Whitefish hikers airlifted from Glacier wildfire

A Whitefish man and his son had an unexpected helicopter ride out of the Glacier National Park backcountry as they were rescued from the approaching Thompson Creek Fire on Sunday.

Marc Roston and his son, Simon, planned to stop Sunday night at Upper Nyack campground on the next leg of their backcountry journey in Glacier's remote wilderness region when they saw a big plume of smoke in front of them.

“We never actually smelled anything,” Roston said Monday. “My recollection is that the wind was blowing toward the fire,”

Roston hesitated. He first thought that maybe they should continue to Upper Nyack where the Park rangers would expect them to be, or return to the previous night’s campground at Beaver Woman Lake to the south and east.

“That looks like a close fire,” Roston recalled thinking to himself.

Although he didn’t smell the fire, the smoke column was growing quickly.

At 2:27 p.m. he took a picture of the billowing smoke and then decided to turn around. They moved as quickly as they could back to Beaver Woman Lake.

But, it wasn’t as easy as the hike in.

“We were on a reasonably steep ascent,” Roston said.

It would have been a rough and long hike out of the backcountry — they were about 16 miles from the trailhead at U.S. Highway 2. But then they heard aircraft.

“We heard planes at first. Then we heard a helicopter. I said to my son, ‘I don’t know if they are looking for us,’” he said.

The flight pattern of the helicopter was strange, like it was searching for something, but they weren’t sure if they were looking for them.

At one point the craft was hovering over them.

The helicopter left and returned maybe five minutes later, Roston recalled.

They stopped to fill up their water bottles at a waterfall, when up the trail came ranger Kyle Johnson.

“That’s when we knew for sure they were coming for us,” Roston said.

Johnson radioed the helicopter to their location. The helicopter plucked them out of the backcountry and took them back to their vehicle along U.S. Highway 2.

“Then I had a very, very excited 12-year-old boy,” Roston said.

Knowing what he knows now about the fire and where they saw the smoke on the trail, Roston guesses they were about three miles from the fire.

Once he was on the helicopter, Roston realized how tired he was from the steep trail.

“I’m glad we didn’t have to keep rushing the whole way out,” he said.

The pair had planned on doing the entire Coal-Creek Nyack Loop, a 45-mile journey in the Park. The fire may have stopped them, but they came home with a story of a lifetime.