Sometimes the headlines serve up reality with a dry punchline you’d expect from the universe’s own scriptwriters: Alaska man unscathed after being pinned for three hours by 700-pound boulder in glacier creek. According to the Associated Press, that’s not a parable or a campfire tall tale—it’s the strange reality that greeted Kell Morris over the weekend.
Survival, Chance, and Community Rescue
Morris and his wife, Jo Roop, embarked on a hike near Godwin Glacier, hoping to sidestep Memorial Day crowds. Their chosen path was less “trail” and more glacier-fed creek bed, littered with boulders big enough to make a quarry envious. As detailed in the AP report, Morris made a calculated effort to avoid the largest rocks—a plan that worked until it didn’t. Suddenly, the ground beneath him gave way, sending him down a 20-foot embankment and into an icy stream. An “avalanche of boulders” left him pinned facedown by a 700-pound slab, but, as Seward Fire Chief Clinton Crites explained, smaller rocks beneath and around Morris distributed the weight enough to spare him from being crushed outright.
For the next three hours, Roop—retired Alaska State Trooper, partner, and now unofficial gold-medal-caliber problem-solver—held Morris’s head above water to prevent him from drowning and tried for half an hour to free him by herself, moving rocks and attempting to shift the boulder. When it became clear that brute force wouldn’t cut it, she trekked roughly 300 yards to find cell service, shared precise GPS coordinates with dispatch, and set a finely-tuned rescue in motion. The AP notes all this unfolded on a wild, inaccessible patch of land where traditional rescue vehicles wouldn’t cut it.
Improvisation, Luck, and Glacial Airlift
A stroke of luck came when a volunteer at a neighboring fire department, who also worked for a sled dog tourism company, diverted their helicopter—normally reserved for more festive glacier pursuits—to deliver first responders directly to the scene. Rescuers, faced with an unwelcoming boulder field, arrived by air in what could pass for a modern Alaskan parable: teamwork, a sled dog operation, and some inflatable rescue airbags usually reserved for extricating drivers from car wrecks.
It became a group effort—seven rescuers, a couple airbags, and a communal “one, two, three, push”—to finally lift the rock enough to free Morris, who by then was hypothermic and drifting in and out of consciousness. Crites remarked that they’d anticipated a very different outcome, noting, “I fully anticipated a body recovery, not him walking away without a scratch on him.” Yet, after a hospital stay for observation, Morris returned home, looking more like a man who had taken a cold plunge than someone who’d been on the wrong side of a natural landslide.
Reflections on Accidents and Outcomes
Morris himself has admitted the whole thing has served as what could be called a “gentle” wake-up call—one delivered through glacial runoff and geology. Plans for the next hike involve only established trails, with trailblazing crossed off the agenda for the foreseeable future. To quote Morris, “We’re going to stop the trailblazing.”
One wonders what it says about the nature of rural adventure, and about luck, that so many elements had to fall in exactly the right (or wrong) place: a strewn creek bed, a retired trooper’s calm instincts, a sled dog chopper diverted mid-tour, and seven people determined to do some heavy lifting. Earlier in the AP’s reporting it’s made clear how easily circumstances could have tipped the other way.
It all leaves the mind to linger, just a bit, on how often we skirt disaster in unlikely places—or maybe just how Alaska refuses to let the improbable turn into the unthinkable, at least for one couple this time around. The wilderness keeps its secrets and its surprises. Sometimes, though, even a 700-pound boulder is no match for teamwork, persistence, and (just enough) good fortune.
