Eagle man safe after 5 days in forest

STANLEY, Idaho – Miserable, shivering and hungry, a 53-year-old hunter who’d lost his way in the wilds of Idaho hunkered down for five nights hoping searchers would find him – before finally wandering out of the snowy forest on his own.

Bill Helfferich, of the Boise suburb of Eagle, says he was surrounded by a howling pack of wolves at one point during his ordeal in the rugged Sawtooth Mountains south of this remote central Idaho outpost near the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.

The first night was one of the worst.

“I shivered the whole night long,” Helfferich told the Idaho Statesman.

He kept busy by collecting firewood as well as newly fallen snow to melt, in hopes he wouldn’t share the same fate as 24-year-old Jon Francis of Minnesota, who wandered into the same mountainous area in July and hasn’t been seen since.

For Helfferich, it was supposed to have been just a two-day solo elk hunt starting last Sunday. But several hours after parking his truck, he took a wrong turn. Finding himself in an area not covered by his topographical map, Helfferich said something even more alarming happened: It began to snow.

After trying to find his way back to charted territory, he decided to wait out the storm in hopes of being found by rescuers. He figured they would be on his trail when he didn’t return to his family near Boise, some 120 miles to the south, by the appointed day.

But as time passed, searchers including Levi Maydole, a deputy sheriff with Custer County, said they had eventually shifted their focus to a body recovery.

“Day three was hopeful, but we had to start thinking of the inevitable here,” Maydole said. “On day four, hopes begin to drain off. On day five, we don’t expect to find people in those conditions at that time of year in that wilderness.”

Helfferich says he was so hungry by Thursday he started eating snowballs, just to curb the nagging emptiness in his belly. There were some tiny pine squirrels in his campsite, and occasionally he would think of using his rifle.

“I … decided I wasn’t that hungry yet,” he said.

Friday morning came and he figured help wasn’t coming, so he opted to try to slog out of the woods on his own. By the time he reached some pine beetle researchers who took him by truck to Stanley later that day, Helfferich figures he covered 24 miles, in all.

After throwing a pizza party for the search team from Custer County, he returned home on Saturday, saying he was looking forward to spending a quiet afternoon in his living room.