Survivors!

Two plane crash victims, feared dead, alive after two days in the wilderness

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

After being presumed dead in a Monday plane crash, two people emerged from mountainous terrain near Essex on Wednesday afternoon as survivors of a violent plane crash.

"Initially we thought there were no survivors, but now there are two," said Denise Germann, a spokeswoman for the Flathead National Forest.

Jodee Hogg, 23, of Billings and Matthew Ramige, 29, of Jackson Hole, Wyo., managed to make their way to U.S. 2 from the crash site above the treeline on Mount Liebig.

That's a distance of several miles and 2,000 to 3,000 feet in elevation below the crash site.

Hogg and Ramige, who was badly burned in the crash, were first spotted by a person driving on U.S. 2, along the southern border of Glacier National Park, roughly 48 hours after the plane went down.

It was a stunning development, considering that when the plane wreckage was found on Tuesday, Flathead County Sheriff Jim Dupont announced to media and family members that there were no survivors.

He said one intact body was recovered Tuesday and the other four people onboard were badly burned and their recovery would be delayed until Wednesday.

Grieving families and friends of the crash victims were being briefed by Forest Service officials in Kalispell on Wednesday afternoon when it was announced that there were possible survivors.

Those at the meeting had just been told once again that there were no survivors.

Loved ones rushed to Kalispell Regional Medical Center, where many were overcome with waves of emotion as Ramige and Hogg arrived on two successive flights aboard the ALERT helicopter.

For some, there was immense relief.

"Are they here?" said one woman as she rushed to the emergency doors. She then burst into tears after learning that two had survived.

But for others, there was bitter sorrow. Some expressed anger at the sheriff's office for declaring all passengers dead when a search should have continued.

"Can you imagine these families?" asked Bob Bryant, whose daughter-in-law, Davita Bryant, was killed in the crash. "They've been told their kids are dead, and now they are resurrected."

Bryant was in disbelief that the sheriff's office had announced that all five on board had died.

"If you don't count body parts and teeth, how do you know?" he said.

The announcement that there were no survivors essentially halted further search efforts, he said.

One man, who asked not to be identified, said he and a friend were in the Middle Fork Flathead River corridor Tuesday, searching in an area not far from the crash site. He said he and his friend intended to hike up Tunnel Ridge - an area even closer to the wreckage - but they were turned away by a Forest Service official who apparently wanted to keep people away from the crash site.

"We were prepared, me and my partner, to walk in there and look for these individuals," he said.

Linda Woods, a Whitefish resident who knows Bryant and Ramige, said she was organizing people in Whitefish to join the search, and she estimates there were probably 100 people who could have assisted.

She said search leaders declined that offer, saying there were liability issues involved and that the leading edge of the search would be carried out by aircraft.

"I think there is also a liability in turning away 100 people," she said Wednesday. "It's possible we could have been very useful and saved some people some suffering … Last night, we sat on the couch and cried instead of being out hiking and searching. And we just accepted what we were told."

But Woods acknowledged that "it's easy to second guess" the efforts of people involved in the search.

"I want to think that people did their best," she said.

Dupont and Undersheriff Chuck Curry could not be reached most of Wednesday because they were at the crash site. When they returned to Kalispell in the afternoon, they were met with tough questions in a closed-door meeting with family members.

Until the wreckage was located, the search area was gigantic, covering the expansive drainage between Bear Creek and the Schafer Meadows air strip in the Great Bear Wilderness, as well as the area along U.S. 2.

With pilot Jim Long at the controls, the single-engine Cessna 206 G took off from Glacier Park International Airport Monday at 3 p.m. to deliver the four Forest Service employees to Schafer Meadows, where they were going to conduct forest vegetation inventories as part of a nationwide monitoring project.

Long, 60, of Kalispell; Ken Good, 58, of Whitefish, a veteran employee of the Flathead National Forest; and Davita Bryant, 32, of Whitefish did not survive the crash.

When the plane failed to arrive at Schafer, a search was launched.

But the aerial search was quickly hampered by foul weather, and it did not resume until Tuesday morning.

The Flathead National Forest dispatch center last heard from the plane when it was just east of Columbia Mountain, leading search leaders to believe that Long was flying up the Middle Fork corridor, rather than pursuing a more common route over the Swan Mountains.

By Tuesday afternoon, cloud cover in the Middle Fork corridor lifted, and the wreckage was spotted by a Forest Service work crew from a nearby ridge.

With coordinates provided by that crew, a helicopter was sent to the site. Soon after, Dupont announced that there were no survivors.

On Wednesday afternoon, Gerald Kupka, owner of the Stanton Creek Lodge near Essex, was one of the first to hear that there might be survivors from the plane crash.

"Some lady pulled into the lodge and evidently she saw two people standing on the side of the road, and they were in rough shape," Kupka said.

Kupka called 911 and an Essex area resident who is on the local quick response unit. The Middle Fork Quick Response Unit, Columbia Falls ambulance and ALERT helicopter were dispatched.

At that point in Kalispell, sheriff's dispatchers were uncertain whether the two people could be survivors.

"It's a miracle from God, if that's what happened," one dispatcher said.

Within a half hour, it appeared there were indeed survivors.

"They are bringing them both in by ALERT," the dispatcher said. "One subject is badly burned, and the other is burned but not as severely."

Most who gathered at the hospital could not believe what had transpired.

"It's absolutely amazing," said Ed Lieser, a Forest Service employee on the Tally Lake Ranger District.

Within an hour after arriving in Kalispell, Ramige was flown to the burn center at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, said Jim Oliverson, spokesman for Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

At 9 p.m. Wednesday, Ramige was still being treated in the emergency room at Harborview.

"I'm told that his mother would be flying with him," Oliverson said.

At the request of her family, Oliverson could not provide any information on Hogg's injuries.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com