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Teens found after two nights
Lost skier, snowboarder emerge from
mountains
Saturday
March 19, 2005
By CHERY SABOL
The Daily
Inter Lake
Two sets of parents held
their sons close Friday afternoon, tears and laughter and questions
jumbling in ecstasy after Jack Landers of Fargo, N.D., and a Charlie
Gruys of Maple Lake, Minn., were rescued from the Jewel Basin east of
Kalispell.
A grateful father wanted to know what an intensive 48-hour backcountry
search for two lost teenagers is going to cost him.
"The minute I saw your face when we told you they were found, that paid
us," responded Sheriff Jim Dupont.
The 19-year-old students from Montana State University in Bozeman had
come to Whitefish with four other friends for spring break.They went to
the Jewel Basin to try out the snow on Wednesday afternoon. Landers was
giving his snowboard a workout; Gruys was on skis, as he's been since he
was 2, his mother said.
The two friends decided to take another run as their other friends moved
on. They should have called it a day. The next run they took left them
disoriented and a dire change of circumstances began.
They were almost immediately lost.
"We thought we cold ski to the parking lot," Landers said. Instead, they
had to hike. There were tracks they followed, thinking they were made by
their friends. Before long, Gruys and Landers were at a lake. There was
no parking lot.
They had a cell phone and called their friends, who reported them lost.
The teens were traveling light, with almost no gear.
"That weather changed really quick," Gruys said.
For months, there has been no snow in the Flathead. Once Gruys and
Landers were lost in unfamiliar woods, the skies released their load of
precipitation. Still, the friends didn't panic.
They called 911. A recording of the call captures how calm they were.
"Hi, this is Charlie again," Gruys says on the recording, sounding like
he might be ordering a pizza. "The sun's coming out," he told the 91
dispatcher.
So was a team of rescuers that would eventually number about 80 over the
course of two days, according to Dupont. First, Nordic Ski Patrol Rescue
began. The trouble was, they didn't know where the men had gone, and
Gruys and Landers didn't know how to describe their location There was
snow. Trees. Maybe the sound of snowmobiles, but they weren't sure about
that. And descending darkness.
Sheriff's deputy Tom Snyder who coordinates search and rescue for the
county mobilized the willing and hardy volunteers.
Gruys and Landers had skied over the ridge and traversed the valley to
the east of where they began.
"That night, we had no shelter,," Landers said. "I decided we had to
keep moving." Later, at a lake, probably Black Lake, they made a snow
shelter and slept for an hour or two, he said. They called 911 again.
At about 5:30 a.m., Snyder had suspended the search for the safety of
rescuers. The weather was getting worse. There was no visibility and so,
no point in endangering rescuers. Tired searchers came down from the
Jewel and tried to do what the two Midwestern teens couldn't do - rest.
On Thursday morning, the teens did something unexpected. They went back
up the ridge, traveling through snow that was at times waist-deep. Te
reason?
"We went back up because I knew I couldn't' get cell-phone service,"
Gruys said.
They were soaked, tired and cold, going on the limited energy of a
sandwich they shared the day before. They had a little water.
"We ate some snow," Lander said.
In his office, Dupont was chastising himself for not telling them that
eating snow would further chill them. But the cell connection between
the teens and their rescuers had gone as cold as Gruys' feet and there
were a lot of things Dupont and others wanted to say, but couldn't.
The men knew that they should stay where they were, they said. But the
ridge was windy and snowy and "it was really cold up there," Landers
said. They stayed still for about two hours and started moving again.
"I knew I was going to be fine as long as we stayed moving," he said.
They moved west. The trees were thick. There were rivers, Landers said.
While searchers intensified their efforts, the two teen worried about
their families worrying about them. They wished their lighter worked.
They kept moving. It was soon dark again.
As they huddled, grounded, beneath a bush for warmth, activity was
happening in the sky. Their families were making arrangements to fly to
Montana. And a Blackhawk helicopter, equipped with night vision and
infrared imaging, was flying above, trying to find evidence of warmth
and life below in wilderness during the one brief clearing in the
weather.
The teens heard in the darkness.
"It was reassuring" to know someone was still looking, Landers said.
Their confidence on the first day that they'd be quickly found was
shaken.
"We had no idea where we were," he said.
Snyder hoped that the helicopter crew could find them and the ground
corps cold scoop them up. At about 11 p.m., the Blackhawk began its
search. The cloud ceiling was right about where the pilot was flying.
"Don't call it," Snyder urged under his breath. The pilot stuck with it,
finding tracks that could be searchers' tracks or the missing men's
tracks. Snyder agonized while the helicopter refueled and continued its
search. Finally, just before 3 a.m., the pilot said he had to return to
Helena.
"I don't want to call the parents," Snyder said wearily. At about 34
hours into the search, he started working on plans for searching at
daybreak. Dupont sent him home at about 8 a.m.
Another brief break came in the weather Friday afternoon as searchers
put more miles on their snowmobiles, skis, and snowshoes. Dupont asked
for a search plane from Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane. When the
response wasn't fast enough, he decided not to squander about 15 minutes
of anticipated clear sky and asked Dave Hoerner of Red Eagle Aviation if
he would fly, instead. Hoerner agreed, taking sheriff's deputy Sgt. Jim
Browder up as spotter.
In Noisy Creek Drainage, on a remote road, two men waved at the plane.
They were Gruys and Landers. Soaked an on their feet, they were alive.
Hoerner called in their location and within 20 minutes, Scott Rhodes of
Flathead Search and Rescue arrived.
"Could you help up? We're kind of lost," they told Rhodes.
"We've been looking for you," he said. "They were pretty astonished to
find out how many people were looking for them."
Uninjured, the teens got a ride to the sheriff's office, where their
families were waiting for them. Dupont was able to tell the families as
they arrived in the Flathead that their sons had just been found.
"I always had a good feeling about it. They were keeping their cool.
They're in good physical condition," Dupont said.
It was in the justice center parking lot that the Gruyses and Landerses
reunited.
"Hi, Mom," Jack Landers told his mother, Debbie. "I didn't expect you to
be here."
"He looks great. He's acting like our normal Jack," she said. Jack
Landers' father, Doug, and 17-year-old sister, Libby, agreed.
"He looks tire," Kathy Gruys said of her son, Charlie.
"He looks too good to be true," Bob Gruys said.
Their gratitude overwhelmed rescuers, deputies, dispatchers, and others
who witnessed the reunion. Teenage boys moved to tears had only to watch
the faces of the adults around them ot know they weren't alone in their
emotion.
Kathy Gruys couldn't say enough about the kindness and accessibility of
the people who rescued her son for her.
Landers family friend, Gary Thrasher agreed. He held up his cell phone
to snap a picture of Snyder "so everybody in Fargo knows how you look."
In a day or two, all those people in Maple Lake and Fargo who worried
about two teenage boys lost in the Montana wilderness will be able to
see for themselves how they look when the families return home. And the
Flathead Valley will have anther glimpse at what an exhausted envoy of
rescuers is willing to do for complete strangers in trouble.
Reporter Chery Sabol may be reached at
406-758-4441 or by email at
csabol@dailyinterlake.com.
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