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Luck helped find lost snowmobilers

ASHLEY DICKSON
Summit County Correspondent
Glenwood Springs, CO Colorado
Summit Daily/Mark Fox
ALL |

SUMMIT COUNTY ” As darkness began to fall early Tuesday evening, Craig Morris and Murry Melloni huddled around a small make-shift campfire after being lost in the remote wilderness outside Kremmling for nearly three days.

Armed only with the clothes on their back, a small snow shovel and a hand axe, the two men continued to brave the elements at 11,000 feet, anxiously awaiting the arrival of search and rescue teams.

The distant sounds of snowmobile engines kept their hopes for survival alive and, despite wind chills well below zero, they willed their fingers to keep moving so they could write text messages to family and friends.



Text messages received from the men were then forwarded to rescuers involved in a massive search on the east side of Elliot Ridge. No one knew Morris and Melloni were on the west side.

Rescue teams on the ground and in the air had been searching the area since 7:30 Tuesday morning with no results. As the day wore on, the weather worsened, and the hopes of finding survivors slowly began to dwindle.



Yet the search continued. At 3:45 p.m., a OH-58 National Guard helicopter involved in the search was forced to land due to maintenance problems and a Blackhawk helicopter was then dispatched from the base facility in Eagle to make repairs.

Increasing winds were quickly making visibility near impossible and, once repairs were made, the two helicopters took off for one final pass of the search area.

“As we crossed the ridge to head back to Eagle, my co-pilot spotted movement on the ridge line so we circled around,” said Mark Grayson, a chief warrant officer with the National Guard who was flying in the Blackhawk helicopter.

“It was the complete opposite side of the mountain range we had initially been looking on. It was a last-ditch effort and really pure luck.”

The sound of helicopters overhead was able to rouse Morris and Melloni, and pilots could see the faint outline of a man waving his arms beside a small campfire.

The men had made their camp right at treeline on a downward slope below the ridge. Dangerous terrain and blowing snow made landing anywhere close to the camp impossible, and National Guard pilots were forced to land in a clearing 200 meters to the east of the men.

As the Blackhawk helicopter descended, the OH-58 circled above using night vision goggles to maintain visual contact in the dark and snowy night.

Clayton Bronson, a National Guard mechanic on board to assist in the repair of the OH-58, had previous outdoor and snowshoe experience. He offered to make the trek on foot to bring the two survivors back.

“Those guys owe their lives to him; there was no way we could have gotten any closer,” Grayson said.

Bronson slowly made his way through the deep snow on snowshoes and arrived at the camp to find both men cold, but alive.

“When I got there both men were so relieved to see me. Murry came up to me right away and gave me the hand saw they had used that he said had belonged to John (McKibben),” said Bronson. “He told me John had passed away the day before, but that the saw had saved their lives and he wanted to make sure it got back to John’s family.”

According to Bronson, the two men were suffering from the beginning stages of hypothermia and were both shaken and disoriented.

“Craig told me he had injured some ribs and he basically had to crawl most of the way back to the helicopter,” said Bronson. “Both of them were having a lot of trouble breathing.”

As the men made their way back to the helicopter the weather quickly began to deteriorate around them. It was now completely dark and blowing snow was cutting visibility, making flying conditions even more difficult.

“If we had been up there another 30 minutes more, we would have all been stuck,” Bronson said.

Once they were safely in the helicopter, Bronson took apart an Army-issued sleeping bag and wrapped the two separate sections around the men to restore their body temperatures. Rescue crews assured the men that family and friends were all awaiting their return and that they were now out of harm’s way.

“We were their last chance of getting out of there,” said Bronson. “If we hadn’t have spotted them by chance, I don’t know if they would have ever been rescued.”

The two men were flown directly to the National Guard Airport in Eagle where an ambulance was waiting to take them to Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs.

“This was hands down the most difficult search and rescue I had ever been on. It was pretty scary flying to say the least,” said Tony Somogyi, a National Guard pilot who spent more than nine hours in the air searching for the men on Tuesday. “It’s amazing we were able to find them. Amazing.”

Ashley Dickson can be reached at (970) 668-4629, or at adickson@summitdaily.com.


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