They had each other

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series begun in Friday’s Frontiersman about the crash of a Cessna 170B on July 22 and the efforts of two local men to get medical aid after the crash. To read part 1, go to frontiersman.com. A brief recap follows of the first installment of the story follows:

In part 1 of this adventure, 51-year-old experienced pilot and airplane mechanic Dave Akers of Palmer and his friend Gary Nall, 46, of Wasilla, who moved to Houston, Texas, shortly after the crash, took a sightseeing jaunt to Knik Glacier in Akers’ 1953 Cessna on July 22. Intrigued by the Friday Creek area, they diverted from their course to fly over an airstrip there, got caught in a down draft and crashed at 4,200 feet. Both were injured in the impact. They had emergency gear on board but knew the signal of Akers’ older model emergency location transmitter (ELT) would be obscured by the mountains.

Stay or Go

At that point, Akers knew they had to make a tough decision: stay with the plane at 4,200 feet or hike out. They decided to hike out.

“We hadn’t told anyone where we were going,” Akers said. “I didn’t have faith in the ELT. We knew we were in an area with a lot of bears. There was a lot of blood.”

Akers said Internet posters on comment boards had a heyday second-guessing that decision. It’s one he stands by today.

“We had to stop the bleeding; we had to get to the creek and rinse off,” he said. It was the choice between being a sitting target for bears or a moving one, both he and Nall said.

“I didn’t know the full extent of our injuries,” Nall added. “I thought we needed to get out and move. I did not want to stay with the plane. I knew I wanted to get down off the mountain.”

So they gathered the survival gear they could carry and headed off, with Nall in the lead.

“We stopped and prayed before we left that the Lord would lead the way,” Akers recalled. Three weeks earlier, he and his wife, Kim, had four-wheeled near the base of Friday Creek and could see a four-wheeler trail disappearing into the higher elevations. That trail was the goal.

Akers was still dazed; Nall was functioning well.

“I think God was watching over us,” Nall said. “At first I was really clicking.” Later, he’d need Akers to help him know his way.

Nall led them to Friday Creek where they cleaned off the blood and started to head down the mountain. With darkness closing in on them, they pulled the tarps around them and tried to sleep.

Early the next morning, they were back on the trail.

“On the second day, I thought we could get to that road,” Akers recalled. It would be a monumental struggle. About eight miles as a raven flies, the men traveled about 12 to 15 surface miles of rough terrain and dense brush.

Early Friday morning they crossed Friday Creek and saw their first grizzly about 200 yards downstream going into the alder.

Nall’s head was bleeding again; he knew he’d draw a bear.

“I was a hors d’oeuvres walking through the woods,” he said. As they walked through tangled alder, they could only pray there was no bear near.

“We felt God’s hedge of protection around us,” Nall said.

Later that morning, they literally stumbled onto a bear-killed moose. As they crossed Friday Creek to distance themselves from the absent diner, Akers’ walking stick broke and he was washed about 20 feet down stream, submerging in the chill waters. But there was no safe place to dry. They kept walking, the fitter Nall in the lead with the compass/whistle to sound the alarm for bear or moose.

The going was tough. The game trails were easier walking, but they knew they shared them. The rain pants Nall pulled over his cutoffs were torn to shreds by the brush.

They were going through a glacial valley when Nall spotted a silvertip grizzly, digging in the earth. The bear lifted his head and saw the injured men; they froze and prayed. As the bear disappeared over the backside of the ridge, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and the big bruin.

“I don’t remember breathing a lot,” Akers said.

The last few miles were the hardest. The thick alders made the going tough, the devil’s club was merciless and the bear tally kept climbing.

Akers said they had a plan if a bear threatened. Nall, with his two good hands, would pop a flare and aim it at the bear. Akers would pull the knife from Nall’s sheath with his one good arm and inflict as much damage as possible to the bear. Then, they’d cover. A month or so later, Akers couldn’t relate the plan without some black humor.

“Probably the better thought would be to throw the peanut butter at him.”

No Help to be Found

Less than a mile away from the trail, the weather broke. While the men could not see how close they were to the trail, they could see Pioneer Peak and aircraft overhead. Early in the afternoon, they sited a DeHavilland Beaver with a polished spinner. Nall set off a flare but the plane kept going. Next, it was a Piper Cherokee going up canyon flying left wing low. Nall shot the second flare; the Cherokee flew off. The third and last flare went off on the right side of a gray and white Bellanca Citbria flying up Friday canyon. It went up canyon and then back overhead without any acknowledgment of the distress signal.

“Flares are gone now,” Akers recalled. “They would have circled if they’d seen us.” The men would find out later they had been reported as missing about midnight Friday — more than 12 hours before they launched the first flare. It would be a week before anyone would locate the wreckage of the plane, and then only with the men’s help.

“Gary and I are like, ‘God, I guess you want us to walk out of here today,” Akers recalled.

Even with their faith to bolster them, the disappointment sapped energy from the men. Then Nall added another blow: “‘I wasn’t going to say anything but I lost the knife sometime back,’” Akers recalls Nall telling him.

“At that point my dedication to get out of that canyon was quite high,” Akers said. “We just bushwhacked, bushwhacked, bushwhacked.”

They caught a glimpse of the Knik Valley, so they began climbing down a valley that became increasingly steep. They knew they could never traverse the slopes, so they started back up. The decision to drop into the ravine was the worse one they made, Nall said.

“We really spent a vast amount of reserve energy,” he said.

At one point, Akers, behind Nall, lost his footing and slid down the steep slope. He doesn’t know how he used his bad arm to help himself back up, but knows he did. Then he heard Nall’s whistle. A mother bear and cubs wandered between and to the right of the men. Nall had just stepped on a bee nest, and the angry bees were making him pay the price.

“I just got my whistle and started blowing it,” Nall recalled. The mother bear heard the sound and moved her family away, while the men moved the other way.

Then a new problem emerged.

Nall, who’d led the men since they left the plane, thought he spotted a hunting camp across the valley, and was convinced they should change course. Akers knew his friend’s brain was swelling and he must get emergency help.

“The only thing I can think of is to encourage Gary to keep going,” Akers said. His chant to his friend: ”Canyon wall left, canyon wall right, opening in front of us.”

Nall said he remembers seeing a hunter in tree stand.

“I got my whistle out and tried to get his attention,” Nall said. When the man disappeared as he neared, he reasoned he was a poacher. “At some point I realized I was hallucinating.”

When they finally broke through the thicket at the base of the mountain, they were about 50 feet from the trail they sought. Dehydrated and weary, the men walked to the river bottom and along the trail for an hour before realizing they were going the wrong way. They hadn’t seen a soul.

“It’s Friday night,” Akers said. “The Knik is loaded with four-wheelers. There is not one person in any one of those campgrounds. Not one.”

Akers is discouraged; it hurts to walk, but Nall, behind Akers to keep Nall from outdistancing him, is waving into the campground asking Akers, “Why won’t that lady in the campground wave to me?”

It’s too dark and they are too tired to go farther, Akers recalled, so they lay down next to the trail, back to back, trying to sleep. Their sleeping bags were saturated.

“We were just shaking uncontrollably,” Nall said.

Revving of Angels

At about 2:30 a.m. Akers told Nall he heard the sounds of engines.

“Oh, great. Now he’s hallucinating,” Nall remembers thinking. He got up and saw headlights.

A Toyota pickup, Chevy Bronco and a Ford Ranger were coming down the trail. It’s a group of Air Force men out having a good time. The Elmendorf-based men were a bit dazed by the oddly outfitted men, Akers recalled. He removed the orange ski mask he was wearing to keep off mosquitoes, and the men could see the injuries. They changed from recreating mode to rescue mode in an instant, Akers recalled.

“We had to have been some real funny-looking guys,” Akers said, smiling. “It was not a fashion show.”

The airmen handed each of the men a half-hoagie sandwich wrapped in cellophane. Akers said his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t open his.

“One of the guys walked up to me, took his coat off, put his coat on me and opened the sandwich,” Akers recalled, still visibly shaken by the compassion of a stranger.

“I remember how good that sandwich tasted, but I couldn’t swallow it, my throat was so constricted,” Nall said. An airman gave him a bottle of water.

They loaded the men into a vehicle, with at least one of the airmen riding in the pickup bed to make space, and drove them to the parking lot on the Old Glenn, leapfrogging streams as they went.

“I can’t say enough about what those guys did,” Akers said.

The men called their wives en route. Kim and their sons, who had flown in from Washington when they heard their dad was missing, met them at the parking lot and took them to Mat-Su Regional Hospital, where Gary’s wife, Lisa, met them.

The women were worried but they had not panicked.”

“I knew you guys were OK,” Akers said his wife told him. Akers and Nall had prayed the Holy Spirit would let their wives know they were OK.

OK, didn’t mean they didn’t each spend two nights in the hospital. Nall’s skull was fractured; Akers had a variety of less-serious injuries. But they were alive.

“We both feel truly blessed,” Akers said. “A couple of dumb, goofy guys don’t usually get out of that situation without help, and we feel it was God’s help.”

They’d encountered six black bears, two browns - one a mature silvertip - and two live moose after crashing at about 35 mph into a mountain at 4,200 feet about 18 miles east of Palmer. Gushing fuel, the plane didn’t catch fire, Akers realized when it was salvaged from the mountain, because the solenoid had snapped on impact; there was no electrical power to spark the fire, which Akers called yet another miracle.

Nall said he still hopes to be a pilot someday but his bruised brain needs another two months of healing.

Like Akers, he sees his ultimate rescuer as the unseen spirit on the mountain.

“God was definitely there with us,” Nall said. “His presence on the mountain was like having a third person with us.”

Valley of Danger

Since the accident, Akers has talked to several pilots who have told him belatedly of the dangerous wind currents at that Friday Creek airstrip and the many planes it has claimed.

Few know that strip better than Palmer flight instructor Bob Smith, whose father, Robert Smith Sr., built the airstrip in the mid 1950s. Bob Smith’s dad died when Bob was 11, but he remembers his father warning him about the area, telling him it awash with “wacky downdrafts.”

“They hit when you don’t expect it,” Smith said, adding that when pilots enter that valley, there is a point of no return.

“You don’t try going around,” Smith said. “It’s not going to happen.”

Akers said he discovered that when he had a blink of an eye to decide if he could turn his Cessna out of that air mass at 45 mph.

“I would have stalled the aircraft if I had made that turn,” he said.

He said the Federal Aviation Administration blames the human factor. Akers is more blunt.

“It was pilot error,” he said.

After the accident, he looked at the peaks and watched the clouds settling in. Two or three hours after the crash, the Valley was at instrument meteorological conditions (IMC); in a plane without sophisticated instruments, it’s like flying blind. He said he should have noticed the cloud changes before flying into the valley.

“I became so engrossed with the landing strip — and excited — that I failed to check the surrounding weather,” he said.

Editor’s note: Part 1 also includes a list of recommended emergency supplies. The list contains a typographical error, and should say Gorilla tape.