Local group aids crash victims

By JESSE DUARTE
For the Register

A plane crash in a remote area. Battered survivors. Flaming wreckage. A heroic rescue. It sounds like an implausible Hollywood blockbuster.

But it was actually part of Ken Stanton’s recent vacation.

On July 5, Stanton — who lives in Angwin — joined up with a dozen friends from Napa and Sonoma counties and headed to Utah for a whitewater rafting trip along the Green River, in an area ominously named “Desolation Canyon.”

The first sign that the trip was going to be interesting was on Sunday, July 6, when the party witnessed a lightning storm. They also saw a fire on the riverbed that apparently had been sparked by lightning, but it seemed odd to them at the time that the lightning had struck on the riverbed rather than on top of the canyon walls.

The next day, after rain had put out the fire, Stanton and his friends reached the area of scorched earth the fire had left behind. Amid the burnt cottonwood and tamarisk they found a tree that had been split neatly in half, apparently by lightning.

But then they found something far more troubling: The charred remains of a small plane. However, they were puzzled not to find any signs of survivors or burned bodies.

By now the party had plenty of questions.

When they later encountered a second rafting party, accompanied by two bruised and battered men, they started to piece together what had happened.

The injured men had been the plane’s two occupants, brothers John and Duncan Bridewell of North Dakota. The two had suffered broken ribs and had lost several teeth, but they were clearly happy to be alive.

The Bridewells shared their story with Stanton: They were experienced pilots who had taken their Piper Cherokee on an airborne road trip from North Dakota to Arizona, then north to Alaska.

After leaving Arizona and refueling at Canyonlands Airport in Moab, Utah, they were headed for Casper, Wyoming, when they decided to take “the scenic route” — flying low along the twisting route of Green River through Desolation Canyon. That’s when a couple of things went wrong.

As they flew between the wide canyon walls, the air pressure shifted. Suddenly the pressure above them was higher than the pressure below. To make matters worse, it seemed that the Bridewells had underestimated the plane’s weight.

That meant it would take a lot of power to gain enough altitude to clear the canyon walls — power the little Piper Cherokee didn’t have.

Recognizing they were going to have to attempt a controlled crash landing, they aimed for an area close to the river and began their descent — only to find that trees and bushes had concealed huge boulders that littered their intended landing site. By then it was too late to try to find another site. They crashed to the ground, the boulders bringing them to an abrupt halt; the plane caught fire on impact. It was the afternoon of July 6.

According to press reports, the fire burned about six acres. It was the same fire Stanton and his friends had seen and assumed was caused by lightning. Fortunately, the flames had drawn the attention of the second rafting party, who investigated the crash site and found the Bridewells alive.

John had been able to escape the plane’s wreckage immediately after the crash, but Duncan was stuck inside the shattered plane. John braved the flames to pull Duncan out, and the two had stopped to rest on a large boulder. They were still there when the rafters found them, but the fire was spreading, and threatening to surround them.

The rafters pulled them to the river — and when the fire followed them, they loaded the Bridewells into the rafts and escaped to safety on the other side of the river.

As luck would have it, at least one member of the party was an EMT. He attended to the brothers and determined that although they were communicating and coherent, they needed medical attention immediately. But cell phones didn’t work in the remote Desolation Canyon, and none of the rafters had a satellite phone.

Neither did members of several other rafting parties that came upon the scene.

Enter Stanton and his friends.

They hadn’t exactly packed conservatively — they’d even brought along a volleyball net. And, in another stroke of luck for the Bridewells, one of Stanton’s buddies had brought along a satellite phone.

He was able to call for help, and helicopters soon arrived to transport the crash victims to a hospital.

Law enforcement officials later said the brothers wouldn’t have survived without the emergency medical care at the crash site, provided by the first rafting crew — and the hospitalization made possible by the satellite phone Stanton’s party had brought along.

By last weekend both Bridewells had been released from the hospital and were recovering at home.

“I’m just glad we were able to help,” said Stanton.ꆱ

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