It was 1 a.m. on the dot, December 30, when the borough’s emergency alert went out: just a few minutes after Andrew Letchworth had given up on digging out his car and hunkered down for the night, just a few minutes before Michael George was about to fall asleep.
Near where Mud Bay Road bends around Letnikof, Letchworth had parked his snowed-in car where the wind was the strongest. Parking at the most exposed spot — counter-intuitive, maybe — but he figured he’d rather be on the scoured side of the road than the buried side. Snow-plows would presumably be rumbling through early the next day, not necessarily looking for a white Subaru submerged in one of many piled-up drifts.
Letchworth had been housesitting near Paradise Cove, so he was in familiar territory. At his parking spot, town was not far away on one side, his whole neighborhood just over the hill on the other.
But even there, he was alone. When he called 911 reporting he had become trapped in swiftly building snow, a Haines police dispatcher told him police wouldn’t be coming out to get him. Officers who went out there, Letchworth heard from dispatch, would likely just be getting stuck right alongside him.
In lieu of a police car, the dispatcher sent out a Nixle emergency alert.
“A motorist has been stranded in their vehicle on Mud Bay Rd. past the Letnikof harbor by rapidly building snowdrifts,” it read.
The alert likely reached a lot of silenced phones at that time of night. Some, surely, were still awake, like George, a fellow Mud Bay resident. But George, the owner of a somewhat low-clearance van, warm in his house, looked at his phone and figured it would get taken care of — somehow. “I thought, well, I’m sure somebody’s going out there,” George remembers.
Despite still being on the road that long past midnight, wet and cold and lying down to sleep in his Subaru, Letchworth said he hadn’t gone out for some crazy late-night drive. He had started at a much more normal time of the day — and the whole saga days before, when he started to run low on diesel. He had been completely snowed in for days at the bottom of a long-driveway, unable to get to town to resupply. That, and he promised a friend’s kids they could finally watch the last episodes of Avatar: the Last Airbender together.
So in the early evening he had driven the six-some miles north to town, fueled up, and then watched the animated series with the kids. By around 10 p.m., he was back on the road headed home, later than he wanted to be out — and should’ve been out, he said.
Looking back on it, he said, he had been warned about Letnikof. The stretch right before the cannery was exposed to the weather, the family he was housesitting for had told him. “When it’s bad, get home early,” they said.
Sure enough, approaching Letnikof he pushed through two low snow drifts across the road. Good tires, he said, and a little bit of extra lift, meant his Subaru handled it relatively well.
But on the other side of the drifts there was more snow on the road. And as he continued on, Letchworth realized it was deeper than it looked: a foot deep, across a roughly 40-foot stretch where wind had been dumping it through the night.
At that point, Letchworth wasn’t panicking. “I had a bunch of snow shovels in my car because I had been shoveling roofs,” he said, “so I wasn’t super worried.” He started shoveling out. Almost as soon as he did, the wind seemed to pick up, laying down snow almost as fast as his shovel was clearing it away.
An hour of shoveling got him free of the initial spot where the car had gotten stuck. He turned the car around to make for town, but the landscape on that side had changed too. By then, between Letchworth and town was a snow berm he estimates was somewhere around 10 feet tall. However tall the exact height, what he did know was it was above his head, blocking off the view down the road.
The shovel came back out, and eventually he punched through that first head-height drift, only to reveal another, and then another.
“At that point I was exhausted and soaking wet,” he said. “I was just like, ‘I’m done. I’m going to sleep in the car.’”
Out went his call to dispatch, out went their Nixle alert; Letchworth put on his extra layers and fell asleep.
A few miles away, George had that thought that surely someone else was headed out to help. But doubt crept in. With the doubt came another thought: “Who’s going out?” And then, “If I don’t go out there, nobody is going out there.”
So as Letchworth and most of the rest of town slept, George put on his clothes, grabbed his headlamp, and started the van up Mud Bay Road.
Seeing the state of the road near Letnikof, George parked the van before the cannery and started walking the rest of the way. It was five minutes maybe, or 10 minutes, up to the exposed and snowed-in straightaway.
Sometimes there were yards of visibility, George remembers, maybe 25 yards. Then the wind would shift toward him and his headlamp, and there would be none. It was enough visibility, though, and enough walking after the 10 minutes, for him to decide there was nothing out in the road. Maybe the stranded driver had gotten out on their own, or maybe someone else had helped them. So George, struggling to walk in the gusting wind, turned around and headed back toward the van.
He only made it a few seconds in that direction when doubt crept back in.
“I was challenging myself, just to be thorough,” said George, who grew up in Germany. “I used to not be so thorough. Now, living in Alaska, you learn you have to double check, to make 100% sure you have it all covered. Doing carpentry, fixing a car — I guess it comes with age or something.”
A few minutes later, Letchworth woke up to a knock on the window and a headlamp shining into his face. His first thought was that the police had changed their minds and had come out and gotten him.
But it was George, an acquaintance he knew at that point only as “Michael,” the guy who he had talked to in Mountain Market a couple of times.
“What are you doing here?” were Letchworth’s first words to him.
“He looked like he was going to freeze his face off when he looked in the window,” Letchworth said. “It was cold and pretty stinking windy. I just kept telling him ‘thank you.’”
They drove home in the van. The next day George gave Letchworth a ride back out to Letnikof, where the white Subaru was sitting in the road almost completely snow free.
What was George doing out there? At a time when everyone else was asleep, or unwilling, or unable to venture out?
George compares it to his time on fishing boats. When you’re out at sea and you get a distress call, he said, it doesn’t matter what time, or what place, or how big your boat is. You just go.
“You just have to do it,” George said. “You can’t rely on somebody else to do it.”
And, he added with a laugh, it pays to have a healthy dose of that self-doubt: the kind that made him get in his car, and also turn back around after he had initially stopped looking.
“I’ll just keep doubting myself, and then everything will turn out good.”