Annual river survey turns into rescue of man who fell

Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 16, 2026

QUEETS — A man was rescued from a remote canyon in the Queets River corridor when two river technicians from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife passed near him while they were surveying a narrow stretch of Matheny Creek.

On May 5, the two technicians, Noah Collell and supervisor Jacob Portnoy, were on a supplemental steelhead survey, which happens only once a year. The survey had been delayed by one week. The surveys, which happen on rivers across the Olympic Peninsula, are an opportunity to index redds, or fish nests.

To get to the site, Collell and Portnoy, who are based in Forks, drove south on U.S. Highway 101 to mile marker 138 before they drove 30 to 40 minutes on a U.S. Forest Service road. The area the two would survey was not accessible by trail.

They pulled off on a nondescript dirt road shoulder, dressed in dry suits and felt boots, and bushwhacked their way downhill through the woods.

After a short time, the two came upon a steep elk trail and made their way toward Matheny Creek.

“While we were climbing down in there, both me and Jacob heard something,” Collell said. “It kind of just sounded like an animal. It was so far away, you could barely hear it.”

Portnoy reached the base of the trail first. The sound was slightly louder but still dampened by the moving water of the creek.

“You could just barely hear someone say, ‘Help,’” Collell said.

The man was probably yelling, but from where Portnoy stood, it was still very quiet.

“So Jacob sees him,” Collell said. “He calls out back to them and sees an arm raise out of this grass and wave at him.”

Portnoy waited at the bottom of the trail for Collell before the two walked up the creek together and crossed it to reach the man.

“Sure enough, there’s a man who had fallen about 50 feet into this heavily forested canyon,” Collell said.

The two have wilderness first aid training. They concluded that the man should not be moved. The middle-aged man had fallen the previous night. Collell believed the man was doing contract research work with a private sector company.

“He was very coherent, he wasn’t bleeding, but from the injuries he did have, he could not move,” Collell said. “We couldn’t get him out of there by ourselves, and we definitely should not move him. He needed a stretcher to minimize damage to him.”

The two decided the best plan of action would be to keep Collell with the man and have Portnoy run back to his truck to drive until he could get cellphone service. From there, he could provide more information than their satellite communication devices would allow.

“Like even how to get in there,” Collell said. “So Jacob ran out of there, lickety-split, and I stayed behind with the citizen.”

Collell described Portnoy as athletic and an avid hunter who knows the area well.

The man, who had been lying there overnight, initially refused a first aid blanket. When the man started shivering, Collell insisted.

“He didn’t want to take it because he felt bad,” Collell said. “I told him, ‘It’s the cheapest thing in the packet, it doesn’t matter.’”

The man was coherent and very grateful to be found. He was not expecting anyone to show up in the untrafficked area. The two talked about books and movies and “everything under the sun” while they waited.

Generally stable, the man started having pain in his legs while they waited.

Within about an hour and a half, Portnoy led Grays Harbor County Sheriff’s deputy Dakota Taylor to the scene. The rescue was right on the border between Jefferson County and Grays Harbor County.

With the obscurity of the location, the steepness of the path and the slippery rocks, Portnoy devised a way to mark the path.

“It was going to be very easy for some of the rescuers to need rescuing, because it’s very rough terrain,” Collell said.

Portnoy took the flagging tape, typically used to mark redds on fish surveys, and marked the path.

“Very good thinking on his part that worked very, very well,” Collell said.

A search and rescue member from the Quinault Tribe arrived with a dog, followed by volunteer firefighters and additional search and rescue crews.

As responders arrived at the base of the elk trail, many were unprepared for the creek.

“Most everyone was not prepared for the creek, so there was a lot of slipping involved,” Collell said.

Collell and Portnoy, in their dry suits and felt-bottomed boots, ferried equipment and people across the water. Collell noted that though the water was only about shin deep and not moving very fast, the creek bed was covered in slippery, algae-covered stones.

Rescuers set up a rope-and-pulley system and brought a stretcher down in pieces. Then a leader of the search and rescue crew notified the group that there would be no helicopter.

“Right as we were about to lift him up, we heard a helicopter in the distance,” Collell said.

A Navy helicopter arrived, though the dense canopy made communication difficult. A responder in an orange jacket finally got their attention by waving from the middle of the creek.

“They start descending, and it starts dropping down two Navy medics,” Collell said. “The issue was that the rotor-wash from it just blasted down. There was a bunch of debris and everything flying everywhere. So we all huddled over the citizen to make sure he was OK and that he wasn’t going to be hit by all of this debris flying around.”

The Navy medics took over care, and the ground crew was instructed to hike out. In the base camp that had assembled on the dirt road, Collell said there were 40 to 50 people from various agencies.

Collell said he hopes the best for the man, whose condition he did not know. He reflected on the sheer unlikelihood of the rescue.

“Besides falling into that canyon, which is very unlucky, that guy had insane luck,” Collell said. “If we did that a week earlier, we would never have found him.”

If the two had entered on the other side of the creek, they would have missed him, he continued.

“If he was asleep because he was there all night, or unconscious, never would have known he was there,” he said. “The fact that it was coming off that warm weather that came through, so he wasn’t freezing in that canyon all night, I mean, it’s just boggling to think that it worked out that way.”

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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.