Cruel Mountain

Duluth Radio-TV Executive Dalton LeMasurier, 47, and his wife Dorothy, 45, were accustomed to traveling as they pleased, but this junket seemed even better than usual. Flying their own twin-engine Beechcraft, they had left Minnesota for Florida to arrange the return of their 62-ft. cabin cruiser Caprice (which they sailed south last fall), then visited a married daughter in El Paso. In Pasadena they visited their lonesome actor-son Ronald, treated him to a steak dinner. The following day they were homeward bound, leisurely droning the miles northeast across Wyoming's rugged mountains.

While Dorothy thumbed the Saturday Evening Post, her pilot-husband radioed ahead to Rawlins, Wyo. for the weather, learned that a vicious storm front was spreading across surrounding Carbon County. As they flew through the grey fringes of the storm at 8,200 ft., Dorothy heard the engines sputter; then her husband shouted: "Hang on, darling, we're going to crash!"

Down Through Snow. The Beechcraft dipped and fell, slid heavily into a steep mountainside, shearing off the starboard engine and wing. As flames lashed at the cabin, the LeMasuriers scrambled to safety, narrowly escaped the exploding fuel tanks. Then a rainstorm squall broke and put out the fire. Although they did not know it, the LeMasuriers had crashed only a mile upslope from a sheepherder's camp on Ferris Mountain (9,500 ft.), 40 miles north of Rawlins.

Confident of quick rescue, they gathered together their slim rations (three pieces of chocolate, a bottle of protein and calcium tablets) and salvaged clothing, holed up for several nights in a shelter rigged from signal-flare parachutes, kept their feet warm in below-freezing temperatures by tucking them into an oversized insulated ice bucket. Although Dalton had suffered a head injury in the crash, it seemed minor; they decided to strike out down the slope through the waist-deep snow. Pausing to rest on a ledge, the exhausted couple rigged a shaky windbreak and decided to stay put. There Dalton LeMasurier died of a brain hemorrhage.

Upon a Hunch. Alone against the mountain, Dorothy LeMasurier kept her wits about her. She carefully covered her husband with part of a parachute. She put a red sweater on a pole to attract search planes, went on using a salvaged bucket to melt snow (by body warmth) for drinking water. Every day she took pains to stand up and do a few exercises. Protected by several layers of clothing against the cold and sleet, she ticked off the days with lipstick on a nearby tree. But shock and exposure began to tell. After 19 days on Ferris Mountain, only twelve scarlet daubs were on the tree.

One morning last week, Jack Putnam, foreman of nearby Buzzard Ranch, rode his horse up Ferris Mountain. LeMasurier's radio-TV company in Duluth had offered a $2,500 reward for anyone who located the plane, and Putnam had a hunch. Late in the morning he spotted a tiny speck of silver high on the mountainside. He quickly reported his find, and an evacuation party was soon puffing its way up the rocky slope. Closing the summit, they heard a faint cry, at first thought it was an echo. Then they found Dorothy LeMasurier on a snowbank. "I don't believe it," exclaimed one veteran mountaineer. "That woman can't be alive."

As her rescuers gaped, Dorothy Le-Masurier, unharmed except by shock and malnutrition after 19 days on the mountain, exclaimed: "I'm so glad to see you." Then she pointed to her husband's body. "He's right over there, but he is dead," she said. "He died on the fourth day. But I'm so happy to see you that I don't feel like crying."

Later, bedded down in a Rawlins hospital, Dorothy did cry. Every time a plane droned high overhead, she covered her face and wept.

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