Crescent Mountain Fire Civilian Hiker Extraction 2018

The family--mom and dad, five children, ages 7, 11, and three were 16 years old; including three dogs--backpacked the five miles into Lewis Lake in the North Cascades and spent the night. The next morning around 1100, the group broke camp and began heading down the trail. The dad used his SPOT (Satellite Positioning and Tracking) GPS tracking device to send a message to the friends he had designated as emergency points-of-contact to indicate that the group was okay. About an hour later, they had made it about one-half mile down the trail when the dad caught a glimpse of a huge column of smoke.

He couldn’t see any flames, but he estimated that the column was about one-half mile away. The wind started to blow from the west, pushing down the valley—toward them. There were no exits, with tons of fuel between this group and the approaching fire. The dad quickly realized that “we are not going into that valley.” He therefore decided to turn their group around, return to the lake, and hunker down.

RLS, Helicopters, Narrow Escape