When The Odds Are Low
I can only assume we were meant to be on that hillside on that day at that time
story and photos by J.R. Larsen
My hunting buddy Steve and I scrambled through a scree field at 10,000 feet of elevation. Rocks covered the hard subalpine ground and jack pines dominated the vegetation, with scattered sagebrush. We could see the paths of recent landslides carving down the steep hillsides. Plunging drainages reached narrow, unforgiving river bottoms below. Pausing in our struggles to heave a few breaths of early-fall air, we heard an airplane engine puttering along in the sky. The tone got higher for a second or two then abruptly cut into silence. Steve heard a faint bang. A minute or two later we looked back and saw black smoke billowing up from the trees. Tragedy had struck, and against all odds, we were the ones to witness it.
I’m an avid elk hunter. Working for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation as a regional director out of my home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, it’s hard not to love elk. But in 2024, I was certain I’d be hunting a different ungulate: a Shiras moose. Draw odds say I would have drawn the tag in 2023 with a point to spare if I’d put in, but I held off because I was sure my friend Brandon would finally draw a bighorn sheep tag that same year, and I wanted to be free to help him. My hunch was right, and I ended up accompanying him on his punishing, but successful hunt. This year I expected to be taking him along on a moose hunt.
But on May 9, when I held my breath and clicked on the draw results, I stared at the word “unsuccessful.” There were two moose tags for three people at my point level and I was the odd one out. My stomach dropped. I stared at the word, trying to adjust to the disappointment. Then I scrolled down to my other results. When I saw “successful” next to my sheep application, my eyes bugged out. I succeeded in the random draw with less than a 1% chance!
I spent all spring and summer after I drew my tag putting miles on. The previous year’s hunt with Brandon consisted of hiking in over nine miles and climbing 3,500 feet of elevation the day before the season opened, seven miles to the sheep the next day and another nine miles out with the sheep meat and skull. I wanted to be better prepared this year.
When the season arrived, Brandon, my long-time friend Steve and I parked at the trailhead to cover the same nine miles we had the year before. It was late summer turning into early fall, with cool mornings climbing into the 80s in the daytime.
Over four days, we watched other hunters take a ram from the basin we were glassing and got cliffed out by rock spires and razorback ridges while trying to get close to another ram. After 40-mph wind clawed at our tent all night for the 4th night in a row, we called an end to the trip a day early. As we packed out, I kept stopping to look around. Steve asked if I was tired or hurt, but I just wanted to take it all in.
While I was sad my first week of hunting didn’t end with a ram, I still had no doubt I would get my sheep. From then on, I’d be relegated to weekend hunts.
For our next hunt, Steve and I planned to try a new spot we’d found on the map. By midday the first day, we’d bumped into a grizzly bear at less than 100 yards and ran into four groups of horseback hunters approaching the basin we wanted to investigate. After more than an hour of trailside thinking, I decided to pull the plug on this spot and drive to another trailhead where we could avoid some of the people and approach the same basin from the north.
Well before sunup the next day, Steve and I were roaring up a two-track in Brandon’s side-by-side. Once on foot, we spent most of the morning on giant rolling grass hillsides interspersed with large boulder and scree fields. As we neared the end of the hill we were trying to circumvent, the terrain dropped off steep and nasty. My boots slid while navigating the wide scree fields and I fell more than once. Large blisters rubbed on my feet and my calf muscles ached from side-hilling on steep angles.
Throughout the morning, we heard airplanes passing by overhead and didn’t think much of them. Even though we were deep in remote country, we were still under a flight path to a nearby regional airport.
At about 10:45 a.m. everything changed. We’d been side-hilling for four hours, and just as we were about to round the bend on the face of the mountain, we heard another aircraft. At first, I didn’t bother to raise my head. Then the sound of a whining engine rang through the air and fell into silence. “Did you hear that?” Steve asked.
The plane was on the ground and there was nothing left but the frame to indicate it had been an airplane—no wings, no seats, no windows, no fiberglass.
“Yeah, it sounded like an engine throttling up and then it just quit,” I answered. Curious, Steve and I scanned the sky. I couldn’t see anything, so I assumed the pilot had powered up to clear the mountain and once over, the engine noise had passed out of earshot.
We scanned the area for a minute or so and didn’t see anything unusual, so we started hiking again. Then we looked back and saw smoke rising from a grove of trees high in the basin below a series of cliffs.
“Ah sh--, that was a plane crash,” Steve said, looking at me with wide eyes.
Knowing he had to be right, I turned and hurried in the direction of the smoke. Steve followed, after sending emergency satellite messages via his Garmin inReach. Three-quarters of a mile of landslides, large benches, loose ground, large holes and downed trees impeded our progress.
After 20 minutes, we came over a dip in the terrain and saw the wreckage of the plane smoldering in the trees. The plane was on the ground and there was nothing left but the frame to indicate it had been an airplane—no wings, no seats, no windows, no fiberglass. The only thing that wasn’t burned was a wheel that had broken off and rolled away before the fire started. We rushed around, scanning the ground until we found the pilot laying in the wreckage, badly injured but able to breathe and talk to us. He gasped that he had a passenger but was afraid she hadn’t survived. We scanned the area without turning up anyone else and switched our attention back to the pilot.
Steve is a helicopter pilot for the Wyoming Army National Guard, and he knows how to respond in situations like this. He sent our coordinates as close as possible to the crash site for the rescue helicopter to land. I was an athletic trainer in a prior career, so I know what to do with severe injuries. I would like to think that of the hunters in the woods in that area, we were two of the most capable and prepared. Steve managed to get in phone contact with the remote management crew in charge of coordinating fire and rescue crews. I was talking to the pilot and assessing his injuries.
“Where are you hurt?” I asked.
“I think my back is broken, but I can still move my arms and legs,” he choked out.
The wreckage of the plane had burned to almost nothing and caught surrounding trees on fire. The black smoke stung our eyes and flames slowly inched their way toward the pilot. We desperately didn’t want to move him because of his likely spinal injuries, but the fire gave us no choice. We first tried to slide my tarp under him and use it as a gurney, but it ripped. Steve constructed a makeshift backboard from his pack frame. It was the best we could do, and we carried the pilot 15 or 20 feet while trying to maintain his spinal stability. We wanted to move him farther away from the flames, but he was in a lot of pain. We gave him a few small sips of water, but not very much to try to prevent him from going into shock. I talked to him to keep him alert. I asked him about his history. He was a machinist by trade and that’s something I’ve always been interested in, so I got him talking about that.
We had to move him a second time because the fire burned closer. Then the thwop, thwop of helicopter blades announced the arrival of a medical team.
Steve and I helped them spine-board and hoist the pilot into the helicopter. From the instant we sent emergency messages to the moment the helicopter departed with the pilot was less than two hours.
Shortly after the helicopter took off, Steve found the body of the passenger. He spotted her and notified me. We quickly determined that there was nothing we could do. Our hearts ached for her family.
We had just started repairing Steve’s pack for the hike out when a federal emergency team drove in on side-by-sides to combat the fire and search for the passenger. We showed the scene commander where the passenger was. Shortly after, another team arrived in a helicopter.
The two gentlemen in charge of the emergency response crews were professionals and managed the loss of life well. They removed the body, used a bucket under the helicopter to get the fire out and then began removing the wreckage of the plane.
Thankfully, the ground crew gave us a ride in their side-by-side the two miles back to our side-by-side. We called an end to our trip and drove the two hours back to town to get a hotel for the night. Physically and emotionally exhausted and in complete disbelief, I didn’t know how to feel. I kept wondering if we could have done more.
We found out later that after we helped the emergency medical team get the pilot into the helicopter, he was life-flighted to Billings, Montana, where he coded twice the next day. He was badly burned and fought multiple organ failure. He also suffered a fractured pelvis, fractured lower spine and fractured C-spine.
Being involved in the plane crash rescue had shaken me up. At times I felt like a zombie just going through the motions of life, because I knew the pilot wasn’t out of the woods, and I desperately wanted him to cling to life.
Even given all the emotions I was feeling, I chose to continue to pursue rams in the area nearby. Late that next Friday afternoon, I met my friend Josh on the side of a mountain just three miles from where the plane crash had happened less than a week before. It was very strange for me, to say the least, thinking about what had occurred so close by.
Saturday morning at 5 a.m. Josh and I headed out in the side-by-side, then began to hike. It took us 10 hours hiking to go seven miles. We crossed a single creek 19 times, and I fell in during a crossing at 8 a.m., soaking my boots. To avoid the continual wading, Josh dragged me up the sides of the canyon where many of the side-hill pitches were past 50 degrees. There was just no easy way to get up this canyon to the basin we wanted to peer into.
As the light began to turn golden with the evening, we dropped our packs and climbed a hillside to glass into the basin. It was gigantic. More than a mile wide in every direction with steep hillsides dropping almost 2,000 feet to a small creek draining out of the bottom. It was largely rocky with very few trees, like a grassy moonscape when viewed from a distance. We soon spotted four bull elk that kept our attention for the better part of an hour. The bulls were all branch antlered; most of them 6x6. They were doing nothing but eating, but it was just so amazing to have one of the greatest creatures in the world in front of us for so long.
Just as dark was creeping over the ridge, a band of 19 bighorn rams appeared just above the bulls. It truly was as if they just materialized out of thin air in the center of the basin. As he looked them over from a mile away, Josh told me there were three or four rams that warranted a closer look, so we made plans to move in on them the next morning. I saw one full-curl ram in the spotting scope that caught my eye. He had a yellow tint on the bottom of one of his horns.
We set up a cowboy camp under the stars that evening where I tried to dry out my boots as best I could, and we gulped down Peak Refuel freeze-dried dinners. I closed my eyes with a picture of that ram still etched in my mind.
The next morning, we gathered camp and all non-essential gear and staged it in the canyon bottom, before ascending toward the sheep. The elk had not moved more than 200 yards during the night and there were now seven bulls together and two more up farther in the basin, all in the way of our path to the sheep. We got within 40 yards of the closest bull before they spooked and ran right up the middle of the basin to the south. Josh and I didn’t have eyes on the band of rams yet. We hoped the running elk wouldn’t bump them.
We crested a small, grassy rise and found all 19 rams within rifle range. There were several close in size and while Josh attempted to find the best one, I saw the full-curl ram we had spotted the night before. “That’s my ram,” I told Josh. The other rams might have had more mass, but this ram had more of what I was looking for. He was broomed off on his right side and flared out into a full curl on his left with a distinctive yellow tint on the bottom of the horn.
“Are you sure?” Josh asked.
“Yep, that’s him.”
Josh ranged him at 315 yards. I felt rock steady, but I must have been a bit panicked because I did something I generally don’t do. I took a shot as the ram was walking. Josh let me know that it was the right elevation but just a bit far back. The ram had walked about 10 yards and stood still. I laid prone, shot again and hit high lung. He went 20 yards, bedded down and immediately died. I don’t remember being overly nervous or worried during the shots, but afterwards I felt a wave of intense emotion.
It took us about an hour stumbling through the loose scree to cover the 315 yards to the ram. We slid down a step for every two we took. Most of the excitement had worn off by the time we got there, but I notched my tag, and we just sat and reflected on everything it took to get to that moment. My mind also went to the pilot who was still in the ICU. Being in that same drainage where the crash happened felt very eerie. I almost couldn’t tell if both these experiences were a dream or real. It was truly bittersweet.
We began breaking down my ram, and by noon we were back to camp. By 2:20 p.m., we had the sheep caped out and we’d split the load between the two of us to begin our seven-mile journey out. We arrived back at the side-by-side at 3:30 a.m.
The taking of my ram is a nice ending to this story that is much less about hunting and more about the odds. The odds of me drawing my sheep tag were less than 1%. But the odds of Steve and I hunting in the right spot to assist the pilot after the plane crash are innumerable.
The pilot survived, though he spent a month in the ICU with severe pneumonia from toxic smoke inhalation. The doctors sedated him for several weeks due to the severity of his injuries and complications. Before it was all said and done, he had a trach tube and ventilator to help his lungs recuperate and was hooked to a dialysis machine to assist his kidneys. At the time of this writing, he is out of the hospital and home where he is getting back to retired life one day at a time. I am happy to have remained in touch with him and his family. Watching him fight for his life, I can see he is an incredibly strong man. I can’t recall him uttering a single complaint while we were with him.
Steve and I were invited to attend the funeral services for the passenger who died in the crash. Her family and friends graciously took us in and made us feel welcome. Spending time with them helped Steve and I mentally process the tragic event, and we promised to take the family back to the crash site in the summer. I find myself thinking about her a lot. She had passed by the time we got there, but I still have a million scenarios playing out in my head about what would have happened if we’d gotten there a few minutes on either side of when we did. Could we have saved her if we’d gotten there faster? Would we have lost the pilot if we’d been slower? The answers are unknowable, of course.
The events of this hunting season were some of the strangest of my life. I believe there had to be a higher power involved for me to have drawn that tag and for us to be close enough to see smoke from the crash and make it to the pilot in time. Every move we made stacked up to put us on that hill at the exact time and place where someone needed our help. Among the many reflections this season has brought to me, it reinforced in my mind a dramatic lesson: I always need to be prepared for anything, even when the odds seem astronomically low.
J.R. Larsen works as a regional director for RMEF. He wants to commend the first responders at this plane crash. He also wants to thank his parents for raising him right and his friends Brandon, Steve and Josh for jumping in wholeheartedly and supporting him during his sheep hunts. He couldn’t have done it without them.
