“It's not a place to mess around with. We lose people in there all the time.”
On Friday, July 25, Samuel Sylvester was lost after leaping from a 70-foot cliff not far outside Troy.
Sylvester, from Massachusetts, is presumed dead, Anderson said, the latest in a long line of lives lost below the diving cliffs. Early reports that Sylvester was making an adventure video were incorrect, Anderson said; he was simply “having some fun up there.”
“It's about 70 feet down to the water line,” Anderson said of the cliffs. “Below are some 12-foot falls, then a section of whitewater we call ‘the washing machine.' I don't think you could make it through there even with a life jacket.”
Sylvester, not wearing a life jacket, surfaced after completing his flips, Anderson said, and witnesses said he “made a couple swimming strokes before he began to bob up and down and then just disappeared. He apparently was an excellent swimmer and diver, and had been around water all his life, but the river down there has some tremendous currents and hydraulics.”
The Kootenai, Anderson said, was running high - around 13,000 cubic feet per second - when Sylvester made his leap.
“That's fast, faster than hell, with all kinds of power,” Anderson said. Upstream dam operators have since cut flows back to just 4,000 cfs, “but no sign yet,” Anderson said. “It could be a while.”
Experience, he said, suggests bodies emerge a week to two weeks after flows are ramped back up. “The last few have turned up on that sandbar down by Bonners Ferry,” across the state line in Idaho, the sheriff said.
Still, Anderson is keeping spotters on the upper river, and teams continue to search from boats and Jet Skis. “We'll keep looking,” Anderson said. “His family is here now from Massachusetts, and they said they're not leaving until he's found.”
Anderson was unsure how many have drowned beneath the popular diving cliffs, “but it seems like one every year or two. It's getting to be more and more all the time.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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