The Danny On tale

It doesn't seem like 29 years since we lost Danny On. There are still times when I catch myself thinking for a split second, "Maybe I'll run into Danny today." Used to run into him often. Any place with great natural beauty, flowers, wildlife or skiing was a good place to find Danny On; places like Banff, Grand Teton, the Bob Marshal Wilderness, but his favorite place was Glacier Park. You might see him during a storm on Boulder Pass or sitting in the sun beside Natahki Lake.

The last time I "ran into" Danny was at Big Mountain the morning of Saturday, Jan. 20, 1979. We made a few runs on chair two and there was a lot of powder, too much, out in the trees for a guy of my limited ability. Dan, who had just returned from helicopter skiing the Bugaboos, was eating it up. It had snowed since early that morning and kept up all day. After lunch, Dan said we should try the higher slopes that hadn't been skied out. I thanked him for skiing with me and said I didn't want to hold him back so he should go with another fella who had joined us. It snowed all that day and the records show many more inches also fell the next day.

Sunday, Jan. 21 had all that new snow and calm winds in the morning with temperatures in the teens. The wind picked up shortly after noon out of the southeast and was gusting to over 30 miles per hour by dark while temperatures dropped to near zero.

Monday dawned cold and clear. The airport weather station showed 11 below at 10 a.m. I got a call from Norm Kurtz at The Mountain. Worry showed in his voice. "George, I thought you should know, we're concerned about Danny. His jeep is in the parking lot covered with snow and we think he must have had an accident yesterday. We've got a crew out looking and more searchers on the way."

I felt empty. Had I taken my friend for granted? Like he'd be around for a thousand years. I had to do something. Called Mike Strand and within and within 20 minutes we were in a plane. As we flew toward Big Mountain I had the feeling… "Danny is gone." Though we'd been in the Forest Service Smokejumpers together and friends for 30 years, I couldn't remember ever taking a good picture of him. The only "Danny On photo" I had was a beautiful one he had given me about a year before.

By radio, Mike and I kept tab on ground activity and we knew searchers were on the eastern edge of the Big Mountain skiing area, around chair four where the lift operator had last seen Dan about 1 p.m. Sunday. We were circling above when it came over the radio, "We have located a body." Mike and I still made a couple of passes over the area. What else was there to do? It was shock time.

Skiing alone, Dan had fallen head first down into a deep tree well in an area called, "The Nose," a steep and out of the way place. A ski patrolman had spotted a boot sticking out of the deep powder snow which had acted like quick sand as Dan struggled unsuccessfully to free himself.

We were flying back to Kalispell. "So this is the way it ends. One of the most powerful powder skiers and experienced woodsmen in the world, killed in a fluke accident." BUT… it didn't really end there. After Dan's death, a book he was working on with Richard Shaw on the plants of Glacier Park was published. That was followed by a wondrous book of Dan's photos, "Along the Trail." Later, a special hiking and nature trail on the Big Mountain was designed and dedicated to Danny's memory.

Danny On's parents came from China, and he was their first child born in America. A few days after Dan's death I talked to his older brother Louis, who was born in China. Louis said that Dan was always a straight arrow and the first Eagle Scout ever in Red Bluff, Calif. Louis recalled when he was a boy, and with his buddies, they scraped together 25 cents to buy a chicken which they took down by the river to roast over a fire. Baby brother Danny was sure Louis and the others had stolen the chicken, so he reported them to the sheriff. Louis said he was upset with Dan for making them prove they had bought the chicken, but it seemed pretty funny later.

Danny's amazing contributions to the advancement of the forestry industry in the area of silviculture, his college degrees and his general generosity and kindness toward his fellow man, along with his pioneering advances in outdoor photography are all the more amazing when you look at the other side of this soft spoken and somewhat mysterious man. Children loved him because "…He treated us as equals."

The Danny On I first knew was one cool customer. Heard about him before I met him. He was a legend among the ex-paratroopers, skydivers and smokejumpers during the late 40s and early 50s. Our feeling at that time was that Danny On was going to kill himself before he hit 30. He was doing free fall parachuting that scared those of us who claimed to be afraid of nothing. Wounded a couple of times, he had survived the Battle of the Bulge and other WWII combat in France and Belgium with the 101st Airborne. Some of us were worried that maybe Dan had decided he was indestructible.

None of us are indestructible. Danny knew that, but he proved to all of us, "The man who lives best, lives every day to the fullest." He did that with a lot of class.

G. George Ostrom is the news director of KOFI radio and a Hungry Horse News columnist.