Hunter Recounts Surviving Seven Days in Flooded Alaskan Delta
OutdoorHub Reporters 12.13.13
For a week in September, Michigan hunter Adrian Knopps clung to a tree to keep dry while battling hunger, exhaustion, and the elements. The 51-year-old hunter from Grand Ledge arrived on a remote island near Ketchikan, Alaska on September 14. With him was local fisherman Garret Hagen, 25. The two had planned for 10 days of hunting and fishing, but an unfortunate accident resulted in tragedy and left Knopps stranded on the island for seven days.
“Any time someone can survive seven days in southeast Alaska is remarkable,” Commander Pete Melnick of the Sitka Coast Guard Air Station told The Detroit Free Press. “It’s a testament to the human will to live.”
It was a helicopter from Sitka that eventually found Knopps, haggard but alive in the remote Alaskan wilderness. As the hunter recovered from nerve damage and other effects of exposure, he told officials a daunting story of survival.
Knopps and Hagen spent the first day of their hunt successfully harvesting an 800-pound grizzly. While a remarkable feat, the hunters knew it would be difficult to transport the meat back to the ship they arrived on, Hagen’s 44-foot fishing vessel Abundance. The Lansing State Journal reported that Hagen loaded up the bear meat on the kayak they used to reach the island, but it was incapable of carrying more than one passenger. It was decided that Knopps would wait on the island while Hagen rowed back to the Abundance. After several hours of waiting, Knopps knew something had gone horribly wrong.
It was only after Knopps was rescued that the mystery of what happened to Hagen was solved. After canvassing the area on foot and investigating nearby cabins, rescue workers recovered Hagen’s body almost 30 miles away from the island. It is believed that he had accidentally fallen into the freezing water while trying to board the Abundance and perished.
Meanwhile, back on the island Knopps found himself in an impossible situation. The hunter was trapped in a river delta that was guarded on its sides by mountains. At night, the high tide flooded marshland a mile in every direction. Although the Abundance was still in sight, Knopps had no means to reach the ship, and a storm would later release the Abundance from its moorings to drift away.
Equipped with only his gun, four granola bars, and the clothes he had at the time, Knopp knew the odds were against him. He made a small fire, which lasted him through his first night. It rained the second day and the increased tide quickly washed away the hunter’s only source of warmth. By day, Knopps searched for food and found signs of wolf and bear activity, although these animals largely left him alone. It was the unrelenting tide and rain that proved to be his greatest adversaries. By the time a storm rolled in on the fifth day, Knopps was already suffering from hypothermia and swelling in his joints. At one point the hunter used his belt to tie himself to a fallen tree to keep from being swept away.
“Every time things got worse I thought ‘what else could happen?’ ” Knopps said. “But there was more, always more.”
The hunter accepted the fact that he might not be leaving the island alive, and used his hunting knife to chisel a message on the wooden butt of his rifle. In it he left a message for his family and that of Hagen’s so that they might know what happened to the hunters. The rifle was slung on a tall branch as Knopps prepared to face another night of the storm. Then, on the seventh day, he heard the sound of a helicopter.
It was the drifting Abundance that alerted rescue workers to his location. The ship was found by a passing vessel and the Coast Guard was quickly notified. Rescue workers found Knopps weak and exhausted on a tree, but with no major injuries. Although the hunter is still suffering the effects of nerve damage in his feet, Knopps shortly recovered from his experience. In fact, according to the Associated Press, Knopps recently went deer hunting with family.
“I love hunting. I love the woods,” he said. “I can’t just stop doing the things I really like in life.”
Although he survived being stranded on the island, Knopps mourns the friend that did not. According to the people who knew him, Garret Hagen was an experienced fisherman and veteran outdoorsman.
You can read OutdoorHub’s earlier coverage on the story here.
