice.

“What else can you do?” he said.

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