Newly minted Alaskan Michael Randall is still trying to figure out how his little Prince William Sound adventure became such a big deal. All he wanted to do before the excitement began was retrieve a metal detector and some other gear he'd loaned a Whittier acquaintance.
The acquaintance hauled Randall's stuff to a mining claim across the water from the little community at the head of Passage Canal southeast of Anchorage. On Monday, Randall decided to go get his gear. The easy way to do this would have been by skiff across the water from the Whittier boat harbor to a beach at the mouth of Billings Creek about four miles distant.
But Randall -- who only became an official, been-here-a-full-year Alaskan in February -- didn't have a skiff. So he decided he would hike. There is no trail from Whittier to Billings Creek, but there is a route. It starts, Randall said Thursday, near the entrance to the 2.5-mile-long, one-lane tunnel that connects the 174 full-time residents of the snowy outpost of Whittier to the Alaska road system.
From near the tunnel, not far from the Whittier airstrip, Randall said, you head north toward Leonard Glacier and then follow the beach along Passage Canal as it curves east. The beach eventually cliffs out. But along the cliffs, he said, is a white rope some bear hunters put in to help people clamber up onto a series of mountainside ledges that can be followed all the way to Billings Creek.
"It's not marked," he said. "A lot of it you've got to fight your way through the devil's weed, but that's the way you go."
Randall had been this way the summer before. He figured it would only take a couple of hours to hike to Billings Creek, but the 38-year-old former soldier was leaving late in the day so he tossed a sleeping bag in his backpack. There was a trailer at Billings Creek that had been hauled over from Whittier by some people planning to do some mining. Randall figured he'd spend the night in the trailer, collect his gear and hike back to Whittier Tuesday.
The hike started off well enough. Randall spooked a sow black bear and two cubs near Leonard Creek, but they were more afraid of him than he was of them. They ran back in the brush. Randall kept going. He climbed high above the kittiwake rookery on a cliff face across the canal from the community of Whittier, and fought his way east along the ledges covered in devil's club -- that "devil's weed" to him -- toward where "a friend of mine started a mining claim over there."
Randall almost made it to the mining claim, too, before a chance encounter with another bear changed everything.
"I walked right on top of him. I stumbled right on top of him," Randall said. "I almost stepped on him.
"He stood up. He was a little bit taller than me. That scared the shit out of me."
Randall is not a big man. He stands only 5 feet 6 inches tall. He stood there eye-to-eye with the bear and decided he probably should move. The sensible thing, he thought, was to slip down the slope to his right to put some distance between himself and the animal.
"It wasn't that steep of a slope," he said, but it was slippery. Randall slipped and then he skidded. He went off a 10- to 12-foot cliff and landed kerplop on a ledge. Where the bear went, he has no idea. He stopped worrying about the bear as soon as he realized the predicament the bear encounter had put him in. He was now on a ledge with a cliff above that he couldn't climb, and some more cliffs dropping away to the water 150 to 200 feet below.
"I couldn't go up," Randall said. "I couldn't go down. I'm sitting on top of running water, and there's a waterfall below me. I was holding onto a lone pine tree."
He wrestled out of his backpack and sat there, trying to figure out what to do. The only sensible thing, he decided, was to get out his cell phone and call Whittier across the way. It was about 8 p.m. He dialed 911 and talked to the police department. Randall was known to the police. He'd worked for Whittier as a seasonal enforcement officer in 2009, his first summer in Alaska.
Whittier police said they'd send a boat over to get him. Randall explained that wasn't going to work because there was no way he could climb down to the water. The police called Alaska State Troopers for help. Troopers passed the word on to the U.S. Coast Guard, which had a helicopter stationed in Cordova at the southern entrance to the Sound. The weather in the Sound was worsening. The Coast Guard helicopter could work its way north at low elevation without having to fly over the wind-pounded mountains that stand behind Anchorage and Whittier.
Whittier police told Randall to sit tight. Help was on the way. It wasn't like he was going anywhere. He couldn't. So he sat and shivered as long as he could. Then he dug some old rubber boots out of his backpack, stuffed some of his extra clothing in them, and started a fire.
"It was the only thing I had that would be burn," he said. "They burned for a good 20 minutes."There was a lot of smoke, but the fire warmed him a bit as he waited and waited and waited.
Rescues are not easy to launch in Alaska. Distances are long. Communications are sometimes difficult. The Coast Guard in Cordova was coming from approximately 150 miles away in increasingly worse weather. It wasn't until the early hours of Tuesday that the helicopter finally arrived on the scene.
"I didn't even really hear it come," Randall said. "The wind was blowing pretty good by then."
He did see the flashing lights on the chopper, though, and lit the road flare he always carries with him for emergencies. Coast Guard pilot Lt. David Feeney said the flare made Randall easy to spot. Picking him up was another matter. With nowhere to land, Feeney had to hover. He started lowering a rescue swimmer on a hoist to get Randall as the aircraft bounced around in turbulence.
"It took him five or 10 minutes to get down," Randall said. "He was swinging all over the place."
When the Coast Guardsman finally touched down, Randall remembers, "I just said, 'Thank God. I'm glad to see you.'"
Things, it seemed, were starting to go a lot better for the new Alaskan from Florida by way of Texas and the Philippines. Randall was quickly hoisted into the helicopter. The flight to Whittier took only minutes. The helicopter unloaded Randall there. He got checked out by local health officials. And he headed home to Anchorage thinking his adventure was over.
In a way, though, it was just beginning, because a modern, Internet-assisted version of the old game of telephone was already spinning out of control. Telephone conversations between Randall and Whittier police were getting mixed with observations from Coast Guard public affairs people far from the scene and tossed into the laps of reporters inclined to believe almost anything coming from an official source. Those reporters then sped Randall's story around the globe.
He was surprised to pick up a newspaper in Anchorage the day after his rescue and discover what that story was: He had been charged by two bears, jumped into the ocean to avoid them, climbed back up onto a cliff and summoned help because he "was prepared for his outing with a cell phone that evidently worked after the dunking, despite being soaked, and was within range."
"They didn't get any of it right," Randall said.
But everyone did get a good story that just seemed to keep getting better as it spread outside of Alaska. Randall's real life encounter with one standing bear became a charge by two bears that grew into even more as a California newspaper headlined: "Caught between two bears, Alaskan hikers leaps into canal."
And he survived. Sacre bleu!
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.