Landing The Big One
The Forest Service is just about ready to close the Case of the Phantom Canoe.
The case involves an Eastern Washington University professor, the professor’s widow, a young Indian, numerous mountain lake anglers and a legendary wilderness ranger.
Joe Flood, a contract wilderness ranger for the Forest Service, said the professor hired two students to pack a 17-foot aluminum canoe into Gray Wolf Lake in the Mission Mountain Wilderness Area about 25 years ago. That wasn’t illegal. Leaving the canoe in the wilderness area was.
It seems that the big lake was the professor’s favorite fishing spot. After each trip to the picturesque lake, he hid the canoe in brush so dense that not even Flood, the Forest Service’s foremost authority on the wilderness area, could find it.
Flood and Forest Service officers knew that what they called the “phantom canoe” was somewhere near the lake. Hikers and fishermen occasionally saw the canoe on the lake and reported their sightings to the ranger station at Condon, Mont.
The professor was killed in an auto accident about 10 years ago and his widow hiked to the lake, pulled the canoe out of the brush, rowed out on the lake and, in accordance with his wishes, spread his ashes over the water.
Flood and his Forest Service superior happened to be at the lake and saw the widow in the canoe.
“We signaled her to come ashore,” he said. “Then we told her that it was illegal to leave the canoe at the lake. She promised she’d have someone take it out of the wilderness area.”
But no one came for the canoe, he said.
Flood said he once found the canoe, moved it from its hiding spot and left, intending to pick it up at a later date. But someone found the canoe and moved it to another spot in the brush.
Spokane fly fisher Dick Ralston and six other men hiked into the wilderness area and camped at the lake a few weeks ago.
While they were at the lake, they saw an Indian in a canoe.
“The Indian told us he found the canoe hidden in brush,” Ralston said. “When we were hiking back to our cars, we saw Joe and told him that we had seen the Indian fishing from the canoe.”
Flood said he’d find and pack the canoe back to the trailhead. He found the spot where the Indian had hidden it and, although he was wearing a back pack loaded with 70 pounds of garbage, shouldered the 70-pound canoe and picked his way over rocks, steep trail and through dense timber, arriving at the trailhead before Ralston and his group were ready to leave.
Ralston and friends were astounded. How was it possible, they wondered, for a man carrying all that garbage and a canoe to hike 9 miles up and down the rocky trail and arrive in such a short time?
No big deal, Flood said.
Turns out that Flood, legendary in Forest Service circles as a superman, is a long-distance runner. For five years, he took part in 50-mile ultra-marathons. Hiking mile after mile in the Mission Mountain Wilderness is just an easy day’s work.
Flood said he hopes the Forest Service will turn the battered and weathered canoe over to the Mountain Wilderness Association to be auctioned off to raise money.
He has spent 37 summers in the Mission Mountain Wilderness Area and knows more about the wilderness, he said, than he knows about his 20 acres in Condon.
During winter months at the University of Minnesota, Flood and his wife, Carrie Gunderson, have been writing their doctoral theses about the wilderness area. After they receive their degrees they plan to write a book or two and magazine articles about wilderness areas.
Meanwhile, he’s anxious to learn what the Forest Service will do about the canoe and whether the agency will prosecute the professor’s widow for failing to take the canoe out of the wilderness area.
Until a decision is made, he added, her name will not be released to the public.