On Saturday, Kell Morris and his wife were hiking up a rocky creekbed east of Seward, picking their way through boulders on the way to a glacial lake at the base of Godwin Glacier. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and they were laughing and joking with each other, happy to be out in the wilderness.

They had no idea that Morris, 61, was about to be pinned face-down in a glacial creek by a 700-pound boulder.

Morris survived, thanks to a rescue that involved a private helicopter company and the brute force of half a dozen rescuers, but not before spending a dangerously long time in a frigid, rising creek, fighting to keep his face out of the water and considering whether this was where his adventurous life would end.

“I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get out of this,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

A hike up the creek

Morris and his wife, Joanna Roop, are retired and living in Kootenai, Idaho, but had come to Alaska this spring for temporary jobs, he said.

Roop, a former Alaska state trooper, had taken a place in the Seward Police Department, and Morris a job at a marine repair and shipbuilding business. Both were happy to be back in Alaska, where they could hike off-trail and into untrammeled places such as the Fourth of July Creek and Godwin Creek area, where the two creeks run down from glaciers that hang over the mountains just east of Seward.

As they worked their way up Godwin Creek on Saturday morning, Morris had climbed an embankment to get a better look at what he thought might be an abandoned ski, a relic of winter backcountry skiing in the area. Suddenly, Morris said, the earth beneath his feet gave way.

“It was a big rock slide, and I was right on top of it,” he said. “I slid a little ways, and then the rest is a blur.”

When he came to rest, he was face-down in the creek and pinned by a half-moon-shaped boulder the size of a wheelbarrow. It quickly became obvious that he was stuck, Morris said.

Roop tried lifting the boulder: rocking it, swaying it, pushing it. It wouldn’t budge. Morris was conscious but could barely keep his face out of the water. The glacial creek felt just above freezing, he said. He could feel hypothermia creeping in.

“I thought, I’m not going to last long in this water,” Morris said.

They had no cell service at their spot in the canyon, about 2 miles up from their starting point near the Spring Creek Quarry, close to the Seward Marine Industrial Center. So Roop left Morris — telling him to “stay put” — and went to find enough phone service to call for help.

Morris grew up in Texas and spent time rodeoing and later as a U.S. Marine and a competitive ocean sailor. Being pinned by a boulder in the Alaska wilderness was not necessarily the most extreme event of his life, he said — that would be a 19-day stretch of ocean sailing around the southern tip of South America in “just horrible” conditions. But during the time he was pinned by the boulder, thoughts of death crept in.

A helicopter to the boulder field

In Seward, the logistical difficulty of a rescue became immediately obvious, said Clinton Crites, the chief of the Seward Fire Department. The terrain was too rough for the department’s ATVs or side-by-sides to reach. Hiking to reach a man pinned in deadly cold creek water would take too long.

But there was another way: A member of the Bear Creek Volunteer Fire Department, which serves the outlying areas of Seward, also worked for a local helicopter company, Crites said. The helicopter company pilots agreed to take firefighters up to the boulder field, where the helicopter hovered as they jumped to the ground because the boulder field made it impossible to land.

They found Morris in the creekbed, still face-down. By this point, the creek was rising in afternoon heat and his wife was holding his face up and out of the water. Morris doesn’t remember much about this part of the ordeal.

“The water had gotten up to my chin,” Morris said. “I was going in and out of consciousness. I’d been shivering, but I stopped shivering every once in a while.”

The firefighters came prepared for lifting a large object, Crites said: They had pneumatic air bags, usually used in car crashes, that inflate powerfully to dislodge stuck objects, and they’d also brought other tools. Still, it wasn’t easy to move the boulder.

“It was almost an impossible task,” Morris said. “They had great training, great professionalism, to do the job safely and properly. But the problem was the water was coming up.”

Eventually, it was a combination of the air bags, ropes and brute force that lifted the boulder, which firefighters estimated at about 700 pounds, Crites said. It happened just in time — Morris estimates he had been in the water for more than two hours at that point.

“I’m not sure he would have had another 30 minutes,” Crites said.

Quickly, they worked on warming Morris, cutting his wet clothes off, wrapping him in thermal blankets and giving him handwarmers.

Seeing that Morris couldn’t get out of the canyon on his own, the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center was summoned and the 176th Wing Air National Guard Pararescue Jumpers arrived by air to hoist Morris — and his wife — out of the boulder field and to a waiting ambulance and then to the Seward hospital, where he was kept for observation for two nights. He had no broken bones or other major injuries.

He’s now had time to consider what happened, and how every element seemed to align for his survival.

The way he was positioned saved him from a major crushing injury, though he feels some nerve damage in the leg that was under the rock. Everyone cooperated to get to the site quickly, he said. His wife played a major role: With her law enforcement background, she relayed all the important information to the fire department, sharing the exact location with them and stressing that trying to get to the area with ATVs wouldn’t work, he said.

“She knew what to do and how to do it.”

The rescue was a success because everyone worked together, Crites said. “It all lined up,” he said.

Morris went to work on Tuesday, to the surprise of his coworkers. The near-death experience is making him reconsider, for now, some of his habits, like off-trail hiking in Alaska.

In the hospital, he and his wife had a talk.

“We kind of admitted to ourselves that maybe we are 60-something years old,” he said.

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