KTUU.com | Alaska's news and information source | Denali hikers rescued, returned safely to families

Denali hikers rescued, returned safely to families

by Jill Burke
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, Alaska -- Two hikers missing in Denali National Park and Preserve were reunited with their families around 5 p.m. Wednesday after crews spent days searching for them by air and on the ground.

Minnesota native Abby Flantz, 25, and Erica Nelson, a 23-year-old Nevada woman, were picked up by a helicopter late Wednesday afternoon and returned to park headquarters where they were greeted by their excited families.

Their safe return was set in motion early Wednesday.

The families were in the midst of a debriefing by park service officials at about 9:30 Wednesday, learning the details of the search underway for the missing women, when a cell phone began ringing.

"Mrs. Nelson's cell phone rang. I was not in the room but apparently she looked at it and realized it was her daughter's number," Park spokeswoman Kris Fister said. "People told me she looked like she had seen a ghost."

The entire room became quiet as Ellane answered the phone and spoke with her daughter, who confirmed the girls were alive and well and had become lost.

The cell phone's battery was weak and dying but park officials were able to pinpoint the signal, which was emanating from the eastern boundaries of the search zone.

"The information she told her mother and us is that both she and Abby were OK, uninjured that they had been traveling generally east," Denali National Park Incident Commander Richard Moore said.

The women told searchers they were on a ridge near Mount Healy. Because they were actually somewhere else, it took hours and another call to locate them.

Nelson made a second call to her mother in the early afternoon in the hopes that she could help rescuers locate the girls' location.

The two set up a tent and displayed any brightly colored material they could find to help searchers locate them.

Two hours after the second phone call and miles outside the search zone a helicopter found the women and picked them up.

"We were greeted with huge smiles," Jen Glyzinski of the Mount Rainier Search Team. "They saw they helicopter and we saw shiny, white teeth."

Families assembled at the airstrip at park headquarters shortly before 5 p.m., waiting for the women's return.

Six days after they walked into the wilderness and seemingly vanished, Flantz and Nelson emerged to cheers and applause.

It was the outcome everyone hoped for, all along fearing it may never be.

Contact Jill Burke at jburke@ktuu.com