Search & Rescue

Searchers continue looking for the body of one of two men who drowned near Tuluksak on New Year’s Day. The body of one man was recovered over the weekend and has not been identified. The search for the missing men has become a training ground for a new generation of search and rescue volunteers.

Kyle Peter lives in Tuluksak. He was one of the first people to rush to the river after the accident, just after 7:30 p.m on Jan. 1. Two men, Peter Sallaffie and Joseph Hale, took the wrong trail out of town and drove their snowmachines into an unmarked open hole in the Kuskokwim River ice. Inside the village, Peter answered a call from a friend who told him the news. Together, they raced to the open hole.

“It was late. It was dark. We couldn’t see anything. So we gathered the group and said, ‘We couldn’t do anything today. We’ll have to come back tomorrow,” Peter said.

Peter, along with about 10 others from Tuluksak, have come back every day since, looking for the missing men. The group is young. Peter is 26 years old, and the others are around the same age. Tuluksak’s older, more experienced searchers are either hunkering down because of the pandemic or are related to the missing men. Yup’ik tradition says that relatives should not participate in organized search efforts for their kin.

For some of the young Tuluksak volunteers, this is their first time looking for a missing body. Peter has done it a few times before, but never quite like this.

“That was the first time I’ve done it with the snowmachine and rope,” he said.

Older, more experienced searchers from Bethel and Akiachak taught the young Tuluksak crew how to use a snowmachine to slowly pull a motorless boat across the open water with drag hooks hanging off it. The hooks scrape along the bottom of the river, looking to snag clothing or other gear.

“We just watched the Bethel crew for about an hour,” Peter said, “and then we started to understand what they were doing, and we started taking initiative.”

On Saturday, the day after the accident, the searchers pulled the snowmachines of the two missing men from the hole in the ice but didn’t find a body. They looked for the lost ones all day on Jan. 3, and in the final minutes of daylight, Peter and members of the young Tuluksak crew decided to drag the river one last time.

“Two of my buddies snagged onto something, and we stopped the boat, and then they started pulling it up and recovered one of the two lost [ones],” Peter said.

They boated to the water’s edge and pulled the body onto the river ice.

“Then we gathered up as a group, gathered in a circle,” Peter said. “Then we prayed for the recovered, and prayed for the family, and prayed for our group.”

Bethel volunteers carried the body back to Bethel to be flown to Anchorage for autopsy.

Searchers continue looking for the body of the other missing man, passing along recovery skills from one generation to another. The effort is happening during one of the coldest weeks along the Kuskokwim River this winter, with wind chills reaching minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

The body of one of the two Chignik Lake men killed in a tragic boating accident the day after Christmas has been recovered by divers.

Alaska State Troopers report that the body of Nick Garner, 39, was found last Wednesday, four days after a skiff laden with a snowmachine in its bow hit a large wave and overturned with three men aboard.

A four-person volunteer search team with Alaska Dive, Search and Rescue and Recovery flew in from Anchorage.

Troopers spokesman Austin McDaniel said Monday that divers deployed side-scan sonar to comb the depths of the lake. The sonar device sends bursts of sound into the water, which then bounce off of the ground and other objects. That then reflects back to the sonar unit on the boat, which produces an image.

“They were able to locate his body using this sonar technology, and recover it and get it turned over to his family members there in Chignik Lake,” he explained.

Fred Shangin, 42, also perished from exposure after more than a half-hour lying on top of the capsized boat. Only 24-year-old Taylor Lind managed to get off the stricken boat and survive. A Coast Guard helicopter rescued four other people on the scene on the north side of Chignik Lake.

Chignik Lake is a community of less than 90 people located south of Dillingham on the Alaska Peninsula.

The first body of the pair of snowmachiners lost in the Kuskokwim River on Jan. 1 has been recovered, although the body has not been identified.

Two men, Peter Sallaffie and Joseph Hale, drove into an unmarked open hole in the ice near Tuluksak. The loss marks the first deaths to open water along the Kuskokwim River this winter.

Both men lived in Bethel and had snowmachined to Tuluksak to visit a relative, according to Bethel Search and Rescue President Mike Riley. After leaving Tuluksak, they took the wrong trail — the hovercraft trail instead of the snowmachine trail — and drove into open water.

“They picked up the wrong trail at the mouth of Tuluksak river,” said Mark Leary, with Bethel Search and Rescue. “And you know, it’s not hard to do the first time traveling an area, especially in the dark. They picked up the wrong trail, and they headed into an area of unmarked open water, and they were lost.”

Members of Tuluksak’s COVID-19 team witnessed the accident, but by the time they reached the open water, neither Sallaffie nor Hale could be seen.

The search was initially hampered by the lack of experienced hands. Leary said that all of the experienced search and rescue personnel were hunkered down because of COVID-19, or too closely related to the missing men to participate in the search.

The crew that came from Tuluksak to help were young people. During the day, Leary said that they watched and helped as volunteers used a boat to try to find the missing bodies.

“All we had available at the time was one beat-up, old boat, maybe a 16-footer, no motor,” Leary said. “And the line is run from the boat to a snowmachine. And the snowmachine goes backwards and forward, moving the boat up and down the open hole, while a pair of searchers run hooks in the water.”

The snowmachines were easy to find. Both were pulled from the water the day after the accident, on Jan. 2. During the long weekend effort, Leary said that the crew from Tuluksak watched, learned and helped.

“[Sunday] night, just before dark, those young guys recovered the first lost one,” Leary said. “They did it and I’m very proud of them. I know they know now that they can do it.”

The search continues for the second body, and Leary said that the crew could use help.

As of this weekend, the large open hole near Tuluksak has been marked with blue reflective tape. Earlier this season, Bethel volunteers marked all known open water upriver from Bethel to below Akiak.

Leary and Riley encourage all communities to mark open water near their villages.

One man died and another is missing after a boat capsized in Chignik Lake Saturday afternoon, according to a dispatch from Alaska State Troopers.

The Coast Guard recovered the body of 42-year-old Fred Shangin of Chignik Lake Saturday evening. He died from cold water exposure, troopers said.

Nicholas Garner, 39, also of Chignik Lake, is still missing. Taylor Lind, 24, was also in the boat and was rescued.

According to troopers, the three men had loaded a snowmachine on the bow of a skiff.

“Three individuals were transporting it to the north side of Chignik Lake when they hit a wave and the boat capsized,” said Austin McDaniel, a public information officer with the state troopers. “The skiff floated for around half an hour until they were able to get to the edge of the ice on the lake.”

Lind was able to save himself.

The troopers report that Shangin could not get off the top of the capsized skiff and succumbed to the cold while it was drifting. Garner hung onto the side of the boat but eventually went underwater and did not reappear. Troopers say the men were not wearing life vests.

Two people, 24-year-old Kevin O’Domin and 21-year-old Denise Bereskin, were on shore but could not get to the boat to help with the rescue, according to troopers. A second boat, driven by Jamie O’Domin and a 16-year-old minor, arrived to help, but troopers say they could not reach the capsized skiff because of ice.

Troopers were called to the area around 3 p.m. Saturday, and the Coast Guard arrived around 6:30 p.m.

The Coast Guard transported Lind and those trying to help with the rescue to Chignik Bay. All are from Chignik Lake.

Troopers say local residents have been unable to search for Garner due to a winter storm, but that search efforts will resume once the storm clears.

Search and rescue teams have descended on Haines, a small Southeast town of just over 2,500 people that was devastated by floods and landslides last week. But from a group of volunteers working to salvage a woman’s home to a hotel reopening to offer a safe place to stay, the people of Haines are showing they can lean on each other.

Joe Aultman-Moore was sitting in his cabin in Haines last Wednesday when a large landslide swept through several neighboring houses. Aultman-Moore spoke with KHNS about what he saw during his rescue from the slide area.

LISTEN HERE:

Full transcript, edited for clarity:

Joe Aultman-Moore: I was in the middle of eating a late breakfast or I guess it would have been lunch at that point, and yeah, and I heard it (the landslide) coming through.

KHNS: What did it sound like?

JA: I think it was a fisherman who described it as like a “whoosh.” That’s what it was. I thought it was a big gust of wind. But it just went on for too long and it was weird. You could almost feel it, it was like a kind of a bass vibration almost. So I went out and I looked around, I didn’t see anything at that point. There was a secondary smaller slide and I saw trees going down. And that’s when I called 911. Because I was like, ‘oh, okay, like, there are people over there. This is big.’

So called 911. They said evacuate immediately. So I got all my gear on. I didn’t even didn’t grab anything at that point. I ran up to the road, and there was just a wall of broken trees 30 or 40 feet high. Several cars were there, several neighbors and they were looking at it saying like, ‘Yeah, we got the call to evacuate, we can’t evacuate, like clearly this is it’s impossible to get past this.’ And so I called 911 again, ‘We can’t evacuate like it’s, it’s clearly cut off.’ And then they were like, ‘Oh, we’ll call you back.’ I’m like, ‘Okay!’ So I had a very, very tense 15 or 20 minutes.

The Haines dispatcher call back and she said, ‘Get a flare go down to the beach, we’re gonna have boats come and evacuate people off Beach Road. So I was like, ‘I don’t have a flare.’ So I grab my flashlight and grabbed a little backpack. And when you hear that tone in their voice, when they’re saying ‘get out now,’ every single second, you’re spending, wondering if you should grab, you know, this or that book or your laptop or whatever, every moment you’ve been thinking about that is a moment, that could be the difference between life and death.

Luckily, I have easy beach access. So just ran right down there. There were several fishing boats coming around the corner at that point. And we have my flashlight and they came right over. And then we had to go almost all the way over to the other side of the cove to get around the debris pile to get into the harbor.

KHNS: What could you see in the in the debris in the water?

JA: Just trees, shattered trees and floating bits of insulation board. At that point, that was the first time any of us really were seeing the extent of the slide and realizing that if anybody was in the path of that thing, like the mountain fell on them. It’s just total devastation. Anything in the path of that slide was total devastation
There were no trees left. There is no roadm no, nothing.

KHNS: I guess you made it to the harbor, is that where they took you?

JA: Yeah, so came into the harbor and the boats went right back out. It’s just, I walked to the Mountain Market cuz, the library was closed, the stuff was good. I just like walked down the mountain market. And just like sat down. And of course, at that point, it was so recent. Nobody nobody the Mountain Market knew really yet so that was that was some weird whiplash.

KHNS: After all this happening to you like how, how are you feeling? Are you feeling sad about what happened or distressed or grateful for you being rescued?

JA: It’s funny, because I think that least from what I can tell the other people who were also the people who were immediately taken off that beach, especially like the day afterward, we were all just ecstatic to be alive and in town. And so it was strange having this, you know, this huge destructive tragedy happen and we’re, you know, we want to throw a party. But there’s lots of complex emotions and especially realizing, realizing the extent of the tragedy that happened over there.