"She was sitting behind the pilot," said Flathead County Sheriff Jim Dupont. "Everything was fine. And then all of a sudden, there it is - the side of a mountain."
Hogg, 23, was one of two to survive the wilderness plane crash Monday, walking out of the mountains injured, cold, exhausted and very grateful two days later. Alongside the Billings woman was 29-year-old Matthew Ramige of Jackson Hole, Wyo., badly burned, his back broken, but still on his feet.
Thursday, Hogg spent some time with Dupont, not long, but long enough to sketch in some of the details. He didn't get all his answers, he said, but at least now some of the bigger mysteries are sorting themselves out.
Hogg and Ramige took off in the Cessna 206 G at about 3 p.m. Monday, heading from Kalispell to a remote airstrip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The flight was supposed to be short - a half hour or so to Schafer Meadows Guard Station, where the Forest Service employees were to conduct vegetation surveys and repair telecommunications equipment. With them were two other Forest Service staffers, 58-year-old Ken Good and Davita Bryant, 32, both of Whitefish.
Private pilot Jim Long, 60, was at the controls, flying for Kalispell-based Edwards Jet Center.
The normal route into Schafer Meadows is due east over the Swan Range, but tricky weather pushed the plane northeast, Dupont said, over West Glacier and up the U.S. Highway 2 corridor. The Middle Fork Flathead River churned below, Glacier National Park slipped past on the left, and the plane hung a right just beyond Great Northern Mountain, turning south toward the backcountry airstrip.
They were just a few miles from the river, near the crest of the Flathead Range, when the ground appeared so suddenly outside Hogg's window.
"She confirmed the plane's engine was fine," Dupont said, a fact he already had concluded by the way the propeller blades bent outward on impact.
"It hit under full power," Dupont said, "climbing as hard as it could to get over the ridge. That's very clear from the crash site."
After the crash, Dupont said, Hogg told him that she, Ramige and Good all worked their way clear of the burning wreckage. Some five hours of fuel spilled from the belly of the aircraft, quickly scorching the plane's body, melting it to nothing.
"Their survival," Dupont said, "was miraculous. I've never seen a fire that intense. I've never seen a crash pattern as bad as this one. The plane was full throttle, plowed into the mountain and flipped over end, upside down. The fuselage was gone, completely melted. There was nothing left."
Nothing, that is, but Hogg, Ramige and Good.
They were more than three miles into the wilderness, 3,000 vertical feet above the highway, nothing but cliffs and snow and forest between them and civilization.
Hogg told Dupont that she was hurt, that Ramige was really hurt, but that Good was in truly bad shape. She tried to care for him, Dupont said, but had little to work with.
"Their clothes were burned off," Dupont said. "They had no heat, no food. They had just nothing."
Hogg tried to cover Good's exposed body with pieces of insulation from the plane as temperatures dipped to freezing, tried to fashion a shelter for him from the engine cowling. That was about all she could do.
Good died early Tuesday morning.
"They finally left the site at about 8 a.m.," Dupont said of the last two survivors.
Hogg told Dupont that she and Ramige could see the weather wasn't good, could see the mountaintops were buried in clouds. And they knew rescue planes could not fly unless the mountaintops were clear.
They also knew they were cold, hurting, hungry, exposed in the snow. They knew they were only a few miles from the road. And they knew their bearings.
So they started down, assuming that their many footprints in the snow around the crash site would lead searchers in their direction. And that, Dupont said, would prove a fateful decision for everyone.
As Hogg walked away from the crash site, Dupont said, she watched the wind carry away the engine cowling that been Good's final shelter.
Meanwhile, Dupont and his search and rescue team were idling their engines, waiting for the clouds to clear Tuesday morning. Finally, the air warmed, the blue peeked through, and by midmorning they took to the air.
A couple of bowhunters had called in early, saying they heard a low-flying plane in the area Monday afternoon, that the engine had cut off abruptly. And a Forest Service work crew reported seeing what looked like wreckage on a far-off ridge near the crest of the Flathead Range, well above treeline.
Working off those clues, searchers spotted the plane early Tuesday, and 24 hours after the crash a helicopter full of seasoned rescue professionals put down at the site.
What they encountered there was one of the most violent crash scenes in their experience, Dupont said. The plane was ripped apart, and large sections had melted away in the intense fuel fire.
It was hard to count victims because bodies had been badly damaged in the crash, he said, and with no signs of life the logical conclusion was that no one could possibly have survived.
Good's body was found clear of the wreckage, but was assumed to have been ejected in the impact. The cowling, which might have proved a clue, was long gone, blown away in the morning storm.
And in Good's pocket, Dupont said, rescuers noticed a pen and notebook sticking out; but no one had left any message.
Most importantly, there were no footprints. The trail Hogg and Ramige thought they had left behind had melted away.
And so Dupont sent his searchers home.
Obviously, everyone had perished in the crash. All that was left was to comfort the families, to recover what remains could be found.
Which goes a long way toward explaining how Dupont came to spend so much of Thursday answering questions about why he declared two people dead when they were very much alive, and why he called off a search with people still missing.
"It's very easy in retrospect to be critical," he said, "and that's OK, because it makes us step back and question our decisions. But the fact is, there was nothing there whatsoever to indicate that anyone survived that crash. Nothing. Period."
Nothing, not even when he arrived at the site in person on Wednesday, sorting through wreckage "for bone fragments and teeth."
But while he looked, somewhere in the thick forest below, Matthew Ramige and Jodee Hogg were working their way down the mountain, injured, badly burned, cold and wet and quite likely in shock.
And no one was looking for them. The rescue teams had been sent home the day before.
A group of friends - perhaps as many as 100 - had volunteered to join the search, but Forest Service officials had waved them off.
The search was over, the friends were told, and even if it were not officials did not want dozens of amateurs out there getting lost and needing rescue themselves.
"I didn't make that call," Dupont said of the Forest Service decision to limit the searching to professionals. "But I can understand it. It's too dangerous. I understand people want to help, but at that point, you're not helping. You're complicating things."
As were Hogg and Ramige, who sometime after noon Wednesday emerged on U.S. 2, right where Paola Creek crosses the highway, watching cars whiz by as the clouds moved back in to cover the mountains.
That same cloud cover worried the crew providing support for Dupont's rescue helicopter. The sheriff and other investigators at the scene might get pinned down, the crew figured, might have to hump all the way out on foot.
And so they eased their truck down the road, looking for a likely route out of the forest for the men up above. About that same time, Hogg and Ramige emerged from a route of their own.
They had spent a full day and a half walking, just to cover three miles. Hogg told Dupont that Ramige was pretty badly off, that she helped as much as she could, but it was slow going.
They rested a lot, she said, but rarely stopped for long.
It was too cold to stop. Too hungry. Too painful. The trick to keeping going, she told him, was just keeping going.
Which brought them to that helicopter support crew, which was still looking for a path out when it came across a couple of raggedy-looking souls.
"I can't imagine what that moment must have felt like," Dupont said.
Nor can he imagine what the families must have felt when they got the word that two had walked out. Not knowing which two, they rushed to Kalispell Regional Medical Center to greet the Alert air ambulance.
For some, it was a tremendous relief to see their children alive. For others, it was a tremendous psychological blow to have hopes dashed, to learn their kids still weren't there, weren't going to be.
"It was like he died twice, and the second time was actually harder than the first," said one family member, who asked not to be identified. "I pray to God you never have to feel that."
And even before their emotional roller-coaster had time to slow, they placed Dupont uncomfortably on the business end of some very pointed questions about his decision to call off the search.
He met with the families late Wednesday, he said, and by night's end said, "I think all the families were OK for the most part. They were angry; no one was giving them any information. But when we explained the situation, what we had to work with, I think they understood what happened up there."
Which is not to say that anyone really understands what happened up there. Not yet.
Since the survivors walked out, Dupont said he's hardly had a moment to reflect on the decisions made on the mountain. He does know that the pressure was incredible, once the plane was found, for him to declare the state of its pilot and passengers.
"The families, the Forest Service, the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), the press, everyone wanted to know, and so we did the best we could given the information we had," he said. "We could have waited, we could have dragged it out for days while we counted body parts. But all the evidence pointed to one conclusion."
And now that the first conclusion has unraveled, Dupont is trying to stitch together a new picture, one closer to reality.
The NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash site, he said, and the Forest Service has launched an investigation of its own. Their findings, no doubt, will help fill in his emerging picture.
And although the families chose not to speak with the press Thursday, Dupont did meet with them, interviewed them at some length, looking for the rest of the pieces. But most importantly, he's now heard at least a small part of what he called "Jodee Hogg's remarkable story."
Those conversations, he hopes, will ultimately help to answer some important questions, such as how the plane came to crash, and how the survivors fared for two days in the woods.
At noon Thursday, Dupont still had a whole head full of questions.
Was Good's body ejected or did he walk out? Why did Ramige and Hogg leave the plane to hike out? Why did they not leave clues for searchers? And how did that engine cowling come to be so far from the wreckage?
"I've got more questions than I know what to do with," Dupont said at lunchtime. "But all anyone asks me for is answers."
By dinnertime, however, he had finally talked to Hogg, "and I think the answers are finally coming."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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