It was over in four seconds.
Anthony Reece was working 140 feet in the air, piloting his helicopter as part of a logging operation in the mountains of Skagit County. About 1 p.m. on Jan. 4, the Darrington man noticed that the sky had darkened. Snow started to fall.
He knew icy weather could cause problems. So he decided to call it a day and head in. In the five decades he spent flying, he had never been injured in a crash.
At 70 years old, he didn’t want to start.
But on his way in, someone radioed him and asked him to pick up a final load of cedar. As he readied his Hughes 369 for the load, the helicopter’s engine quit.
Using the chopper’s last bit of inertia, he pointed upward at the snowy sky, giving a colleague working on the ground time to run out of the way.
The blades slowed.
He fell.
As his chopper neared the ground, Reece thought “God darn, this is gonna hurt.”
The next thing he remembers is a loud crunch, then someone pulling at his feet. He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
As co-workers moved Reece into a pickup truck and rushed him down the mountain, his wife of 48 years, Sue Reece, got a call from her brother. He was working near the wreck.
Anthony crashed, he told her. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians were on their way up. Her husband was injured, but moving.
Sue Reece hopped in her car and drove from Darrington to Mount Vernon.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’ll be all right,’” she recalled. “Of course I worried about him. I’ve been doing that real regular for 48 years.”
She met her husband at a Mount Vernon hospital and rode in an ambulance with him to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
Diagnosed with three cracked vertebrae and a split sternum, Reece spent four days in the hospital. On Jan. 8, he returned to his house in the woods of Darrington.
Balloons and flowers from well-wishers filled his living room. A borrowed hospital bed sat by the window. Sue Reece said she tried to pay for the bed, but the owner refused. Anthony Reece had plucked her son from a raging river years ago.
As a pilot, Reece has participated in hundreds of search and rescue missions. He’s found lost hikers and carried injured climbers to safety. He’s also transported the bodies of fallen outdoorsmen home, so their families could see them one last time.
“I would describe him as one of my heroes,” said Kelly Bush, district ranger and search-and-rescue coordinator at North Cascades National Park. “He’s definitely saved lives. There are dozens of lives – people that have been in the last hours of living that are critically injured – and if it were not for his quick response and skill they wouldn’t be living today.”
Among the missions Reece participated in are several well known rescues. In 2005, he flew the bodies of Mountaineers leader Johanna Backus and two other climbers after they died in a rockslide on Sharkfin Tower in the North Cascades National Park. He flew their injured climbing partner to safety.
The previous year, he responded when Nigel Aylott, a well-known Australian adventurer, was killed by a falling boulder near Darrington during the Subaru Primal Quest adventure race. He’s also credited with saving Seattle Weekly writer Brian Miller after he fell while climbing 8,815-foot Forbidden Peak in the North Cascades park.
“A number of people owe their lives to his skillful piloting,” Bush said. “We rangers are a dime a dozen. A good pilot is really what it’s all about.”
In 2005, 81 pilots died in the United States. When you add in people who fly bush planes, crop dusters or ferry around celebrities, it’s easy to see why pilots have the third most dangerous job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As he’s flown through his youth into old age, Reece has lost many pilot friends to accidents. He always has accepted the risk, all the while doing everything he can to minimize it.
He says he doesn’t scrimp on maintenance and avoids unnecessary danger. People who’ve flown with him say he’s an expert at reaching difficult areas safely.
Dave Doan, aviation manager for the state Department of Natural Resources, has flown with Reece for 30 years, fighting forest fires and managing the department’s timber.
He said Reece is known throughout the Pacific Northwest as a safe, reliable pilot.
“I felt very comfortable and very safe whenever I was with him,” Doan said. “He never took chances. He never did anything that would scare you or anything like that. Comparing him to other pilots, he was in the top tier.”
As is standard, the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. Reece thinks a chunk of ice slid off the chopper into its air intake valve, instantly killing the engine.
As for flying again, it’s not on the schedule anytime soon.
Reece wears a brace to support his broken bones and gets around with the help of a walker. He sleeps in the hospital bed and is under the watchful eye of his wife. She’s not in any rush to see him return to the skies.
However, flying has always been a part of Reece. Ever since he was a boy he’s been enamored with planes, always dreaming of soaring above the clouds.
And much to his wife’s dismay, the gray-haired grandfather is not sure he can drop the urge to fly.
“God knows,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s hard to tell what an old, dumb guy like me will do.”
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@ heraldnet.com.
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