Out of the Wilderness Into Disbelief

In an age of 24-hour-a-day TV broadcasts and satellite communications, this news dropped out of a small plane, tied to a rock.

Bob Mottram and his hunting buddies were out on the tundra near Iliamna, Alaska, and for two days the skies had been strangely quiet. Normally the Alaskan air is abuzz this time of year with bush planes ferrying hunters out to camp. But starting last Tuesday morning, Mottram had not seen a single plane. Same thing Wednesday.

By Thursday, they were starting to wonder. Bad weather coming? Did the caribou herd move somewhere else? Was anyone going to come get them? That afternoon, the plane circled low overhead, finally dropping the weighted-down note before flying away.

“Dear hunters,” it said. “Terrorists hijacked four airliners yesterday morning and destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon. They crashed the airliners into these buildings, killing thousands. The FAA stopped all air travel, even our planes. Obviously, we are behind schedule due to this. We will begin getting out the parties which were due to depart first. . . . We appreciate your cooperation.”

It was almost too much to comprehend, said Mottram, an outdoor writer from Tacoma, Wash. “I refused to believe it at first.”

Getting the Word Days Afterward

News of last week’s terrorist attacks reached India and China within moments. But in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, at least one party of backpackers didn’t hear about it for two days--some not until they arrived at the airport in Missoula to find their flights had been canceled.

Hiker Brian Robinson didn’t realize what had happened until he walked into Silverthorne, Colo., Wednesday afternoon and saw a newsstand with a picture of a burning World Trade Center tower. “I didn’t even know the building had collapsed until somebody walked up next to me,” he said.

And if you still believe the world is a small place, consider this: 10 college-age students enrolled in a National Outdoor Leadership School program in northeastern Washington still may not have heard the news. School managers are scheduled to meet up with the party Thursday to inform them.

George Newbury, a school official, said administrators will be carrying faxed letters from the students’ families, reassuring them of the well-being of friends and family and trying to explain what happened.

In the 21st century, when it takes a major effort just to get away from telephones and cable news, amazingly there are still some Rip van Winkle moments.

Only in Alaska--where much of the state lives off the network of roads and where wilderness most often is accessed by plane--did a substantial number of people find themselves cut off from a defining national moment.

The ban on air travel hit the state particularly hard because so many bush communities were without critical food, medical and mail shipments until flights resumed Thursday morning.

“We’re very, very dependent on air travel here,” said Keith Fiedorowicz, chief pilot for Alpine Air, based in Girdwood, Alaska. “A funny thing is, people up here talk about how glad they are [that] they’d be isolated from the Lower 48 if anything terrible ever happened. But the truth of the matter is, that’s where all of our food, all of our supplies come from. We’re not as self-sufficient as we like to think.”

Fiedorowicz had several parties of fishermen stranded in southern Alaska when the flight ban was imposed, and was particularly worried about one group of four men, all of them in their 60s and on medication. Fiedorowicz was two days late picking them up. None of the men had a clue about what had happened, he said.

“I waited till they were all together there, and I told them the world I was taking them back to was going to be a changed place. And then I told them what happened,” he said.

“It was kind of quiet in the plane on the way back. And then one of them said: ‘Maybe some good can come out of this. Maybe the world can actually work together.’ ”

Walking Back to Changed World

In Alaska’s Denali National Park, six mountaineering students and two instructors on the Pika Glacier waited all day last Tuesday for a plane to pick them up. The instructors hiked up to the top of a ridgeline, got a cell phone call out and heard the news. But by the time the flight ban was lifted two days later, a snowstorm had set in. They built an igloo and hunkered down in 20-degree weather and blowing snow until Saturday, instructor Jered Vilhauer said. “We basically told the students what had happened, and there was a lot of disbelief,” he said. “We had a couple of small radios, and we were able to turn on to the news and get updated. And it sort of slowly sunk in. A depressing kind of feeling.”

Larry Bekkedahl, a native of Tustin, Calif., who works as a surveyor north of Anchorage, heard the news on his Walkman while working on his cabin, miles into the wilderness.

He wasn’t about to wait for the flight ban to be lifted. A float plane might not pick him up for days, he reasoned. And by that time, his elderly parents--who had driven up from Orange County on vacation--would have headed home. Bekkedahl took a compass, a Global Positioning System device and a map and began hiking back through dense brush--across 6 1/2 miles and over several ridges--to try to reach a road.

“I just feel like if you let these terrorists alter your life in any way, every detail that they can alter . . . is a part of a victory for them,” he said. “Whether it be not going on an airline because you’re afraid, or missing your parents’ departure because you can’t get your flight home. That’s what got me to start walking.”

He made it.