California: Death in Trinity Mountains

Alvin F. Oien, 59, was hopping his single-engine Cessna from Portland, Ore., to San Francisco last March 11 when he crashed. Remarkably, no one was killed: Oien was cut up, an arm and some ribs broken; his wife, Phyllis, 44, had a broken arm and ankle, and his stepdaughter, Carla Corbus, 15, was badly bruised. They were stranded 4,500 feet up, in northern California’s Trinity Mountains. Luckily, Phyllis, a Northwestern University graduate, was a trained nurse, and Oien, a rough, resourceful logger who had worked his way up to ownership of a Portland hotel, was an experienced outdoorsman.

There the good luck ended. Last week a hunter discovered the wreck and in it a pathetic diary of the family’s ordeal jotted down by Carla and Phyllis in the margins of a flight log.

Staying Sane. Phyllis, delirious the first night, came around the next day only to find her feet frostbitten. Both radios smashed, Carla set out twice for help but was driven back by snow, which fell almost daily for the next eight weeks.

The family took shelter in the plane, melted snow for drinking water, subsisted a while on two jars of jelly and a couple of sandwiches taken on the trip. In mid-March, when Oien was well enough to move, he set out through five feet of snow for help. “At 1:15 p.m., Al shouted O.K. and crossed the gully,” the diary said. Days later, Carla wrote, “Fear Al did not make it … Getting weak . . .”

To stay sane, the women tore pieces from the plane’s upholstery and used them for pinochle cards. They took turns writing down different kinds of food they wished they had, gifts they would like. On April 30, Carla wrote, “This is my 16th birthday. I hope you are happy, Search and Rescue. You haven’t found us yet.” Then, her last entry, on May 4th: “Today is a bright and drippy, drippy day. We are completely soaked.”

Search planes had logged 593 hours in 351 sorties, probing an almost constant cloud cover for the little grey plane. Three ground teams had been unable to find the wreckage, and the search was called off after two weeks. “We figured there was no possibility of human life involved,” said Air Force Major Robert Hillier, who directed the search. Nonetheless, the eldest of Oien’s three sons, Alvin Jr., 32, an airline copilot from Westlake, Texas, stayed in Redding 107 days, scanned the snow from the air every time the weather broke.

Lost Luck. When the wreck was finally found, the family’s luggage was still inside, inexplicably unopened. Lying near the plane amid a Crosshatch of animal tracks, the hunter found the scattered bones—gnawed by bears and coyotes—of two bodies. The search for Alvin went on.

The Oiens could have been rescued in a matter of hours had their plane been equipped with a crash-locator beacon ($100-$300), which shines a light visible up to ten miles and sends a radio distress signal 60 miles. Unknown to them, their two-month drama was lived out only eight miles from busy U.S. Route 299.