On Saturday, March 11th, 1967, a single-engine Cessna set off from Portland bound for San Francisco, on what was supposed to be a relatively short and routine flight. However, several hours into their flight, they encountered a freak storm that would cause the plane to crash on a literal mountain side. Miraculously, all of the occupants would survive the initial crash, but what they would go on to endure in the next few weeks would be one of the most prolonged and grueling ordeals in the history of the region.
This was so much so that would forever change the course of aviation. This is their horrifying story, and as always, viewer discretion is advised. [intro music] Alvin Oien was the proud owner of a Cessna 195. This is an older but actually quite elegant-looking four-seater model compared to today’s more boxy Cessnas, but for Alvin, the plane’s real value wasn’t in its looks; it was what was inside it and what it allowed him to do.
Alvin had a blended family with his wife, Phyllis, who brought her daughter, Carla, into the fold, alongside Alvin’s adult sons from a previous marriage. One of those sons, 3-year-old Alvin Jr., was scheduled for a layover in San Francisco, making it the perfect excuse for Alvin and his family to fly down and see him.
Because after all, what’s the point of owning a plane if you don’t use it to spend time with family? Now, by 59, Alvin had already lived a full life. He started out as a lumberjack— mastering survival, and hiking in the wilderness before becoming the owner of the Clifford Hotel in Portland. That business now supported his family, giving him the freedom to enjoy time with them and pursue his hobbies— one of which was flying.
Accounts say he was very particular about his plane, insisting that he do the cleaning and much of the maintenance himself. Joining Alvin on this trip was 44-year-old Phyllis, who was a nursing graduate from Northwestern University, and 15-year-old Carla, who was less than thrilled about the flight. She would’ve much rather spent the weekend with her boyfriend, but Alvin Junior’s busy schedule as a Delta Air Lines pilot meant opportunities to see him were rare.
So on Saturday, March 11th, 1967, they took off for San Francisco. Unfortunately, despite Alvin’s experience as an outdoorsman and his reputation for being a careful pilot, the family survival kit was somehow left behind. Whether it was forgotten in the rush to meet Alvin Jr. or simply overlooked, it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.
It was a short, familiar route Alvin had flown many times before. But it’s hard to overstate how unlucky this would soon be realized to be. About halfway through the flight, Alvin made routine radio contact near Medford, Oregon, about five miles west of the city. Their next stop was the town of Red Bluff to refuel before the final leg of their 860-kilometer journey to San Francisco.
Now in the 1960s, although navigation for private pilots wasn’t as advanced as today, one thing that is common between now and then is the use of visual landmarks. Even now, many pilots use highways, rivers, train tracks, and other landmarks as visual guides— just simple lines to follow. If you ever noticed a Cessna flying parallel to a highway while driving, you’ve seen this in action.
And Alvin would’ve done the same relying on his eyes, but before they could get close to Red Bluff, the weather changed completely and stole any false sense of security Alvin might’ve had. In moments, they were in a full whiteout blizzard. Soon enough, not only did he lose any visual reference to the ground, and not only was ice beginning to accumulate on the wings, but a strong wind started blowing them westward towards the ocean and away from the landmarks he’d been using, even if he could have seen them.
This is one of the worst situations a civil pilot can face and is responsible for nearly half of all civil aviation crashes. It’s something known as VFR into IMC or “Visual Flight Rules into Instrument Meteorological Conditions”. This essentially means flying into a storm, visibility would be bad while relying only on visual navigation.
As you might imagine, this is the worst possible combination. So although Alvin wasn’t inexperienced and would’ve done his best to stay on course, with only a compass heading and no visual landmarks outside the windows, he had no way of realizing they had drifted over 20 kilometers, or 12 miles off course and into the Trinity Mountains.
As the harsh winds and growing ice pushed Alvin and his family down out of the sky, a mountain came up through the storm right in front of them. This left him with no choice but to make a hard surprise landing on a literal mountainside. This is something in which in a vast majority of crashes, would’ve ended in the worst way possible for all involved.
But instead, somehow, miraculously, he managed to land the plane, and everyone survived the impact. Thanks to some mix of skill and luck, Alvin proved he was far more than just a casual hobbyist. But in spite of their initial survival, their ordeal was just beginning. They were now alone with no idea where they were.
As Alvin unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and tried to gather his bearings, his first instincts may have been to check for the smell of leaking aviation fuel. But what soon must have become more pressing was that he had a broken arm, multiple crushed ribs on his right side, pain in his spine, a cut to his chin, and three across his forehead.
It must have hurt just to breathe, never mind crawl around inside a crash plane. And Phyllis was even less mobile. She’d suffered a broken left wrist and left ankle in the crash; cuts to her right hand and brain fog from a possible head injury, severely limit her ability to move around or use her nursing skills to tend to the others.
Maybe the only luck they had other than surviving the crash in the first place was that Carla, although badly bruised and shaken, was otherwise unharmed. As the only one among them without broken limbs, she was now invaluable to their survival. And between the three of them, initially, Alvin must have thought they had what it took to survive.
He knew how to live outdoors, his wife was a nurse, and their daughter was still able-bodied. He probably felt dumb for having left the survival kit, but otherwise, they could do this. But as he reached for the plane’s console and checked the systems, he discovered that both radios were broken in the crash.
This meant that they couldn’t call for help and the plane was in a bad state. It was turned over on its left side, the windows were smashed, and the door on top didn’t close properly, letting in the cold winter winds. And without the survival kit, which included everything from emergency food to a hunting rifle and a flare gun, they needed help more than ever.
Unfortunately, though, given the circumstances, they would have to wait to be found on the side of a mountain in a blizzard, by people who had no idea where to look. Hours later, when the plane didn’t arrive at Red Bluff, a series of calls went out and soon escalated into a full-blown emergency effort with the Air Force, Civil Air Patrol, and Oregon Pilots Association.
Meanwhile, as this effort began, the weather still wasn’t cooperating with the searchers any more than the lost family. And beyond that, the rescuers had no idea where between Medford and Red Bluff, the plane had gone down. That’s a distance of 245 kilometers, or 152 miles. And beyond just the distance, how much the plane might have been blown off course.
If rescuers assumed the plane could have drifted just 20 kilometers off its intended path, that meant scouring a massive 4,900 square kilometers of wilderness. Expanding that radius to 30 kilometers increased the searcher to a staggering 7,350 square kilometers, with most of it being dense forests, rugged mountains, deep lakes, and uninhabited terrain.
And what was unknown to everyone at the time was that is exactly how far they’d have to look. The plane had crashed on the north face of Bully Choop Mountain— a full 30 kilometers west of Redding which is one of the navigational points down to Red Bluff. And worse still, the side of the mountain was covered in trees and minute by minute, receiving more and more snowfall, making the plane even harder to see.
Meanwhile, back in the mountain side itself, Phyllis woke up the next morning with frostbite already on her toes and the whole family in a miserable state. By then, they almost have known that though they survived, their wait would be grueling. All the family had to eat was about one picnic’s worth of food.
This included a few sandwiches, three jars of jelly, some lemon drops, two bags of M&M’s, some milk of magnesia tablets, and some vitamin pills. Obviously, not exactly a feast, but it was something, and they smartly began rationing them immediately. They also hung up sheets and pieces of clothing to cover the broken windows, but it became a constant fight against the wind to keep them in place and maintain some kind of shelter.
Back in San Francisco, it wasn’t long before Alvin Jr. heard about the crash, given that he was expecting them. But unlike many people in his position, he was actually in a position to do something about it. Junior then went up to Redding and volunteered for a search effort as soon as he could, joining them in flying search and rescue missions.
This was actually something he had done previously during his time in the US Air Force. Because truly, in some ironic twist of fate, the family seemed to have everything they needed to try and survive, except for working radio. And as the days passed, nothing got easier. The storm refused to leave, and while there were occasionally a few hours here and there, otherwise, there was rarely even a full day of clear skies anywhere along the search.
Instead, search flights needed to dance around the storm schedule peeking through gaps and grounding again, or shifting where they worked as new fronts came in. On the third day after the crash, Carla made an attempt to leave the plane and search nearby, but the heavy snowfall drove her back in zero visibility.
Even worse, she also lost her shoes in the attempt. Two days later, so five days into their isolation, Alvin had recovered enough that he felt able to move, but day after day, the snow hadn’t stopped. It was up to his armpits at this point, and it was more like swimming than walking to get through it, making it impossible to stay dry or warm.
But again, as the days passed, he knew he had to try anyway. The food was down to the final jar of jelly, and his family was gonna die there otherwise. So he bundled up as best he could and set off down the mountain face, hoping that it was the right direction. Carla and Phyllis could hear him calling back for the first little while as he made progress, until he yelled that he made it across a gully safely.
At that point, he was out of earshot, so the mother and daughter sat alone, waiting and hoping he would find someone. And up above, Alvin Jr. was hoping for the exact same. He was by then part of a team of 165 people, three ground search teams, and 45 different search aircraft. And as impossible as the tasks seemed, he refused to give up.
Day after day, in cloud and stormy weather, he went back out again and again. But then, another week passed, and Alvin never came back, and no rescuers found him. At some point during this, Phyllis wrote down in the margins of a flight notebook Carla had been using as a diary, that she was worried he hadn’t made it.
And by the end of the second week, the rescuers thought the same with them and called off the search after nearly 600 hours of flight time across hundreds of trips. Alvin Jr., however, refused and kept flying search missions on and on as the storm continued. And this continued for eight weeks. In the meantime, Carla and Phyllis cut the upholstery of the plane to make cards to pass the time.
They also continued to do things they’d done when Alvin was there, like making lists of food they want to eat, things they’d want to do, gifts they’d like to have, and places they’d like to see when they made it back. But as you might imagine, it can be hard holding onto hope when you’ve gone over a month without food, melting water and ice with your own body heat just so you can drink more and fill your stomach.
On the 30th of April, so almost two months after crashing, Carla wrote: “This is my 16th birthday. I hope you’re happy, search and rescue. You haven’t found us yet.” As grim as this was, this seemed to be a bit of sarcasm, because in the same entry, her birthday wish was that they would find her. Obviously, if anyone had license to be sarcastic at that point, it would certainly be her.
Beside these comments or lists, Carla circled each day that passed on the notebook’s calendar and commented regularly on the weather. In all, only two days at the crash site had clear sunny skies; the bad weather was just relentless. And then, four days later, on the 4th of May, the final entry was: ”
It’s a bright and drippy, drippy day. We are completely soaked…” After that, the calendar stopped, and one message stated that they were becoming too weak to keep updating the calendar and that they would probably only survive a little longer. So we don’t know exactly when they died, but they did. Afterward, their bodies lay there frozen and unmoving, but the story continued even without them.
Because although they survived at least 54 days, Alvin Jr. flew flight after flight after flight for 107 days. It was only on the 26th of June that he was finally forced to give up the search as his savings were running low and he needed to return to work. Months passed afterward until the first week of October when Floyd Bolling, a hunter in search of deer, stumbled upon the plane’s wreck.
It was buried in the trees 5,000 feet up the mountain in a spot so dense that there was practically no chance of a search and rescue flight seeing them, even without over four feet of snow in the ground. Then, after searching around, nearby were the bones of two bodies pulled apart by animals and a book.
This was the FAA flight log that Carly used as a makeshift diary, detailing everything about their time in the mountain. Alvin Jr. then came back to Redding and sold the diary’s contents to The Saturday Evening Post to spread Carla’s story. His two brothers also joined him, and then the three set off into the woods camping at the crash site as they continued searching for their father.
He just had to be there somewhere, and they needed to find him. Some sources say they still had to hope he was alive, but from the crash site, it was only eight miles to the nearest highway. Had he been able to move, Alvin surely would’ve been found by then. It is unclear if this was a little journalistic embellishment or if the brothers didn’t wanna admit out loud what they surely already knew.
But in neither case, they didn’t find anything and eventually had to return to work for the sake of their own families. It wouldn’t be until the 23rd of September, 1969, so two years later, when two deer hunters came across the remains of Alvin and how tragically close he’d made it and how hard he tried.
Alvin’s body was only about 40 feet from the road, and he must have been drawn to the telephone poles running along it. Before he died, he’d made an arrow on the ground out of tree branches, pointing towards the crash site in hopes that someone from the area or driving by would see it. He even hung his gloves on a tree in hopes that it might catch someone’s eyes they drove past, but no one noticed.
As the crow flies, he was only about a quarter mile, or about 400 meters from the crash site when he finally froze to death. And maybe even more tragically, it’s entirely possible that his sons had walked through that very field on multiple occasions and simply missed him in the grass. But two years later, all that was there for hunters to find were scraps of clothing bones, two shoes, slowly turning into moss, a ballpoint pen from the Clifford Hotel engraved with Alvin’s name, his glasses, and strangely, a camera.
Maybe he meant to use it and try and document his path to show rescuers the way of the plane, but there doesn’t seem to be any reference to what, if anything, survived on the film. In the aftermath of everything, to say that Alvin Jr. was critical of the rescue effort, would be an understatement. He called it disorganized, poorly managed, and generally unprepared.
They gave up too easily, he thought, and could and should have been better prepared. But then, in addition to that, there were other steps that could have been taken to prevent this. It wasn’t required at the time for civil aviation to have emergency locator beacons. They were still an optional extra, usually ranging from $1–$300, and with some models going as high as $800.
But had the family had one, they would’ve been rescued within just a couple of hours. And most of that time would’ve been walking just the half mile from the nearest road to get to the plane. This is where Carla’s diary would play a crucial role. Colorado Senator Peter Dominic read her story in the newspaper.
And being a former member of the US Air Force himself, it must have been easy for him to imagine going out and searching for his own family month after month, praying he would find them. So with the help of some of his peers, including Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington State, he introduced something known as Carla’s Law to make emergency locator transmitters mandatory in civil aviation, just as they were in commercial planes.
Finally, in December of 1970, President Nixon signed Federal Aviation Requirement 91.207 into law. And three years later, it will become mandatory for all civil aviation planes that wish to make use of government-funded airports to have emergency beacons on them. Carla’s journal and the combined efforts of her family have since indirectly saved the lives of thousands of people who would otherwise not have received medical attention quickly enough or be found at all.
Her tragic journal put a human face to a problem and helped it get fixed. We should all be so lucky. If you made it this far, thanks so much for watching. If you have a story suggestion, feel free to submit it to the form found in the description. Also, in case you weren’t already aware, if you wanna listen to the audio-only version of these videos, you can listen wherever you listen to podcasts.
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