PORT ANGELES – A Port Townsend man who lost his way near Hurricane Hill on Saturday was found safe in the freezing, snowy Hurricane Ridge area at about 1 p.m. on Sunday.
Randy Kraxberger, 53, skied out of the wilderness alongside the Olympic National Park search team after having slept in a snow cave overnight with temperatures in the teens.
“I went from the most low recesses to the greatest euphoria when I saw them struggling through the snow toward me,” he said Sunday from the park’s emergency operations center on Park Avenue in Port Angeles.
When he heard rescuers’ voices in the early afternoon on Sunday, he didn’t know whether to believe his ears.
“I thought, is this real?” he said.
Kraxberger – who is on a winter break from his job as a commercial halibut and black cod fisherman in Alaska, living in Port Townsend, his home for 26 years – set out to simply enjoy a day’s cross-country skiing up to Hurricane Hill, which is past the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center.
He had skied, alone, to the summit of Hurricane Hill before weather conditions worsened.
In white-out conditions and high wind, Kraxberger lost sight of the trail and wasn’t sure where he was.
“It had started snowing and the tracks got covered up fairly fast, and I got a little disoriented, thinking I was a little further east than I actually was,” he said.
He called his wife of 30 years, Lisa Enarson, on his cell phone at about 3:15 p.m. Saturday, asking her for the Visitor Center phone number.
Enarson phoned the park headquarters and rangers began a search with a team of 12 rescuers on skis.
Kraxberger made sporadic cell-phone contact with searchers, but the phone cut off after only a few words, said Larry Nickey, park emergency operations coordinator, on Saturday .
His phone did not have a GPS locator, Nickey said.
Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said Saturday that two searchers had tried skiing beyond the section of road that serves as the cross-country ski trail, but that they turned around because of wind gusts of 45 mph, low visibility and high avalanche danger.
