Very cold man plucked from Knik River sandbar

BUTTE — Mat-Su Borough medics rescued an Anchorage man who wound up stranded on a sandbar in the Knik River Sunday.

“He was using a snowmachine to skip along the water and evidently got stuck out there,” said Butte Fire Chief Charles Von Gunten.

To hear responders tell it, the man was lucky to have escaped with his life. Borough responders don’t generally distribute, or often even collect the names of people they save, and police agencies had not released his name as of press time.

Borough Dive Rescue Team Chief Cliff Silvers said the man left from somewhere near the mouth of Jim Creek and made it a decent distance.

“He’d go across the water and then a sand bar or gravel bar or another stretch of water and he just kept going,” Silvers said.

The rider eventually wound up in the water near the sandbar he found himself stranded on. Silvers said it wasn’t his first trip across that sandbar as there were multiple sets of snowmachine tracks in the sand.

“He was just short of a sandbar when he dunked his machine and, of course, he’s not wearing a life jacket or a helmet or any exposure gear,” Silvers said.

The man also spent an appreciable amount of time wrestling the snowmachine out of the water and onto the sandbar.

“It’s pretty cold water, comes down off the glacier,” Silvers said. “He was apparently jumping up and down for awhile and trying to flag down boat traffic.”

Silvers said borough responders weren’t called out until three hours after the man went into the water.

“A Fish and Wildlife officer was at Jim Creek and he could see the guy out there on the sandbar, and after awhile he was no longer moving,” Silvers said. “That kicked us in a little higher gear.”

He and his team put the borough’s airboat in the reiver upstream from the Old Glenn Highway bridge over the river. Onboard were members of the dive team, a pair of medics and the Fish and Wildlife officer. By the time they got there, Silvers said, the man’s body temperature had dropped to a dangerous level.

“Two of the medics were seeing what the response was and he wasn’t responding at all,” Silvers said. “He was just laying there on his back with his arms crossed.”

Silvers said warming the man up was the priority.

“We wrapped him up in the thermal bag, which is a fancy sleeping bag, and put a couple of hot packs in there with him and called in LifeMed to transport him to Anchorage,” the dive chief said.

The helicopter landed on the gravel bar and took off from there.

“We put him on the LifeMed helicopter and sent him to Providence,” Silver said. “His machine is still out there.”

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