| karens |
Jan 31st, 2007 01:44 PM |
On a white water trip in Montana, we floated by the capture of an escaped convict. I cut and paste what I wrote about in the trip report:
Our last day we planned a 1/2 day white water rafting ride on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. We knew water levels are down by Aug., but we still had some rapids, and it was a pretty ride. We had a young female guide - born and raised in West Glacier. Toward the end, she told us that the last half mile or so was a float back to the raft company's headquarters and our cars in the parking lot there. Then she commented on a van that was driving down on the right side of the river. She never saw that before, she said. Then two rangers or sheriffs (some sort of law enforcement in unforms) got out and both were holding shotguns. Maybe they are looking for an errant bear, our guide said. I don't know what the one guy was doing, but it looked like he raised his rifle and pointed it right at our raft. Next, we see another sheriff on the left side of the river, also carrying a gun. A young man on our raft said we should ask them what they are doing, so someone called and asked him if he was looking for a mountain lion. "No, human" was his chilling reply. Now, on the inside, I was starting to freak out b/c our raft was literally between the sheriffs on either side of the river, and if anyone started shooting, we were right in the line of fire. (I got to hand it to everyone on our raft, no one panicked, but then no one really understood what was going on, especially our guide. The poor thing never experienced anything like this before). So then we start hearing urgent yelling off in the woods to the right along the lines Get Down. Thankfully we heard no shots fired, and after what seemed like a while, but was really only about 5 or 6 minutes later, we arrived at our pull out point. Back at the offices, a young guide getting ready for the next raft trip told us that there was a car chase down Route 2, and a guy ran out of his car, and ran up to several cars in the parking lot trying to open doors. He wasn't successful, so then he ran along the side of the building and into the woods, where the sheriffs caught him. And they just happened to catch him when our raft was only about 1/4 mile or so away. There was a steady stream of rafts going down this popular river, and the people in the raft before us didn't even see what was going on. They said they heard some yelling, but never saw the law enforcement people with their rifles.
On the drive out (we headed back to Kalispell b/c we were flying out the next day), we saw many sheriffs cars, one scratched pretty badly, surrounding a sedan that looked liked it flipped over several times. But we didn't find out what everything was about until we were in our Hampton Inn and went on-line and checked the local news. The story they reported was that two convicts that had escaped from a Nebraska prison last month were seen in a tavern in Columbia Falls (about 10 miles from West Glacier). When approached, one escaped into the woods, and he is still at large. The other got into a car and led the police on a high speed chase down Route 2, and went right through a barrier set up at West Glacier. He then escaped his car, and then they apprehended him several minutes later. He was wanted for theft, and escape. Originally, 3 men escaped from the Nebraska jail by overpowering a female guard and stealing a car. One of the guys was captured in Wyoming, and it is believed that the other 2 were up near Glacier b/c one of them knew someone up there.
Here we thought we were going up to Montana to "get away from it all".
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