Off-duty Idaho F&G officer thought he saw body, then crashed, cheated death

Paul Christensen's blue jeans and sneakers were soaked with the frigid waters of the Salmon River.

His survival gear and his radio were unreachable, back in the upturned small plane he had just crashed near White Bird in central Idaho this week. But the off-duty Idaho Fish and Game officer survived the cold, wet night.

Christensen, 23, was found unhurt but cold at 8:20 a.m. Wednesday about one mile downstream from the Hammer Creek recreation site and boat launch on the Salmon River.

He had been flying from Moscow to Slate Creek Tuesday afternoon when he dipped into the Salmon River Canyon between Pine Bar and Hammer Creek. While flying over a gravel bar he spotted a dark object he thought might be the body of a missing angler who drowned near Riggins in November. He took another pass over the object but was unable to tell what it was so he attempted to land.

As he approached the bar the plane's engine sputtered.

"I went to give it throttle, and it hesitated excessively," he said.

His plane, a Taylorcraft F21, lost altitude and the wheels hit the water short of the gravel bar. The plane flipped forward and landed in the water.

"I unbuckled myself, kicked open the door, jumped in the river and swam to shore."

Once on shore he checked himself for injury and then tried to recover survival items from the plane. But he was unable to reach the aircraft and unable to start a fire.

He wrote a note in the sand indicating he was unhurt and hiking upriver.

Christensen was wet from his midriff down, wearing street shoes, blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, jacket and a ball cap. He walked and scrambled along the steep riverbank for about four hours before it became too dark for him to safely negotiate the canyon and he prepared to spend the night.

"I gathered up large amounts of grass off the hillside, found a place to sit and covered my body with grass to act as some sort of insulation."

The night was cold with gusty winds.

While Christensen was coping with the elements, authorities were just becoming aware his plane may have crashed. Shortly after 8 p.m. the Idaho County Sheriff's Office was notified of an emergency locator transmitter signal received in the Grangeville area. A short time later the office was notified Christensen's plane was overdue. A search and rescue operation was mounted by the sheriff's office, Fish and Game officers and coordinated with the Idaho Division of Aeronautics. They began searching the Camas Prairie near Tolo Lake where the signal indicated the plane might be. But the signal was bouncing off the canyon walls and the crash site was not located Tuesday.

At daybreak Christensen resumed his upriver hike. Around the same time, Fish and Game officers Roy Kinner, Jim Rolle and George Fischer prepared to launch a jet boat to search the river canyon. They put in at Hammer Creek and proceeded downstream where they found Christensen just before 9 a.m.

"I had engine trouble and ended up crashing in the Salmon River in the dead of winter and somehow managed to walk away from it, so I figure I'm the luckiest man out there," Christensen said.

He credits surviving the cold night with keeping calm and thinking through his options.

The object he spotted on the bar was not the drowning victim.