INDEX – She clung to a rock in the middle of the Skykomish River, screaming for help.
He apparently tried to reach her, hoping to keep her from tumbling farther down Canyon Falls. Instead, both were swept down the waterfall.
Friends managed to pull her out. He never surfaced.
“One boy kept running up and down the rocks yelling, ‘Mike, Mike,’ but he wasn’t coming up,” said Tammy Baumgartner, who lives above the river and ran to help.
Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office divers on Monday found the body of a 20-year-old Bothell man about 20 yards downstream from the base of the falls. His death was the second there this summer.
The man, whose name was not officially released Monday, the woman and two other friends were floating down the river on inner tubes Sunday afternoon.
A friend reportedly told them that they could float from Eagle Falls to Gold Bar – a dangerous stretch of river with several waterfalls.
Someone shouted a warning to the group as they approached Canyon Falls, sheriff’s deputy Glen Bergstrom said. None was wearing a life jacket.
The three men made it out of the current, but the woman went over the first of the series of falls, he said.
The Bothell man “was trying to get her off the rock when he slipped and fell in,” Bergstrom said.
She was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where she’s expected to make a full recovery.
The search for the man’s body started Sunday and continued Monday morning. Sheriff’s office search-and-rescue volunteers, divers and firefighters from Index and Gold Bar worked as the man’s family and friends waited nearby.
With the help of the sheriff’s new underwater camera, divers found the victim in about 20 minutes, said dive team leader Sgt. John Flood.
Divers spent 11 days searching the water there just weeks ago for the body of Chris Lund, 18, of Woodinville, who died July 4.
Lund and his brother Michael, 16, were floating down the river on a raft they’d purchased for $15 that day at a yard sale.
The two didn’t know about the falls, said Michael Lund, who came to the river with his mother and sister on Monday to comfort the Bothell man’s family.
“I couldn’t believe this happened again. Something needs to be done,” said Lund, who said he and his brother didn’t see any signs along the river warning of the danger.
Signs used to be posted near the river, but are no longer there, Baumgartner said. Index officials could not be reached for comment.
“Every time I see someone down there in the water, I want to scream, ‘Get out!’” said Baumgartner, who placed a cross in Lund’s memory near the river.
Juli Lund, Chris Lund’s mother, said that had she known about Canyon Falls, she never would have allowed her boys to go rafting. The Fourth of July weekend was the family’s first at their new cabin.
“The river is very deceiving,” she said. “When my kids got in, the water was below their knees.”
Researching an area before getting in the water is vital to preventing injuries, sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Jorgensen said. So is wearing a life jacket.
And, she warns, “stay away from the falls. We don’t want another tragedy there.”
Reporter Katherine Schiffner: 425-339-3436 or schiffner@heraldnet.com.
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