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Four Days Under Snow: The Watch That Kept Him Talking · Survival Stories 24/7

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Card was three inches by five inches, laminated, written in
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: blue ink. Michelle Reed read it once, standing on the
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: shoulder of Forest Route 7 in the Idaho mountains, and
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: then read it again, alive below. Watch ticking equals I
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: am here. Follow pole to slab edge, four feet down.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: She had driven out that morning, looking for a septic
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: access cover. She found something else entirely. The ski pole
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: standing upright in the snow was zip-tied to a laminated
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: index card. Below that pole four feet, and two inches
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: of compacted avalanche debris separated a living man from the
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: open air. That man had been down there for five days,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: one hour, and seven minutes. He had not lost consciousness once,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: and the mechanical watch on his left wrist was still running.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: What follows is the story of how Duane Bishop survived
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: roughly 121 hours under the snow in Harmon County, Idaho,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: and how the tools that saved him were never designed
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: for that purpose. Dwayne Bishop was 44 years old in
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the spring of 2019. He ran a remodeling company out
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: of Boise, the kind of small operation built on referrals
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: and repeat clients where your reputation is the business. People
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: who worked with him or hired him described the same quality.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: He showed up exactly when he said he would, not
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: roughly on time. Exactly. That precision extended to everything around him.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: His truck was organized. His bids were detailed. His callbacks
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: were same day. His ex-wife, Pamela, who lives six blocks
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: from him in Boise, could tell you that he locked
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: every door of any building he entered. Front, back, side.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Not from anxiety. From habit. It was the same instinct
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: that made him a reliable contractor. Close the loop. Every time.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: He had been skiing the Sawback Range since he was
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: a teenager. The terrain around Feather Gulch was not new
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: to him. He knew the elevation bands. He knew how
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the wind loaded the cornices on north-facing aspects. and he
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: had checked the avalanche forecast before he left. The forecast
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: that morning, the 4th of May, rated the danger as
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: considerable on north aspects above 7,000 feet. Duane had verified
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: the slope he intended to ski-sad at 7,150 feet, below
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: the threshold. He signed the Harmon County Forest Station Register
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: at 8.14 in the morning. Temperature, 20, 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Sky clear. His pack was the kind a careful person carries.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Two energy bars. A water bottle. A headlamp. a folding saw,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: a first aid kit, a space blanket, a lighter, and
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: two things that would later seem almost impossible, a small
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: stack of index cards, and a box of thermal laminating pouches,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: left over, according to later accounts, from a home office
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: project the previous autumn. He had never fully separated his
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: work habits from his time outdoors. The laminator pouches were
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: just there, the way a contractor always has a marker
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: in his jacket pocket. His daughter Nora, 17, was spending
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: that weekend with Pamela. His friend Tim Okafor owned the
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: cabin at Feather Gulch, a place Duane had used before.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: A reliable base at roughly 6,000 feet elevation, Tim had
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: given him open access. The plan was straightforward. Ski Saturday,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: sleep at the cabin, drive back Sunday by 10.40 on
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: May 4th. Duane Bishop had not returned. The cornice released
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: on its own. At 7,150 feet, just below the forecast threshold,
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Dwayne had checked. A natural fracture sent a wall of
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: snow down the slope, 600 feet of run, a debris
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: field roughly the size of a football field. Dwayne was
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: caught at the left lateral margin, near a stand of
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: mature fir trees, and buried under approximately four feet of
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: consolidated debris. He was 320 feet from where the slope
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: had caught him. He did not lose consciousness. That detail
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: is not a footnote. It is the axis around which
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: everything that followed turned. Four feet of consolidated snow pressed
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: down on every surface he could touch. Dwayne Bishop knew
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the weight was not going anywhere. He also knew, at
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: 1040 on the morning of May 4th, 2019, that he
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: was alive and thinking clearly. Those two facts were the
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: only material he had to work with. The debris had
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: caught him at the left lateral margin of the field,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: near a stand of mature fir trees. He had not
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: chosen that spot. The avalanche chose it for him, but
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: the trees mattered in ways he could not yet know.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: and would not fully understand until much later. He ran
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: a body inventory. Left ankle. Wrong. He could feel the
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: fracture through the cold. Three toes on that foot were
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: going numb in a way that was different from ordinary cold.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: He filed both facts and set them aside. There was
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: no intervention available, so the injury was simply information. The
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: air pocket around his face was small, 15 to 18 liters,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: by later estimates. Enough, in theory, for 30 to 45
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: minutes of consciousness. He was still breathing after hour one,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: after hour six. After the first full night passed and
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: the snow above him compressed further and he was still
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: pulling oxygen from somewhere, the physics of what was sustaining
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: him began to shift from what he could see to
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: what he could not. The fir trees, their root systems
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: had been in that ground for decades, compressing and channeling
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: the soil in ways that created a sub-pack airflow corridor
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: along the forest floor. When the debris settled around their base,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: The roots acted as a structural bridge, holding a gap,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: creating a channel that connected to Dwayne's pocket. Avalanche Science
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: recognizes this effect. It cannot reliably predict which specific site
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: will produce it. Dwayne happened to be buried in one
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: of those sites. He did not know that yet. He
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: knew only that he was breathing. By the time the
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: sun went down on May 4th, Tim O'Coffer was on
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the phone with someone from the county, reporting that Dwayne
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: had not checked in. Tim mentioned the cabin's back door.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: He had found it unlocked. That detail traveled through the
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: system and landed at the wrong conclusion. A county deputy
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: arrived at the cabin the following morning, May 5th. What
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: he found? Back door open. Dwayne's bag on the bed.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Dwayne's car in the lot. The deputy wrote it up
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: as an overnight excursion. Not urgent. He moved on to
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: other calls. That classification would cost the search approximately 18 hours.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: The error was correctable, but only if someone pushed back.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: On May 6th, Jennifer Callahan's team reached Pamela Bishop. Pamela
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: said something simple and absolute. Dwayne locked every door, every time. Back, front, car,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: storage unit. It was not a habit. It was a rule.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: An unlocked back door did not mean Dwayne had stepped
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: out for an evening walk. It meant something had gone
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: wrong before he returned. Callahan pulled the trail register on
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: May 7th. Entry at 8.14 in the morning on May 4th.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: No exit. The register had been sitting there for three
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: days with a single line written in it. and no
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: follow-up line to match it. That morning, a hiker named
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Scott Feeley gave a statement. He had been in the
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: area on May 4th. He had noticed a debris field
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: that looked freshly released. He had assumed natural cause and
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: had not reported it. Callahan received that information at 6.15
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: in the evening of May 7th. Four days after the avalanche,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: that was when the search had a location. By dawn
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: on May 8th, two probe teams were working the debris
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: field in a grid pattern. They moved systematically. They were thorough.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: They found nothing. The reason was geometric. The probe teams
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: were working the center and upper portions of the field,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: where debris was thickest and most concentrated. Dwayne was at
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the far left margin, near the treeline. 320 feet from
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: where the slope had originally caught him, the probes never
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: reached him. Below the snow, Dwayne had been measuring time
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: with the only instrument he had. The mechanical watch on
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: his left wrist ran on a mainspring that required no battery.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: No sunlight. No signal. It ticked whether he moved or not.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: He used it the way a contractor uses a sight clock.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Not for comfort, but for structure. Hour markers. Decision windows.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: He divided the darkness into manageable units. At some point
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: around the third day, records and later accounts placed this
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: in the range of May 6th or 7th. Pretty 60 up,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: he made a decision that required him to give up something.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: In exchange for a chance he could not measure, he
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: took his ski pole. He secured the laminated index card
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: to the grip end using a zip tie from his pack.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The card read, alive below. Watch ticking equals I am here.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Follow pole to slab edge. Four feet down, he sealed
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: the laminating pouch with his lighter. Then he pushed the
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: pole upward through the snow, using what leverage his body
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: position allowed until resistance stopped him. He had no way
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: to know which end was up. The basket might be
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: pointing at the sky. The grip with the card might
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: be buried. He had done what he could do And
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: then he waited. On the morning of May 9th, Michelle
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: Reed was driving a service truck along Forest Route 7.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Her job that day was septic system inspection. She was
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: looking for an access lid set into the ground near
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: a property line. She was not looking for a ski pole.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: She was not looking for anything unusual. She saw it anyway.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: A pole standing at an angle in the snow at
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the edge of a debris field. Something attached near the top.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: She pulled over. She walked to it. She read the
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: card once. Then again. Then a third time. The text
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: was in blue ink block letters, sealed behind laminate. Alive below.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: Watch ticking equals I aim here. Follow pole to slab edge.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Four feet down. She called it in. Callahan's team reached
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: the site approximately 40 minutes later. A probe went into
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the snow at the base of the pole, angled toward
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: the slab edge, as the card instructed. Positive resistance at
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: four feet two inches. Not the dense resistance of packed debris.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: The resistance of a person. They dug by hand at 11.47
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: in the morning on May 9th, 2019. Five days, one hour,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: and seven minutes after the cornice released, Dwayne Bishop came
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: out of the snow. He was conscious. He was speaking
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: in complete sentences. One of the first things he asked
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: was whether his car had been ticketed His left ankle
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: was fractured Three toes showed moderate frostbite He had lost
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: an estimated 11 pounds The mechanical watch on his left
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: wrist was still running The grip end of the ski
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: pole The end with the card Had been pointing upward
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: He had not known that when he pushed it He
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: found out later Picture what the debris field looked like
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: on the morning of May 8th, when the probe teams
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: worked it. A football field of compressed white, sloping away
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: from the treeline. Wind smoothed at the surface. No visible disturbance.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: The teams moved through the center in disciplined rows. Their
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: probes went down 12, 14, 16 times per grid square.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: They were looking for a body, specifically for the resistance signature.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: A body produces in consolidated snow. They were not finding
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: it because Dwayne was not in the center. He was
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: at the margin where the debris was shallower and less uniform,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: where the fur roots had altered the pack structure, where
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: the probe pattern had not yet reached. One version of
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: what happened at that margin is simply bad geometry. The
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: search was calibrated for the most probable burial zone, which
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: is statistically the center of a debris field. Duane's position,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: caught at the lateral edge rather than the main channel,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: was a lower probability outcome. The teams were not wrong
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: to start at the center. They ran out of time
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: before they reached the edge. But that version doesn't hold
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: all the weight you need it to. Because the probe
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: teams were also testing for body resistance specifically, not for
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: air pocket signatures, not for structural anomalies in the snow.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: The fur-root corridor that was keeping Duane alive was actively
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: making his location harder to identify by standard probe. The
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: thing that saved him was the same thing that made
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: him hardest to find. And underneath that is the detail
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: that recontextualizes everything else. The laminating pouches in his pack.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: They were not survival gear. They were office supplies. left
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: over from a home project the previous autumn. They were
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: there because Dwayne Bishop never fully separated his work habits
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: from his outdoor habits the way a contractor always has
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: a marker in his jacket pocket, those pouches, and the
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: zip tie he used to secure the card, and the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: index cards he had brought without specific purpose. None of
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: those objects were in his pack because he planned for this.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: They were there because of who he was before any
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: of this happened. The probe teams were looking for a man.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: The card on the pole described exactly where to find him,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: In the language of a construction site, measurement, location, instruction.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Follow pole to slab edge. Four feet down. The man
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: who wrote it had spent 20 years telling crews where
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: to dig and how deep to go. When he needed
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: to communicate across five feet of snow to rescuers he
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: could not see and could not hear, he wrote it
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: the way he would write a work order. Michelle Reed
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: was not a searcher. She was not part of Callahan's team.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: She was looking for a septic access lid. The note
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: was not addressed to her. It was addressed to anyone.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: That is what made it work. They found him at
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: four feet two inches. The probe hit resistance at that depth,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: and Jennifer Callahan's team switched from sounding rods to hands.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: They dug by hand because a shovel blade can injure
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: someone very close to the surface, and they already knew
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: from the card that he was close. The snow came
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: out in blocks. The blocks were dense and gray-white, the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: compacted kind that forms when a slab consolidates under pressure.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: And then one of the excavators called out, and the
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: digging stopped. and Dwayne Bishop's face appeared in the hole.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: He was conscious. He was speaking in complete sentences. The
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: first thing he asked was whether his car had been ticketed.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: He had been under four feet two inches of consolidated
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: avalanche debris for five days, one hour, and seven minutes,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: and that was his first question. The rescuers left. The
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: date was May 9th, 2019. The time was 1147 in
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: the morning. His left ankle was fractured. Three toes on
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: his left foot had moderate frostbite. He had lost an
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: estimated 11 pounds. The mechanical watch on his left wrist,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the same watch that had kept his sense of time
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: from dissolving entirely in the dark, was still running. Not symbolic. Running.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: The hands were moving. The mechanism had continued through five
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: days of burial and sub-freezing debris, and it had not stopped.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: That detail, of all the details in this story, is
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: the one that keeps returning. Not because a watch surviving
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: is remarkable in any mechanical sense. Because Dwayne had used
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: it to organize his thinking. to count intervals, to resist
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: the collapse of time that total darkness creates. The watch
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: did not save him, but it kept him from losing
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: himself while everything else tried to take him apart. He
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: was transported to St. Luke's Regional Medical Center in Boise.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: He was discharged five days later. On May 14th, he
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: went home. Six weeks after that, Dwayne Bishop walked into
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: his Tuesday night bowling league wearing an orthopedic boot on
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: his left foot. He did not improve his average that season.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: He said later that he was fine with that. There
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: is something in that detail. The orthopedic boot. The unchanged average.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: The Tuesday night routine. Resumed. That carries more weight than
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: it seems to at first. The avalanche at Feather Gulch
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: was a natural event. The cornice released on its own.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: Below the threshold Dwayne had checked that morning. No one
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: caused it. No one failed to warn him in a
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: way that was clearly required. The sequence of what went
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: wrong afterward. The unlocked door. Misread the eighteen hours lost.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: The probe teams working the wrong quadrant. was a series
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: of reasonable errors that compounded in the worst possible direction.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: That is not a comfortable thing to sit with, because
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: there is no one place to put the weight of it.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: What remains is the record of what worked. A woman
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: named Michelle Reed was driving Forest Route 7 looking for
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: a septic access lid. She saw a ski pole standing
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: upright at the edge of a debris field. She stopped.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: She read the card three times. She called it in.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: The card said, ALIVE BELOW WATCH TICKING EQUALS I AM
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: HERE Follow Paul the slab edge, four feet down. Dwayne
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Bishop had written it with a blue ink pen, sealed
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: it in a laminating pouch he had heated shut with
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: a lighter, and pushed it toward the surface. On day three,
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: not knowing if the grip end or the basket end
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: was pointing up, not knowing if anyone would come down
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: that road, not knowing if the card was visible or buried,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: he pushed it because it was the only thing left
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: to do. The laminating pouches were in his pack because
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: of a home project he had finished the previous autumn.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: The zip tie was there because he was a contractor,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: and contractors keep zip ties. The index cards were there
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: for no reason he could have named before that morning.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: None of it was survival gear. All of it saved
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: his life. There is a version of the story where
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: the pole tips the wrong way, where Michelle Reed takes
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: a different route, where the probe team reaches the left
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: margin before the search is called. The record does not
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: tell that version. It tells the one where a 44-year-old
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: man from Boise spent five days in the dark, kept
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: count of the hours by the sound of a mechanical watch,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: and used the tools of his ordinary working life to
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: write his way out. The watch was still running when
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: they pulled him free. That is the part that does
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: not leave. This show is made by Oboe Media.