Scouts To The Rescue Troop Puts Skills To Work In Real-Life Backwoods Emergency

What started out as a routine camping trip turned into a five-hour rescue operation last weekend, when a group of Valley Boy Scouts helped save an Oregon woman who had been trampled by a horse.

Members of Boy Scout Troop 464 were camping near Pendleton, Ore., in the Umatilla National Forest. Just after noon on Sunday, leaders Tim Taylor and Rich Krenkel and Krenkel’s 15-year-old son, Hadley, encountered a woman rushing down a trail in search of help.

She told them her friend, 43-year-old Ellen Freeland, had been injured. Freeland and her horse fell 25 feet down from a trail located on a hillside ledge. The horse landed on Freeland, then panicked and trampled her.

“If the ground wasn’t soft, I know she would be dead,” said Vivian Hulick, one of the riders that was with Freeland.

At first, the younger Krenkel, a sophomore at East Valley High School, thought the story was just a test.

“I thought it was a training thing for the leaders,” he said. “But then I decided they wouldn’t do it on that rainy of a day.”

The Scout and the two leaders headed off to where the accident had happened. There they found Freeland, who was part of a seven-person riding party.

When the group arrived, they first examined Freeland to determine if she should be moved at all. After deciding that it was safe, they used a rope and stripped tree branches to strengthen a crude stretcher crafted from a rain poncho by Freeland’s friends.

The challenge now was moving Freeland three miles down the steep, narrow trail. The ground was rocky and loose, and made slippery by the the rain.

The Scout party took turns with some of the men in the riding group holding the stretcher, but the steep incline and the fact that the trail was just 18 inches wide made the going next to impossible.

“The ledge was straight up one side, and straight down the other,” Taylor said.

Then they modified their approach. They took the breast collars from the horses and used them as shoulder braces to carry the stretcher. Nearly three hours after the accident, they headed down the trail.

The woman who had ridden off for help eventually contacted Forest Service staff, and an ambulance was sent. Unfortunately, miscommunication sent the ambulance to the top of the ridge the riders had been climbing - about five miles from where they actually were.

After the woman riding for help sent the initial Scout party to aid Freeland, she ran across three other members of Troop 464 along the trail. Mark Smith, 14, Chris Amestoy, 15, and Nate Taylor, a 19-year-old Scout leader and son of leader Tim Taylor, headed back to help the others.

The three arrived at the site of the accident and began bringing horses down the trail to the Scout camp, which was just a half-mile away. Some of the horses were so spooked they wouldn’t cross back over two fallen logs they passed earlier. The Scouts had to saw open a passage.

Once the horses were safely moved to the camp, six younger Scouts there watched the horses and tried to calm them down. They also prepared a hot drink for and stayed with a teenage girl who was part of the riding party.

Meanwhile, the hike to the end of the trail was a long one. Taylor said the arduous haul turned out to be “three miles in three hours.”

Forest Service officials contacted the ambulance by radio and told the driver to head to the base of the hill, where the trail ended. At about 5 p.m., the Scouts had Freeland off the trail. Five minutes later, the ambulance arrived and took her to St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton. There she was diagnosed as having broken ribs, a punctured lung, a bruised heart, and numerous bumps and bruises.

She was released on Thursday.

“I don’t know what I would have done without all those Scouts,” said Freeland, an experience rider who, during the ordeal, lost a prized belt buckle she won for barrel racing.

“I would really like to thank each and every one of them. I don’t think I would have gotten off that mountain until midnight if it hadn’t been for them.”

Scout leaders said it was a miracle they were there in the first place. Originally, they had planned to camp at another location, but it was snowed in.

Leader Nate Taylor said he was amazed at how calm the Scouts remained during the rescue. He said the scouts “tried not to get overexcited, to keep calm and act like it was something normal.”

Apparently, it worked.

“We thank God they were there,” said rider Hulick. “They knew exactly what to do.”

That night around the campfire, a long way from their meeting home at Hope Lutheran Church, Troop 464 talked about what they learned from the experience.

Krenkel, the Scout who had lashed the stretcher together, summed up everyone’s feelings.

“You’re taught about all those knots, and you think, ‘I’ll never use this,”’ he said. “Then something like this happens, and you know what to do.”

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