This story, “Lost in an Icy Hell,” appeared in the February 1971 issue of Outdoor Life.
The match was a flimsy thing, torn from a book, and it would not strike. Until that moment I had never realized how terrible such a seemingly insignificant fact can be.
My brother Walter tried to strike a second and third, but the heads crumbled and fell apart.
“They’re wet,” I said grimly, and Walt nodded agreement.
He was down on his hands and knees, in the dusk of a cheerless November day, with a small pile of dry twigs in front of him. On that pile had rested our hopes of a fire to dry our clothes and warm us through the long cold hours of darkness that were coming. Such a fire might even bring rescuers to us during the night. Now all hope of it was gone.
Because I am not a smoker, I don’t ordinarily carry matches. To allow for just this kind of emergency, however, I had made it a practice to remove the butt plate from each of my shotguns and rifles and then drill a hole in the stock to provide a weatherproof compartment for matches. But on this hunt I was carrying a new rifle in which I had not yet drilled a compartment. Now, when I needed matches desperately for the first time in my life, there were none in the gunstock. Walt’s one book contained all we had, and they were soaked and worthless.
Rain and wet snow were sifting through the timber, and the wind blowing down from the high peaks of the Bitterroots was taking on a knife edge. We faced a night in that hostile wilderness, a night of fog and storm, without shelter or warmth. We didn’t think then that it would be more than one night; but one night would be bad enough. We stared at each other over our useless pile of twigs, wondering how much of an ordeal it would be but saying very little.
The predicament had begun as a long-dreamed-of elk hunt in the roadless Selway-Bitterroot country of Idaho, just west of the Montana border.
I was 52 years old and living in San Mateo, California, south of San Francisco where I had been superintendent for a construction company for 20 years. Walt was five years older and had recently moved to California, to El Cajon near San Diego.
The two of us grew up at Rockford, Illinois, and we had hunted since boyhood, starting with squirrels and rabbits. Later we graduated to deer, and after I moved to San Mateo I hunted mule deer almost every fall in the Sierra Nevada or the Coast Range with friends or members of my family. Walter had yet to sample hunting in California or anywhere else in the West.
Years before, I had hunted in Utah with a man named Hall. Later his son Danny came to work for the construction company where I was superintendent, and he and I did a lot of talking about elk, which I had never hunted. The more we talked, the keener my urge became. There was no better place to hunt elk than Idaho’s Selway country, Danny said, and when he offered to make all the arrangements and guide me in the fall of 1969 I didn’t wait any longer.
It seemed like a prime idea for Walter to drive up from El Cajon and join me, and as soon as I was sure I could take the needed two or three weeks off my job I phoned him and we nailed things down.
Looking back, I can see that the trip was cursed with bad luck from the outset. Walt arrived at my place toward the end of October. We loaded hunting gear, sleeping bags, and food into my pickup truck and headed for Declo, Idaho, east of Twin Falls, a drive of about 800 miles. We’d rendezvous there with the rest of the party — Don Jacobs, Lee Anderson, and Danny.
Jacobs was a rancher at Declo. He would furnish the saddle and pack horses and would go along. Lee and Danny were working for him at the time, and it was arranged that they’d guide Walt and me.
We reached Declo on November 1 and spent a few days doing final chores and packing equipment. On the morning of November 6 our little caravan rolled north on U.S. 93. We had another 400 miles to go to our base-camp site, and our troubles were about to start. Lee Anderson took the lead in his four-wheel-drive vehicle full of gear. Jacobs followed him in a truck loaded with eight horses. Danny was next, driving a three-ton truck and pulling a big trailer filled with hay and grain for horse feed. Walt and I brought up the rear in my pickup.
All went well until we made the climb to Lost Trail Pass, where the road crosses the Bitterroots at just under 7,000 feet and winds steeply down into Montana. The downhill stretch proved our undoing. We hooked the three-ton truck and some of the horses to the rear of the horse truck to hold it back on the steep grades, but the load was too heavy and we tore three pistons out of the motor.
We towed the disabled truck into Darby, the next town, and put the horses into a stockyard for the night. Then we started looking for repair parts. There were none to be had. The next morning Danny started for Hamilton, 17 miles north, hoping to find parts there. But before he arrived the drive shaft on his truck gave way, and again no replacement could be found. In the end Lee took the 4WD another 50 miles north to Missoula to get what we needed.
Fog closed in around us with frightening suddenness — fog as thick as dirty gray milk. Within minutes it had wrapped us like a clinging wet blanket, blotting out every landmark and turning timber, canyons, and ridges into a featureless void.
The repairs took time. We were four days away from Declo when we finally turned off the paved highway onto a dirt road that led to Magruder Ridge, across the Bitterroots in Idaho, where we would set up base camp. We had averaged only 100 miles a day.
We made things comfortable at base camp, with two 20 x 20-foot tents, one for sleeping and one for cooking. But bad luck still dogged us, and the hunt was delayed again. While building a log corral for the horses, Don Jacobs hurt his back. He would have to quit the hunt and go home for treatment.
We spent the next two days making two trips back to Darby to pick up the horses, and another day finishing the corral. At last we were ready to look for elk. By that time Walt and I had been away from home more than two weeks, but we agreed that if things took a turn for the better now we wouldn’t begrudge the delay.
We left camp on horseback right after breakfast, riding west into the Selway Wilderness Area about as far as horses could go. There were no trails, and the country grew rougher as we went along until it became a tangle of steep slopes, rocky cliffs, heavy underbrush, canyons, and small streams. The ground was bare at the lower elevations, but snow was on the ridges and peaks higher up.
We finally stopped and pitched two pup tents for a spike camp. There was no horse feed here, so Lee Anderson headed back to our base camp with the horses. Danny and Walt and I would hunt on foot, and Lee would return for us later.
It snowed that night, and light snow was still falling at daylight. We put away a good breakfast and then headed into the timber. A few miles out we separated. Danny moved up along a ridge, hoping to spot elk from above, while Walt and I stayed lower down where we would watch for his signals.
It was hours before we caught our first glimpse of the guide, high above us. By that time Walt and I were talking about starting back to camp. But we never got the chance. Disaster was coming, in a form we had not even thought about. It struck in midafternoon.
Fog closed in around us with frightening suddenness — fog as thick as dirty gray milk. Within minutes it had wrapped us like a clinging wet blanket, blotting out every landmark and turning timber, canyons, and ridges into a featureless void. We lost all sense of location and direction.
We waited awhile, hoping Danny would make his way down to us. But when the light of the dismal afternoon started to fade, we abandoned that hope. We would have to get back to camp by ourselves. Probably the guide, not knowing exactly where we were, was already on his way to camp. But in the fog we could see nothing that would tell us in which direction camp lay.
We started to walk, but we could see no more than 50 yards around us. And the longer we walked, the less familiar the surroundings seemed. There was no snow where we were and no tracks that we could follow back. Within an hour we realized we were lost, in one of the wildest and most rugged areas of mountain country in the West, a place where foot travel is almost impossible. We had a box of shells apiece. Walt’s rifle was a Winchester Model 70 in .270 caliber, mine a .308 of the same make and model. We decided to fire signal shots, three in a row.
The first slow-spaced distress signal echoed through the timber and died away. When no answering shots came, the thought struck me that I had never heard a sound more lonesome and forlorn than those echoes.
We repeated the signals two or three times, Then, with dusk gathering, we resigned ourselves to a night in the woods. We gathered dry twigs and tried to light a fire. I have already described the results of our efforts.
It grew dark quickly. We could find no shelter, so each of us finally chose a big tree to stand beside and stamped our feet to stay awake and to keep them from freezing. The night turned colder, and rain fell steadily. In all the days that followed we did not again suffer as much from cold and wet as we did that first night. Perhaps we just grew accustomed to the discomfort.
We had no breakfast. Our only food had been a few prunes and two small pieces of jerky that I had carried in a pocket. We had shared that food for supper. No matter how long we were lost now, we would have to survive on water.
Neither of us was carrying a compass or a map of the area. I have been asked since whether I consider that an act of negligence. It’s a question not easy to answer, but I guess you could call it that. I realize now that no hunter should ever venture into wild country, familiar or unfamiliar, without both compass and map. Our failure to take them almost cost us our lives.
We had always hunted in areas where we knew the way out. Neither of us had ever stayed overnight in the open. Our practice was to return to camp in time for supper, and our plans for this hunt were no different. Danny was 27, in good physical condition, and familiar with the area. It had not occurred to Walt or me that there was any cause for apprehension, so we had started out light, carrying only guns and ammunition.
We walked in the direction that we believed would take us to camp, but I am sure now that we traveled in a circle, as lost men often do. Each step we took seemed to lead us deeper into tangled wilderness.
One thing was in our favor. We were dressed fairly warmly. Walt was wearing thermal underwear, army dungarees, wool socks, boots, a warm jacket, gloves, and a wool hat with ear flaps. I had thermal underwear, cotton pants under a nylon flight suit, wool socks, insulated boots, a hat like Walt’s, and a good jacket. The thing we lacked — and needed most — was raingear.
Daylight brought no break in the fog and rain. We walked in the direction that we believed would take us to camp, but I am sure now that we traveled in a circle, as lost men often do. Each step we took seemed to lead us deeper into tangled wilderness.
We traveled down small streams, climbing over rocks and fallen timber, hoping that the streams would lead us out. We climbed cliffs and clawed through underbrush. We went up on ridges, hoping to get above the fog. But each time we topped a ridge we would see another, fog-shrouded and equally unfamiliar, beyond it. We went down into ravines to get below the fog, only to find that each ravine led into a deeper and wilder one. We were wandering as lost men do, blindfolded by the fog.
We never learned exactly how low the temperature fell while we were lost, but it went far below freezing. The nights were much colder than the days. By late afternoon we could feel the numbing cold creeping through our wet clothing, and it grew worse as darkness came.
At dark the second night we fired signal shots again. We did that each night until we were down to three shells apiece, but we never heard a reply. We decided to husband the last three shells against some final emergency.
That second night, we contrived to build a poor shelter. We found big fall en trees, peeled off sheets of bark, and leaned the sheets around the trunk of a tree to make a low wigwam. It would keep off the worst of the wind and rain. We crawled in and huddled together for warmth, and for the first time in more than 36 hours we slept intermittently. But the rain turned to snow, and sometime after midnight our bark lean-to caved in from the weight. We crawled out of the wreckage and stood around until morning, stamping our feet and shivering
We left as soon as it was light enough to travel, but soon we encountered the worst obstacle we had found — a big area of fallen timber left by a blowdown or a forest fire many years before.
Logs lay breast-high above the L ground, crisscrossed and strewn in every direction like so many giant jackstraws, an impenetrable tangle. We spent that whole day climbing over them or trying to find a way around, getting nowhere. When night came we looked for a dry spot underneath a big log, crawled in on the dead leaves, and huddled together once more for a few hours of broken sleep.
By now we were speculating more and more about the search that we knew would be made for us, not realizing that the searchers would be about as badly handicapped by the fog as we were.
Danny hadn’t got back to our spike camp the first night. He spent that night in the woods as we did. The next morning he made his way to a packer’s station maintained by Heaton Wayland and Higgs Faye, two guides from Darby. From there he hiked on to camp. When he found no trace of us, he knew he was dealing with lost men.
Meanwhile, Lee Anderson had taken Don Jacobs out to Darby, where Don’s wife would meet him and drive him home. Lee got back to the spike camp shortly before dark the second night, and he and Danny went out at once to look for us. They located us, too, but as luck would have it they could do nothing about it.
They were high above us in the mountains when they heard the shots we fired at dark. But we did not hear their reply, and we were at the bottom of a canyon so rough and deep that they could not get down to us in the darkness. They built a fire and kept it going for several hours, but the fog was too thick for us to see it.
The next morning, Lee and Danny notified rangers of the Bitterroot National Forest that two men were lost, and the search got under way. But little could be done until the fog cleared, and it didn’t clear.
The U.S. Forest Service arranged to keep a helicopter standing by at Missoula, Montana, the next three days. But because of the weather, the copter couldn’t get off the ground. Search parties fanned out on foot in small groups, some with walkie-talkies, but could only grope almost blindly through the fog and snow.
Hall and Anderson pressed the search without letup. The night before we were found, Lee’s brother Ray and four companions spent the whole night in the woods. But we had left few traces of our wanderings, and no one found anything that might indicate what had happened to us. Least of all did the searchers suspect that we were without fire.
The ordeal had one rather surprising consequence. When it was over Lee Anderson had lost all interest in hunting or guiding.
“All I could think of the whole time was having to call those families in California and tell them the two men were dead,” he said long afterward. “I don’t ever want any part of that kind of thing again.”
On the fourth day Walt and I noted the sound of an airliner passing over the mountains in the direction we believed was north. We had heard planes there before — the only aircraft we heard while we were lost — but had paid no attention. Now we concluded that we had been walking south, toward the Salmon River and away from our camp. We turned around, listening for the airliners to go over and traveling slowly and painfully toward them.
We spent the fourth night under a clump of evergreens, rain dripping down on us, and trudged on once more as the fifth day began. Walking was becoming more and more difficult now, as cold and hunger and fatigue took their toll. We had searched endlessly for food — frozen berries, anything to fill our empty bellies; but we had searched in vain. We learned firsthand that snow gives very little nourishment.
Our walking time grew shorter and shorter, our rests more and more frequent. My feet were in poor shape, and Walt’s were far worse — frozen and half numb but very painful. When we stopped to rest we massaged our feet and hands, but it didn’t seem to do much good. I had come down with a very hard chest cold, too, and I coughed until it seemed I would tear my lungs apart.
On the fifth night we were very close to the end of our physical endurance, and we began to wonder how much longer we could hold on. Our hopes sank to their lowest ebb.
Shortly before dark on the fifth day we came to a pile of bark heaped at the base of a tree. At first we didn’t recognize it, but then we suddenly realized that we were back at the spot where our lean-to shelter had fallen in. We set the broken slabs back in place as best we could and spent the night there. We had no better place to go.
I don’t think either of us ever gave up hope. Sustained by a determination to keep going as long as we could set one foot ahead of the other, we were able to believe through the whole ordeal that we would finally be found or make our way out on our own.
But on the fifth night we were very close to the end of our physical endurance, and we began to wonder how much longer we could hold on. Our hopes sank to their lowest ebb. We lay in our drafty bark shelter and talked of our loved ones, of the plans we had for them, and of our own achievements and failures. And we speculated on how much more time we were going to have.
We had three sisters, but they all were married, had families, and were living their own lives. Walt was not married, but I had a wife and two sons. Gary was 26, Stephen 25. The boys could take care of themselves, and I didn’t worry much about them. But how would my wife Zelda make out if I died?
I suppose we were being morbid, but probably that is inevitable for lost men as close to the end of the road as we were. We slept little that night. In fact we talked to keep each other awake, as if subconsciously afraid of sleep. When daylight came, with fog and snow still shrouding the mountains, we gathered our last remaining strength and made ready to move on.
“I can’t walk much longer,” Walt told me. “My feet hurt too much.”
He didn’t need to. We were only a short distance from the bark lean-to when we heard a far-off thud, miles away in the mountains, that had to be a rifle shot. We answered with two shots of our own and started to stagger off toward the sound. But we walked only a few minutes and gave up. We would wait there and hope for rescue.
Two hours passed, but they seemed more like two days. Then another rifle shot crashed out, much nearer, and we heard a shout. The voice was Danny Hall’s.
We fired our remaining shells one after another and yelled as loudly as we could. About noon we heard horses coming, and then our guide rode out of the fog. We were found at last, on the sixth day of our ordeal.
How far we had traveled in those six days we will never know. To us, both the time and the distance had seemed endless. We had tried to walk each day from daylight to dark, but toward the end we had rested a lot. At the time, I thought we had covered at least 100 miles, but I’m sure now it was far less than that.
Danny had brought along a pocket flask of whiskey, and he gave each of us a drink. It burned like fire, but it took some of the chill out of our bones and braced us for the long trip out
The guide was riding one horse and leading another equipped with a pack saddle. Both animals showed the effects of the rough country they had come through. They had torn their legs on rocks, and patches of dried blood were on their shoulders and flanks where brush and down timber had taken their toll.
Neither Walt nor I was in shape for more foot travel. Danny helped Walt into his saddle, and I got onto the pack animal. The guide would lead the horses. A pack saddle is not the most comfortable contraption in the world, but never in my life had I been so grateful to have horseflesh carrying my tired body.
Our troubles were not quite over. An hour after we started the ride, on a narrow shelf along the side of a cliff, my horse slipped and went down, throwing me headfirst. I pitched 20 feet down the sheer slope before a narrow ledge broke my fall, in time to save me from serious injury. My head and face were cut and bloody, but nothing was broken. Danny gave me a hand and I clambered back up to the horse.
It took us six hours to reach the packer’s place where Danny had stopped the day after the fog had trapped us. Wayland and Faye were there, along with Wayland’s wife and two hunters from Oregon. They put Walt’s swollen feet in warm water to relieve the pain and gave us a light meal of milk and the broth from an elk stew. It was our first food since we had eaten our prunes and jerky five nights before. By this time we had each lost 20 pounds.
We rode all the next day on horseback to reach our base camp at Magruder Ridge. We found forest rangers and a local sheriff there, directing the fog-hampered search for us. It could be called off now.
I pitched 20 feet down the sheer slope before a narrow ledge broke my fall.
Walt’s feet were in urgent need of medical attention. We drove out to Darby the next morning and hurried to a doctor. The word we got was bad. He doubted that the feet could be saved since they were in such bad shape.
We pushed on to Declo, and Don Jacobs directed us to another doctor. He said that Walt’s feet should be amputated without delay.
Walt and I held a brief conference and agreed we should get back to San Mateo, where I had a personal physician, as quickly as possible. We looked for an airline flight but could find none, and when we realized that the only means of transportation was our pickup truck I offered to make the drive, even though by that time I had a high fever and was seriously ill.
“If you can drive I can ride,” Walt answered.
So in late afternoon we hit the road for home. Exhausted and sick as I was, only sheer determination kept me at the wheel as night came on. I don’t remember much about the trip. But I pushed the pickup hard, and we reached San Mateo before morning. I had driven that 800 miles with a full-blown case of pneumonia in both lungs.
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With capable medical help and Zelda’s care, I made a fast recovery. In a few weeks I was as good as new. Walt was less fortunate. He lost all the toes on his right foot and three of his toes on the left.
But unlike Lee Anderson, we were not cured of hunting by the ordeal. Walt went after deer in California a year later and enjoyed himself thoroughly. And one of these days I’m going to try for elk again. But when that time comes I will be a lot more careful about my preparations.
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