“We found the airplane. We’ve got many survivors, and the baby is OK,” were the words that crackled over Jim Alsum’s radio 30 years ago.
Alsum remembers the exact time of the wonderful news.
It was 6:04 a.m. The day: Dec. 5, 1978.
The guy with the good news was his son, Jerry.
Just three hours before, Jerry Alsum, Don Niekerk and Steve Paulson set out in a Sno-Cat from the Grizzly Creek Campground east of Steamboat Springs. They were hunting for Rocky Mountain Airways Flight 217, which had gone down in a vicious blizzard.
The Civil Air Patrol rescued and saved more people from the flight — 20 out of 22 — than any other rescue in the patrol’s history, said Capt. Scott Orr, public affairs officer for the CAP’s Black Sheep Senior Squadron in Colorado.
Killed were the pilot, Scott Alan Klopfenstein, and one passenger, Mary Kay Hardin.
What stood out was the courage of the passengers and the rescuers, Orr said.
The plane, a DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter, left Steamboat Springs at 6:55 p.m. Dec. 4 and was supposed to arrive in Denver 55 minutes later.
But 15 minutes after takeoff, Klopfenstein radioed that the plane was icing up and he was turning back to Steamboat. Those were the last words from the aircraft.
The Alsums — Jim and his sons, Jerry and Dan — all belonged to the Civil Air Patrol and left Denver in the dark on Dec. 4. They were near Green Mountain Reservoir when they picked up the signal from the emergency-locator transmitter of the downed plane about 60 miles away.
Twin Otters weren’t even required to have an ELT, but this plane had two, Jim Alsum recalled Thursday.
Although they had signals from the transmitter, the mountains played tricks with those signals.
Joined by Paulson of Rocky Mountain Rescue and Dave Lindow, who provided the Sno-Cat, the small group worked on “clues,” said Jim Alsum. The group knew that there were reports of electrical-service disruptions about the time that the plane turned back.
They concluded the plane had hit power lines around Grizzly Creek, so they centered their search there.
Jim and Dan Alsum stayed at the base camp at the Grizzly Creek Campground as Lindow, Jerry Alsum, Niekerk and Paulson headed off in the howling winds and blinding snow.
Jim Alsum listened as the three men plowed through extremely deep snow, checking “all kinds of little roads” to see whether the plane was near any of them.
Finally, a little less than 12 hours after the plane crashed, the three men found it.
The baby they saved was 8- month-old Matthew Kotts, who was sitting in his mother’s lap when the plane crashed. He bounced around the cabin, but a thickly padded snowsuit saved his life. Kotts is a pilot today.
The survival story is now an exhibit at Denver’s Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum.
Survivors and rescuers met there Thursday night for the unveiling of the display, which includes parts of the plane, personal items of passengers found at the scene and photographs of the crash and the recovery.
Jim Alsum said the success of the rescue was due to everyone working together.
“At the time, we didn’t know if we had survivors or all were dead,” said Jim Alsum. “It was a team effort to find them. It was a major team effort to bring them out.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
