Casey Ryan had a free Sunday. His wife and four children were out of town. The 37-year-old Eugene photographer could do whatever he wanted.
Instead of loafing around the house, Ryan decided to seek out the contentment and peace he always found in nature.
He called a buddy, explaining his newly hatched plan to explore a section of the Willamette National Forest. His friend was in. The two men, along with Corduroy, Ryan’s chocolate lab, climbed into Ryan’s four-wheel drive. Not too long later, Ryan turned onto Forest Service Road 19.
The 60-mile route starts near Oakridge, meanders through the national forest, and ends at Rainbow, a dot on the map. In the spring and summer, motorists, bicyclists, and hikers take in the sights, which include the Cougar Reservoir and Terwilliger Hot Springs. In the winter, though, it’s a lonely and desolate world. Sheriff’s deputies don’t patrol FSR-19, and crews don’t plow snow from the road.
Ryan had traveled this route many times. A deeply religious Christian, he believed he saw and felt God’s spirit here, and it offered the opportunity, in a good way, to feel small, part of something vast. He knew quite a bit of snow had fallen during the past month, but that didn’t concern him. Raised in Montana, he’d camped, hiked, and played in the snow. He knew how to drive in it.
It turned out Ryan did have reason to be concerned about the snow. But not too concerned.
The snowy conditions he encountered that day – Sunday, January 29 – and how he responded to them have turned Casey Ryan into an outdoors legend in the making, the central character in a wild story involving the power of an Oregon winter, a jury-rigged drone and frantic phone calls to Uganda.
No one would believe it if there wasn’t evidence to back up the tale.
“Most unique thing I’ve ever heard of,” said Jason Bowman, the search-and-rescue program supervisor at the Lane County Sheriff’s Office.
Bowman, who’s been with the unit for 16 years, is not a man prone to hype and hyperbole. He said he expects what Ryan did on Forest Service Road 19 to be studied by search-and-rescue teams across the United States.
“This guy’s ingenuity was amazing,” he said. “People in this field are going to be talking about this one for decades.”
Casey Ryan’s truck. (Photo courtesy of Casey Ryan)Photo Courtesy of Casey Ryan
Casey Ryan recreates how he sent his cell phone into the sky via his drone. (Photo: Casey Ryan)Photo Courtesy of Casey Ryan
That’s when Casey Ryan concocted a crazy plan.
He would marry two technologies – his cell phone and the drone he kept in the back of his rig for making aerial photographs.
He decided he’d attach his phone to the drone, type a text message to his wife and send the drone up. He’d have to get the drone several hundred feet in the air, which meant he would have to hit send on the message and instantly launch the drone. If the message was too short, the phone would send it before the drone was high enough for the signal to get out. He needed a long message.
He told himself to be creative.
“I held the phone in my hand,” he said. “I figured I could attach it to the drone with a cord. I wrapped a paper towel around the phone, taped it and it seemed like it might work.”
He typed a message:
“I’m sending my phone in the sky with my drone. I hope this message gets through. This isn’t an emergency. We are okay, but we are stuck 25 miles in the mountains directly at Box Canyon.…
I love you and I’m so sorry this has happened. We are okay. We are safe. Send a tow. Call AAA.”
He hit send. The drone lifted off.
The phone went up, up, up – about 300 feet into the night sky.
“It was to the point where I could almost not see the drone and that phone,” he said. “I was nervous.”
After a while, he brought the drone down slowly, very slowly, worried about damaging or losing the phone. Finally retrieving the phone, he tore the towel from the screen. The chill he felt was not just from the night air.
Message undeliverable.
His stomach plummeted. He’d have to try again. He typed:
Hey, sweetie, I don’t know if these messages are making it to you because they are not delivered.
I’m praying that you are reading them because, and if you are, please send an exact time that you think they’re showing up because I don’t know.
He closed it out:
I love you so much. Thanks for working so hard.
Please let the driver know that we’re at Box Canyon in between Westfir and Cougar Reservoir.
Up went the drone.
He let it stay up in the sky. He prayed. He figured it was about 5 a.m. in Uganda. Even if the text managed to make it halfway across the world, would his wife have her phone turned on?
The drone slowly came back to the ground. Once again, he pulled the towel from the cell phone.
This time it worked!
“I’ve been advised to call 911. I did,” his wife wrote. “But it will also be tomorrow in the daytime before they can make it.”
Ryan told his friend.
And then he walked to the woman’s van and knocked on her door. She stepped outside. Anxiety was etched into her face. She’d been stuck out here in the cold too long.
In the dark and in the snow, the two strangers talked.
Ryan said he’d like to pray with her.
She agreed.
His voice was the only sound on FSR-19 in this lonely section of the Willamette National Forest:
God, if you could look after her in the future. If you could surround her in light, love and abundance.
If you could get us out of here.
If you could send help to us. With this prayer know that we are going to be honoring your name.
“She teared up,” said Ryan. “It was a moment for both of us. It was divine. I held her hand and told her she’d be fine. We’d all be fine.”
Sylvia and Casey Ryan. (Photo courtesy of Casey Ryan)Photo Courtesy of Casey Ryan
It wasn’t as easy for Sylvia Ryan to send help as she made it sound in that text to her husband.
She called a Eugene tow company, but they said they did not have the equipment to pull off a rescue up on a snow-larded mountain road. Then she called 9-1-1 for help — and the call went to a Uganda police station.
Sylvia Ryan had to figure out who to contact in Eugene. The first two people she called did not answer. She thought of another friend — and reached her. She quickly explained the situation and said she’d send screen shots of her husband’s text messages.
Once Sylvia Ryan’s friend read Casey Ryan’s texts messages, she called the Lane County Sheriff’s Office, saying she was calling on behalf of a friend who was in Africa and looking for help for her husband who was stuck in the Willamette National Forest.
The matter ended up with the county’s search-and-rescue unit. But the information they were given made no sense to them. They knew there was no cell service up on Forest Service Road 19. And this rescue call originally came in from Africa? Was this a joke? There was no way to verify any of it, but just in case, the team rolled out with three massive rigs. They learned about the drone only when they got to the scene.
“My wife is the real hero,” said Ryan. “She was coordinating everything from Africa.”
After Ryan’s truck had been pulled from the snow that Monday and he finally had cell service again, he called his wife. Sylvia told her husband how worried she’d been, that she’d hardly been able to sleep. She was relieved the rescuers had reached them.
Six weeks later, Casey Ryan is back exploring the Willamette National Forest. But he now has a second cell phone, a higher-tech one that allows him to send a message and his GPS location from anywhere in the world. His wife makes him test it frequently. He leaves Tuesday to meet her and their children in East Africa. He plans to pick out the perfect gift for the woman he loves.
Ryan’s life is back to normal, but it’s also different, he said. Getting stuck overnight in the snow changed him. He thinks about the woman in the van, the stranger he met on FSR-19 and will never see again, and how he prayed with her that night.
“It was a just a beautiful thing,” he said. “It was memorable. I hope she’s doing well.”
Ryan knows he is.
503-221-8224; [email protected]; @thallmanjr
George Custer lives in Oakridge with his wife Sayre. George is a former smokejumper from his hometown of Cave Junction, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. and ran a construction company in Southern California. George assumed the volunteer duties as the Editor of the Highway 58 Herald in 2022. He loves riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, building all things wood, and playing drums on the weekends in his office.
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