“There are places here where no man in the history of the world has ever stepped,” says Russ Zullick, safely on the ground once again, back in Sitka.”I love to get back off the beaten trail and go deer and goat hunting in the Annahootz Mountains. But the average citizen needs to realize that the terrain is so rough in this part of Alaska that if someone were injured and lying down unconscious and unable to draw attention to himself, he’d never be found. This is a rain forest. People forget that there is a thick canopy down there. I can’t see through those trees.”
Here in southeast Alaska, nature challenges all who infringe upon her. The land is extremely rugged in places, and often impassable; nature imposes certain brutal realities upon all who venture forth.
For much of the year, near-freezing winds and tidal currents cold enough to incapacitate a person in seconds are there to greet all varieties of mariners, fishermen, campers, and pilots. Many people, while plying the savage beauty of Alaska’s wilderness, have come to know only too well the risks involved.
Here, life-and-death struggles occur with unsettling frequency. Those who ignore the canons of outdoor safety or who violate the
unforgiving laws of nature do so at their own peril. As a result, even in these supposedly modern times, hypothermia remains the leading cause of accidental death in the state of Alaska.
Through the years, more than a fair number of anecdotal life-and-death struggles have taken place in southeast Alaska; like the time, on what began as a pleasant outing on a sunny morning, Gearhart Hiller motored down the length of Wrangell Narrows and out into Sumner Straits in his small outboard-driven canoe. He did not notice the trail of seawater leaking in until too late. When ensuing waves completed the swamping, Hiller was left under darkening skies to drift through the chilling currents and cling, as best he could, to the side of the wave-washed canoe.
There was no reason at all for Richard and Sharon Sprague to be motoring along that particular section of the coastline area. As a practicing dentist from Petersburg, Richard often commuted by boat with his wife to provide dental services to those in need in several of the local Native American villages. Earlier that day, after he’d finished caring for his patients in the Tlingit fishing village of Kake, he and his wife had decided to take an alternate route back to Petersburg. Only providence, they will tell you, could have orchestrated such a coincidental encounter.
By the time they came upon Hiller, and pulled him aboard their sixteen-foot Boston Whaler boat, he had slipped so far into the late stages of hypothermia that he was not only unable to speak, he could barely move; his stiff, cold body mimicked the advance of rigor mortis.
Then there was the time, in that same area, when a man in a skiff found himself dead in the water and being carried out of Wrangell Narrows. Using his head, he managed to help his girlfriend to safety on a channel buoy before being swept away into the night by the fierce rushing tides there, never to be seen again.
There is the tale of the commercial fisherman from Sitka who got caught without a survival suit in a sinking skiff while trying to cross open water near Haines. The story one Coast Guardsman told me was that the fisherman clasped his arms around the nearest buoy with such resolve that, although nearly unconscious from the cold by the time his
rescuers finally reached him, they were hardly able to pry his fingers apart.
And there is the story of the teenage girl whose boat sank not far from Sitka. When her male companion drowned during the long swim through the icy waters to a nearby island, she was left to fend for herself. She survived without food or shelter or any way to build a fire. Ten days passed before disbelieving searchers discovered her—gaunt and emaciated, but nevertheless alive.
Though I was never able to substantiate it, I was told of a hunter who shot a deer and ended up spending several nights and the accompanying days stranded on the side of a cliff on a mountainside not far from Wrangell. By skinning the animal and using its pelt as an additional protective garment, the crafty hunter was able to endure forty-mile-per-hour winds and avoid the flesh-numbing inundations of pelting rain. And, I was told, he coolly conserved enough bullets so that when searchers finally did draw near enough, he was able to call attention to himself.
Some years ago, Petersburg’s own Nancy Zoic found herself on a sinking seine boat near Glacier Bay. Her heroic boyfriend insisted that she don the vessel’s only survival suit. As a result, she was the only one in the crew to make it to a nearby island alive. Then she spent ten days and nights huddling in the November cold before a U.S. Coast Guardsman named Mark Hackett, riding shotgun aboard an H-3, spied a pair of orange crab buoys “walking up the beach,” as he put it. Nancy Zoic had created something “bigger, brighter, and different,” he recalls, and, as a result, she managed to draw attention to herself and was rescued.
One notable story involved a thirty-one-year-old super-athlete named Nick Frangos. He was considered the iron man of health and vigor, a cardiovascular wonder, the U.S. Coast Guard’s athlete of the year in Alaska in 1989. Then one day, the dinghy he and fellow Coastie Norm Dornbirer were paddling flipped over near Juneau, a short distance offshore, and both men promptly drowned. Soon thereafter, the Coast Guard initiated a survival training course for all Coasties who work aboard boats plying Alaska’s waters.
Survival expert Dug Jenson is one of several instructors in the Sitka area who teach these classes. He commonly refers to the same flesh-numbing waters that struck down these two fit and popular young men as “Kryptonite.” Today, all Coast Guardsmen who come to Alaska aboard either a cutter or buoy tender are required to take the course. Completing it is a notable accomplishment, and carries with it certain bragging rights.
“It’s like serious boot camp,” says Jenson. “There’s anxiety there, as well there should be. It’s the hardest thing most of them say they have ever done in their lives.”
On the first day of his weeklong class, Jenson generally begins by asking one simple question. “Has anyone here ever lived in a rain forest on an island? No one ever raises their hand,” he says. “Yet they are all sitting on Baranof Island in the middle of the southeastern Alaska rain forest.”
If not prepared, airplane crash victims and ship castaways alike quickly find that the high-tech safety bubble in which they’ve always existed is suddenly gone. For some, it is too much. In a real emergency, those who panic usually die.
Jenson teaches that human beings are physically best suited for the balmy waters of the Caribbean. When caught in the Alaskan wilds, they need to know how to improvise and prioritize and govern their decisions using the “survival rules of three,” says Jenson. “A human being can live for three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food.”
The Coast Guard personnel he trains in advanced survival techniques are not coddled. Jenson is aware that, although these people have received a good deal of training regarding surviving in water, they have had virtually no training having to do with surviving in the mountains. Once they’ve grasped the fundamentals, they’re dropped off together by an H-60 helicopter out on Kruzof Island. Then they begin hiking up the seven-mile-long trail that winds its way up the backside of Mount Edgecumbe.
Eventually, Jenson leads the men away from the main trail and out into the stunted, weather-tortured trees on the backside of the mountain.
Near the top, he deliberately disorients them. Then he disappears into the brush, returning, in due time, to keep tabs on them from afar. Participants are left for several days to sleep in a shelter built with their own hands. In their semihypothermic state, they must scrounge for food and materials as best they can. Not until the third day are they allowed to build a fire. Trainees are taught that it is not necessary to have a fire to survive. “Is it nice? Yes,” teaches Jenson. “Is it required? No.” The Eskimo get along quite nicely without them.
During these outings, Jenson has seen grown men crack. As a backup, he carries along a handheld radio.
“Improvising is the key,” he says. “The folks that do come back don’t think like a one-bladed knife, but, rather, like one of those Swiss knives with all the many blades. You’ve got to get in there and tweak it and change things to your advantage.” People who do nothing are people in denial. If their behavior is left unchallenged, they will often stand back and watch themselves die.
Flexibility in one’s thinking is essential. “If you think brittle, you’ll break,” he says. “Wise men learn from their own mistakes. Wiser men yet learn from the mistakes of others.” A garbage bag, a handheld radio, and a week of learning and preparation in a survival training class can make all the difference.