Federal probe of crash starts
Teams recovered the bodies of two Missoula men and two Kalispell newspaper reporters from the site of a small plane crash Thursday as federal investigators began to look at piecing together what happened.
The recovery teams had a difficult time making progress through dense forest to the site on a remote, rugged hillside near Dixon, Lake County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Carey Cooley said.
Accompanying them was a saw team from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ fire division.
The crew cleared enough trees and underbrush in the area to allow a helicopter to hoist the bodies at about 8 p.m., Cooley said. The remains were sent to the state crime lab in Missoula.
Authorities found the wreckage Wednesday about 80 miles south of Kalispell after a 2 1/2-day ground, air and river search for the four friends who never returned from a sightseeing trip Sunday.
On board were Daily Inter Lake reporters Melissa Weaver, 23, and Erika Hoefer, 27, and two Missoula men, Brian Williams, 28, and the pilot, 25-year-old Sonny Kless.
The terrain made recovering the victims by helicopter impossible without the hoist becoming snagged in the trees, authorities determined.
On Thursday, a recovery crew from the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office specializing in mountain rescues set out for the site from about a mile above the wreckage.
A second team approached from below about two miles away, using the sawyers to clear the dense brush and timber in their path, Cooley said.
“There was a lot of downed timber and brush,” she said. “It was a very arduous hike in for these folks.”
About 45 people took part in the recovery effort, including officials from the Sanders and Lake county sheriff’s offices along with the Flathead, and Salish and Kootenai teams.
The site was discovered Wednesday afternoon, and within a couple of hours two searchers were dropped into the area by helicopter to confirm that there were no survivors.
The four left Kalispell City Airport Sunday afternoon and did not return, prompting a search that got under way Monday, focusing on an area west of the National Bison Range where the plane was last detected by radar.
Cooley said search and rescue personnel had cleared the area by Friday morning.
“Their mission is done,” she said.
“Those guys need to be commended for their efforts. They didn’t complain, they just kept moving forward,” Cooley said. “It was a really tough day for them getting up there.”
Sanders County officials helped an investigation team from the National Transportation Safety Board go to the crash site Friday morning.
While it took all day Thursday for recovery workers to blaze a trail into the site, Cooley noted, now that there is trail access it only took about an hour and a half to get to the site on Friday.