Company faces criticism for Oso rafting plans

EVERETT – A rafting company says it’s reconsidering its plans to offer sightseeing trips through the zone of last year’s devastating Oso landslide.

Dave “Captain Dave” Button, the owner of Burlington-based Pacific Northwest Float Trips, was timing the trips down the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River around the anniversary of the slide, which killed 43 people last March 22.

But the Daily Herald newspaper of Everett reported that after criticism from the locals, the 70-year-old is reconsidering. He says he’ll meet with a survivors support group this week, and if they’re adamantly against it he’ll stop the trips just short of the slide zone.

“It’s still a proposal,” he said. “It’s not poured in cement that we’re going to do that.”

Button used to teach and coach in Darrington, one of the nearby communities hit hardest by the slide. He ran similar rafting trips in the 1980s after Mount St. Helens erupted, without complaints, but he noted that was before social media.

He said he always planned to donate some proceeds from the $90-per-person rafting trips to a charity in Oso for relief efforts, but he will now donate all of it.

The outcry over the rafting trips demonstrated how raw the grief remains in the Stillaguamish Valley as the one-year mark approaches. Survivors and loved ones have been struggling not just with loss, but with unforgiven mortgages, post-traumatic stress and an uncertain future. Many in the valley consider the mudslide area sacred ground.

The landslide occurred when the river cut away at the base of a steep, landslide-prone hillside that was already soaked with record rains.