Search continues for man in Flathead River

The search carried on most of Monday for a 37-year-old Flathead Valley man who is presumed to have drowned during a Sunday rafting trip on the Flathead River downstream from Blankenship Bridge.

“I don’t think the odds look good,” said Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry. “And primarily that’s just based on the river conditions.”

The man went overboard about three quarters of a mile downstream from Blankenship Bridge. A search was launched Sunday evening and it continued Monday, with about 15 people from the Sheriff’s Dive Team and volunteers from North Valley Search and Rescue searching areas along the river all the way to Columbia Falls, Curry said.

Dive efforts concentrated on eddies and pools but those slower water areas are limited this year because of unusually high flows on the river.

“Everything’s still running high. It’s murky, it’s cold and it’s running pretty fast,” Curry said late Monday afternoon. “We actually have stopped the diving operations because we dove what we thought today was feasible or safe to dive.”

But people walking shorelines and search boats continued operations.

“We’ll continue to look, certainly for the family to have closure,” said Curry, who has yet to release the name of the missing man.

Seven people were onboard the raft when the man jumped into the water without a life preserver to retrieve an oar that had been dropped in the river.

Curry said that when it appeared the man was in distress, all but one person left on board at one point or another entered the water trying to help him.

“One actually got ahold of him at one point but they weren’t able to bring him back to the surface,” Curry said, adding that all on board had been drinking Sunday afternoon.

Curry said search conditions are highly difficult, and that if the man was carried downstream through the river’s deeper main channels, that will make a successful recovery more difficult.

“If he stayed in the main channel, he couild conceivably get a long ways downstream,” he said.

“From a recovery standpoint, the water is still very fast for this time of year and it’s still very murky for this time of year. Our divers have only about two feet of visibility,” said Curry, who participated in Monday’s dive operations, being an experienced diver himself.