Search & Rescue

One Sitka man has died and another sustained injuries after being thrown from their skiff while subsistence fishing for herring eggs on April 9.

Good Samaritans played a critical role in the rescue, which took place less than a quarter mile from shore.

41-year old Theodosius Merculief — known to family and friends as “Dosy” — was pronounced dead at the Mt. Edgecumber Medical Center shortly after he and his companion, 43-year old James Jensen, were pulled from the water near the Starrigavan boat ramp.

Tom Climo, who works in Sitka’s harbor department, and was traveling with friends to a cabin for the weekend. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, and they had run about a quarter-mile from the Starrigavan ramp when one of the women in his party, Camila Gomez Duclos, spotted the empty skiff, which was turning tight circles at high power.

Climo at first thought she was talking about an actual whale circling, making a bubble net, which is a common sight in Sitka Sound this time of year.

“Actually she had said, ‘Look! There’s a whaler doing circles.” Climo said. “Like brodies. With no one in it. We went over to it and realized someone’s got to be in the water somewhere. And we’re looking around, and Emmett looked way out — maybe a hundred yards — and all of the sudden there’s this arm coming out of the water and it’s waving, and we jetted over there.”

Emmitt Andersen spotted the victims. The man waving his arm was James “Jimmi” Jensen, who was holding onto Merculief. Climo says that Merculief was already unresponsive, and that he was wearing a float coat and hip waders. Climo held Merculief’s head above water while Jensen was brought aboard. Then the boat’s skipper, Terry Perensovich, maneuvered to retrieve Merculief.

“Terry’s got a drop bow, so he put the drop bow down, but we had to slice his hip waders, because there was so much water in them, they were really heavy,” said Climo. “And we brought him around to the front of the boat, and were able to get him up on the deck.”

Climo and Perensovich’s brother, Gary Perensovich, along with Andersen, performed CPR on Merculief, for the 8-minute boat ride back to the Starrigavan boat launch. Camila Gomez Duclos tended to Jensen, assisting him into dry clothes. Another member of the party, Nicole Duclos, had summoned help, and the boat was met first by Sitka police officers, who assisted with CPR until the arrival of EMS personnel.

After the victims were transported, Climo says his party resumed their camping plans. On the way out, they saw that the Boston Whaler skiff had apparently run out of gas, and they were going to tow it back, but an Alaska State Trooper vessel instead arrived to retrieve it.

In an email to KCAW, troopers said they are investigating the possible cause of the mishap.

Jensen and Merculief were believed to have been harvesting herring eggs on branches — a traditional subsistence food — at the time of the accident. Climo says that there were signs in the skiff of egg harvest, but no branches.

Dosy Merculief leaves behind his partner, Natalie, and three children ages 13, 5, and 16 months. A GoFundMe campaign was started on Saturday for the family. It has raised just about $27,000 so far.

The Alaska Air National Guard rescued the pilot of a crashed Cessna airplane near Lime Village on April 7.

Alaska Rescue Coordination Center superintendent Sgt. Evan Budd said that the pilot called the Stoney River Lodge, and someone at the lodge relayed the Cessna’s position to the center. The center dispatched a HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter and a HC-130J Combat King II airplane, with pararescue teams on each aircraft. The plane refueled the helicopter in the air, and the chopper landed near the crash site.

The pararescue team brought the pilot out, and flew the pilot to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. Budd emphasized that the pilot had a reliable means of communication, which was critical to getting a rescue team there quickly.

On Saturday, personnel from the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center, National Park Service and Alaska State Troopers received word of a group of five people who were stranded with their airplanes on the Ruth Glacier in the Alaska Range.

Maureen Gualtieri, public information officer for Denali National Park, says the five had already been on the glacier overnight when they called for help.

“They had, from my understanding, gone in for a day trip — flightseeing — in the [Alaska] Range on Friday, and weather came in quickly,” Gualtieri said. “They landed in the Ruth Gorge but were unable to safely take off due to weather.”

Gualtieri says the group was able to communicate via satellite phone to receive weather updates, but conditions didn’t improve on Saturday. With limited survival supplies, they called for help.

But the same weather that kept the stranded group on the glacier kept rescuers off it. Fortunately, the Sheldon Chalet was just a few miles away and keeps professional guides on staff. Gualtieri says they were able to ski out to the stranded aviators.

“They didn’t need to come too far, but they brought all the necessary skis, harnesses, ropes to guide these five individuals back to safety — back to food, warmth and water,” she said.

Robert Sheldon, whose family operates the chalet, says they were in contact with the stranded group before the official call for help went out. He says there were potential windows in the weather to allow the planes to take off and leave the Alaska Range, but none of them came to be.

The Sheldon Chalet’s guides packed two sleds with extra skis and gear and made their way to the planes over the course of about three hours. The group made it to safety by about 10:00 pm on Saturday. The stranded party was put up in the original Sheldon Mountain House, just behind the luxury chalet, until they were flown out on Monday.

Robert Sheldon says snow had already gathered nearly up to the wings of the three small planes by the end of the weekend, and that local aviation experts were being consulted on how to safely retrieve them once weather allowed.

Disclosure: Sheldon Chalet, which provided assistance to the stranded aviators, is a sponsor of KTNA’s “The Blue Tarp.”

A skier was rescued unharmed after getting buried by an avalanche in the crater of Mount Edgecumbe on March 28.

The man triggered the slide during his descent, according to a report to the Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center. Two other skiers in his group used avalanche transceivers to locate him. They saw his boot sticking out of the snow, dug him out and cleared his airway. The man was buried between five and eight minutes but sustained no injuries. All six members of the group exited the mountain safely.

Sitka Mountain Rescue technical team leader Eric Matthes said his team didn’t respond to the incident. But the group called in to report the avalanche and to let the someone know that they’d left a ski and two poles behind.

“Their primary reason for getting in touch with us is that if somebody reported finding that gear in avalanche debris, that we would not be unnecessarily called out,” Matthes said.

The group didn’t want to be identified, but he said they were “pretty shaken up.” If they’d had to wait for the local search and rescue team to arrive on scene, the man probably would’ve died.

“These people had training and equipment, and they still had a pretty serious incident that might’ve gotten a lot worse,” he said.

Matthes said he hopes the incident can serve as a cautionary tale. There’s high avalanche danger in the mountains around Sitka right now, even in places people may not expect — like Blue Lake Road, Green Lake Road and some of the ravines near Herring Cove Trail. Not everyone who ventures into the mountains is adequately prepared, he said.

“A snow pack looks like just a pile of snow, but it’s actually made up of a bunch of different layers. And those layers are affected by temperature, by moisture content, by wind and a number of other factors,” Matthes said. “And so if you, if you don’t have the correct training and experience, it’s basically impossible to assess that stability accurately.”

The report said the group could’ve avoided the incident with better communication and more time spent assessing the conditions.

Local information about snow and avalanche conditions can be found in the Sitka Snow Report Facebook group. Additional avalanche resources or training opportunities can be found at alaskaavalanche.org.

Avalanches blocked a highway on the Kenai Peninsula and killed a skier near Matanuska Glacier within the last week. There were also several avalanches reported around Juneau, including a very close call just outside the boundaries of the Eaglecrest Ski Area.

But it still may be risky with high potential for human-triggered avalanches over the next few weeks, even inside the ski area.

Skier Devon Calvin said he watched another skier trigger an avalanche on Mt. Ben Stewart on Douglas Island last Sunday. He recounted his experience on the Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center website and included a video that was also posted to YouTube.

Calvin skied down that same path earlier on that sunny day. An hour later, he was watching three other skiers come down when one triggered an avalanche that was estimated at 150 feet wide. It ran for at least 500 feet.

Calvin watched the third skier appeared to hold his own and not get carried down the slope. But in what is probably an understatement, Calvin ended his report by writing: “I’m a little rattled.”

The Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center said they saw evidence of at least four different avalanches off Mt. Ben Stewart on Sunday morning.

SEADOGS, or Southeast Alaska Dogs Organized for Ground Search, said they planned on doing training exercises at Eaglecrest Ski Area on Sunday. But because of what happened, they paused their training and stood by in case they had to quickly get to an avalanche scene and do a real rescue.

Tom Mattice, CBJ’s urban avalanche forecaster and emergency programs manager, said there was “considerable” avalanche danger on that day and it had been that way for several days.

“And people get kind of complacent, and then the sun comes out and it’s, ‘Today’s my day. I’m going to go up there!’ said Mattice. “Considerable danger is not low danger, and it’s not no danger. It just means that natural avalanches are less likely.”

Human-triggered avalanches are still very likely, and Mattice said most fatalities actually occur at the ‘considerable’ danger level.

In other reports posted to the Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center website the day before on Saturday, one person reported a fellow skier got caught in a small slide at nearby Fish Creek Knob. Another reported turning around and going back after digging a snow pit and finding an unstable snowpack in the same area.

Dave Scanlan, Eaglecrest Ski Area general manager, said their ski patrol does avalanche mitigation every morning before they open to the public, ranging from doing ski cuts to release thin snow layers to dropping explosive charges. But that is only within the ski area.

Scanlan said they can’t control what anyone does outside their boundaries.

“A lot of the backcountry ski enthusiasts will come up to the parking lot and they’ll leave the parking lot and hike up towards Mt. Ben Stewart or Mt. Troy, both on neighboring state lands,” Scanlan said.

Scanlan also worries about people coming up when the ski area is closed and the ski patrol hasn’t had a chance to go out after a big snowfall.

“It’s easy to get complacent and not realize the hazards that exist just within the average ski area boundaries,” Scanlan said. “So, when people are hiking up the slopes on our closed days, the risk for avalanches is still very much present.”

Last weekend, Mattice said avalanche control measures on Gastineau Peak brought down enough to cover Thane Road with snow fifteen feet deep and hundred feet wide.

There were also small slides at the bottom of the Behrends Avenue avalanche path, but no activity higher up on Mt. Juneau.

“This is the warmest period we’ve had in quite some time with the temperatures as well as having more than an inch of rain each day or right at an inch of rain each day,” Mattice said. “So, we’re seeing a lot of loading during a warm period with significant wind and we’re back to high danger.”

The urban avalanche danger was lowered back down to “considerable” level on Thursday. But Mattice said the snow layer featuring the deep persistent slab from last month likely still exists throughout the region.

Editor’s note: The headline for this story has been updated.

The Alaska State Legislature and the Coast Guard have recognized the Yakutat Fire Department for a search and rescue effort last August. The team of firefighters and volunteers responded after a man fell into the water in the middle of the night during a storm.

The nearest Coast Guard station is over 200 nautical miles from Yakutat, and the town has no official search and rescue team. It’s often up to local volunteers to respond in an emergency, especially when weather conditions are bad and time is of the essence.

“We’ll do whatever you got. If we got somebody in trouble in the water, fire or wherever however, we’ll do what we can and make the best out of it,” Fire Chief Casey Mapes said. “We’re short chronically always on the proper type of gear that we need, but we improvise always and we get it done.”

Mapes led the effort last August to rescue a crewmember on the fishing vessel Provider, Franklin Fox, who’d fallen off of a ladder into Monti Bay and disappeared. Enduring gale force winds and heavy rain, volunteers searched the water on skiffs and scoured the beaches with flashlights, calling Fox’s name.

The bad weather caused the Provider to crash against the dock where Mapes stood waiting for a volunteer diver to resurface. He said all he could think about were the responders who were putting their lives at risk, and the man they were searching for.

“That guy out there needs you. Ain’t nobody else on this whole planet that can help him but you. So you gotta do what you gotta do,” Mapes said.

By the time the diver, Mark Sappington, pulled Fox’s body to the surface, more than an hour and a half had passed since he’d fallen in. Mapes and two others scaled the slippery ladder and pulled Fox onto the nearby vessel. They administered CPR before transporting him to the local clinic, where he was pronounced dead.

Mapes said he thinks they received recognition because they responded quickly with a large group of volunteers despite the dangerous conditions. If they’d waited for the Coast Guard, they may not have found the body.

“It was above and beyond. We didn’t have to do that. Probably shouldn’t have done that, if you want to get your rule book out. In my mind, under circumstances like that, sometimes you need to bend the rules a little bit to try to do what’s the best thing,” he said.

This isn’t Mapes’ first dangerous search and rescue. He’s been with the fire department for 36 years, and he can think of many times when he and others have responded, even when they don’t know if they’ll make it back alive.

“I just have always had that creed about me that I don’t much care when it’s time, I’m gonna go and if I get to come back, I get to come back. But I’ll sleep good at night knowing that I went. No matter what,” he said.

Mapes says he’s grateful that they were able to bring some closure to Fox’s family and crewmates, and that all of the volunteers came back safely. He’s also thankful for the recognition, and hopes it will inspire more volunteers to respond in the future when the need arises.