Lost hiker relies on ingenuity, 40-year-old gift to survive 17 days in Oregon wilds

May 5 started out as just another Wednesday. Harry Burleigh kissed his wife of 40 years, Stacy, goodbye as he headed to Toketee Lake for an overnight fishing trip.

The plan was to spend the night at the lake, go chasing some German brown trout the following day and head back to the couple’s Roseburg home. After all, Mother’s Day was that coming Sunday.

Fishing from a kayak the following morning, 69-year-old Harry Burleigh was having a little luck.

“I caught a couple of nice ones, kissed them on the snout and let them go,” Harry Burleigh said at a Thursday morning press conference at the Douglas County Courthouse.

As the wind kicked up, it became difficult to keep his kayak stable and in the early afternoon, he paddled back to shore, loaded the kayak onto the top of his vehicle and began to make his way back down Highway 138 East to Roseburg.

But it was still early in the afternoon. There was still plenty of daylight. Plenty of time to do a little more fishing.

“I figured, ‘Let’s take that road and see where it leads,’” Harry Burleigh said. “It was 10 miles up a pretty steep road, but I got to the trailhead.”

At approximately 4 p.m., he arrived at the trailhead, filled out a sign-in card and left it on the dash of his vehicle with a note: “Be back tonight.”

“The trail was only a mile and a quarter and I thought, ‘I can dash that,’” he said.

Burleigh was double-layered with clothing, but for just a short hike and a few casts, he didn’t feel the need to carry more than he needed: no compass, no map, no beanie cap, not even a water bottle. It was only a mile and a quarter, after all. His footwear consisted of only wool socks and a pair of leather hiking sandals, “Which were great for the kayak.”

“I didn’t need the pack with my extra shirt. I was just going to make a couple of casts,” Burleigh recalled. “I’m ready to go.”

When Harry Burleigh set out for Toketee Lake, Stacy Burleigh told him that if he wanted to stay an extra night, that would be fine.

“The first night, I wasn’t all that nervous,” Stacy Burleigh said. “For the first couple of days, I was thinking he was going to be coming home. But that second night, I started making phone calls. I was getting really nervous.”

Stacy Burleigh was under the impression that she had to wait 48 hours to report her husband as missing, so she waited two days to make the call. She later learned she only had to wait to 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Harry Burleigh was getting further and further from his desired fishing hole.

“It was a brisk hike through deep, tall timber and it smelled gorgeous,” Harry Burleigh said Thursday, wearing a dark green T-shirt which read “Deep Forest” with a screen print of fish in a river. “I crossed a little stream, went further and ran into snow where the trail markers were. That would have been a good spot to say, ‘This might be a good point to turn around.’

Harry Burleigh didn’t realize the trail to Twin Lakes took a hard left turn at that junction. His wrong turn soon found him in a fight for his life.

The late afternoon daylight was turning to dusk. It was approximately 5:15 p.m., and Harry Burleigh was hit with the realization he was going to be spending the night in the woods.

“I just took a deep breath and asked myself, ‘What’s the mental imagery I had when I came in?’” he said. “I had dashed, and my mental imagery was distorted. I took a deep breath and told myself to stay calm.”

The contours of the canyon ridges only caused him to be drawn further from his destination.

“I felt like I knew where I was at, that I had terrain awareness, but I didn’t,” he said. His map and compass were back in his car at the trailhead. “There was no cell service. I couldn’t call (Stacy) or anyone else for that matter and let them know where I’m at and I knew that I’m going way off target here.”

Harry Burleigh found himself on a steep slope. He concocted a makeshift shelter for the night, although he didn’t sleep. At first light that Friday morning, he was greeted with snow. He realized he was in the area of — ironically — Deception Creek, and at least knew that he was well off track.

“I was responsible for my own path to get out, and that motivated me to say I’ve got to do this myself,” he said.

He came across a rock ledge with two large logs long enough to lead him down into a ravine to the creek, where he could finally get some water. He began leading himself carefully down one of the logs when he lost his balance and fell. His head bounced off the second log. He landed on his fishing pole, which was attached to his belt, and his reel slammed into his hip.

“Now I’m on the bigger log, trying to get my sense, and I have blood dripping,” he said. “In an instant, everything became very serious. This was no longer a hike. I had to be mindful, stay focused on the moment.

“That was a realization. You know you did everything wrong, but at that point, you can’t knock yourself down. You have to stay focused and do something, do it your best and don’t expect more.”

Meanwhile, in Roseburg, Stacy Burleigh has called to report her husband as missing.

After Stacy Burleigh called the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office to report that her husband was missing, she received a return call from Deputy Dave Ward, who works with the county’s Search and Rescue team. Her communication with Deputy Ward would prove to become a source of peace.

“That deputy was a Godsend for me,” she said. “He called every day. It would get hard, but every morning would be a new day. I had hope. When I have information, it makes me feel better. Getting that information from the deputy was what got me through.”

Meanwhile, her husband was lost in difficult terrain with a skewed sense of direction, and Stacy relied on those calls from the deputy and the support from the community to keep hope alive.

“Sharing with the (online) community was what kind of got me through it,” she said. “It felt like there were people there with me. To have that message go from Roseburg, throughout Douglas County, across the United States and into the world, that was very uplifting. It kept me going.”

Two days after Harry Burleigh took his wrong turn, his son, Kaylan Burleigh, arrived in Roseburg from Tucson, Arizona, to help support his mom.

Harry Burleigh had reached the confluence of Twin and Calf creeks and decided to shelter there. After all, while he had not eaten in four days, at least he had water nearby. Using fern branches under a low cover of Douglas Fir limbs, he was able to build a shelter to minimize the elements, which included low overnight temperatures and the threat of inclement weather.

But, he didn’t have anything to keep his head warm. His beanie cap was back at the trailhead.

“I took the cover off my fishing creel, used a fillet knife to cut the creel pack and made a headcover,” Harry Burleigh said. “It was kind of funky looking, but it was pretty effective, except for the top of my head.”

“I thought to myself, ‘What do you need underwear for? Just go commando,’” he said. So he removed his underwear, sewed one leg shut and suddenly had a head covering proper enough to help minimize the loss of body heat escaping through his head.

“It took a couple of days to assimilate it to the natural forest smells,” he said with a wry grin, “but it kept my head warm.”

The next day, Harry Burleigh was working his way up another steep slope when he heard the sound of an airplane. He removed his sweatshirt, pulled out his car keys — the nearest thing he had that might somehow reflect a glimmer of sunlight — found an opening in the timber and began waving them as the plane passed over. The pilot didn’t see him.

“I blessed him then and I bless him still now,” Harry Burleigh said. “He was trying to see something in a hole in the trees, and there’s a gazillion of these holes and every bit he moved, the angles changed. The ‘needle in a haystack’ is so true.

“There were highs and lows, but that was a high. Just to see that someone was actually out there.”

It had been at least a week since Harry Burleigh had eaten, and at least a week since he had a fire. He was getting proficient at literally rubbing two sticks together, and said that the sticks would be too hot to touch. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to spark the tinder for his fire.

“About 40 years ago, my father-in-law gave me a gift and said, ‘Here, put this in your wallet. You might need it someday,’” he said.

That gift was a plastic magnifying glass. Harry Burleigh said that every time he got a new wallet, that plastic magnifier would always be in there.

He was finally able to combine the direct sunlight and that magnifying glass to create enough heat to start a fire. The problem was that the wood he had gathered, with the plan of hunkering down for a couple of days, was so dry that it burned through on the first night. His attempt to use moss to try to create smoke — which might be seen from overhead — was squelched by the wind effects of the canyon he was in. The smoke would dissipate before it had a chance to reach the canopy.

“At that point, I wasn’t thinking very clearly,” Harry Burleigh said. “No wood, no fire, no smoke, no food.”

He eventually got to higher ground and tried to use nearby logs to create markers such as “HELP” or “SOS” which might have been seen by passing aircraft. While trying to construct these markers, his body was overheated.

“My tongue was dried out, my peripheral vision was starting to go,” he said. “I got some shade, but I wasn’t recuperating.”

“I had read about it. I had seen movies about it,” he said, “and I drank my own urine.”

A short-term hydration solution, Harry Burleigh still needed to get fresh water. The water was at the bottom of the ravines, while his chance to be spotted was on the ridge tops. And he was growing exhausted.

When Kaylan Burleigh arrived in Roseburg, he was invited along with a friend to be a part of the search and rescue operation. While not put in harm’s way, they could help search softer terrain for signs of Harry Burleigh.

On Day 10 of the search operation, Stacy Burleigh said Kaylan was given a radio and GPS unit to follow communications during the search.

Harry Burleigh’s original camp — the one near the confluence of Twin and Calf creeks — had been found. In that camp, pictures sent to the family from search and rescue members confirmed that some of the items found — including a fishing tackle box — were, in fact, Harry’s.

“It was really awesome for (Kaylan) to be there and listening to that,” Stacy Burleigh said.

Meanwhile, Harry Burleigh was on Day 12, and things were beginning to unravel further.

He abandoned his outpost on the ridge to try to follow a creek that he believed would lead him to Twin Lakes and, ultimately, to that same mile and a quarter trail out of the wilderness. When he came to a sheer rock wall — alongside a waterfall that he said he was “mesmerized” by — he saw a possible path to the top, but knew it was going to be difficult for an already worn-out 69-year-old man.

“I took a couple of pretty serious tumbles, but I managed to get up about halfway and my sandal disintegrated,” Harry Burleigh said. “It was just hanging by the ankle strap. I had just twisted my ankle, I was stabbed by a branch in my other foot, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

He made it to the top to hear the sound of a Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter dispatched from North Bend. Harry Burleigh raced as best he could to get to a clearing where the crew of the helicopter could see him, but got there moments too late.

“I blessed him,” he said of the pilot. “He was doing his job the best he could.”

Harry Burleigh made it to another ridgetop and built a three-sided structure out of random limbs, and finally found a water source: a tree that had snapped in half that had water pooled in its stump.

“I scooped out all of the debris, bark chips, some mosquito larvae,” he said. “The water was brownish, like the color of my sandals.”

He took advantage of the water source, as well as the nutrients of a couple of grubs he found in the stump.

Meanwhile, Kaylan Burleigh had to return to Tucson: his children needed him, and he had a job interview coming up. Now, Stacy Burleigh was on her own, except for the daily calls from Deputy Ward and the vast support of the online community.

Some 50 miles away, her husband was doing his damnedest to just put one foot in front of the other.

“I would take one step with love, grab some love, and take another step,” Harry Burleigh said. “It centered on that love, and I tried to focus on that love.

“All of a sudden it became about ‘One more day.’ One more day to be here. One more day to see my wife.”

It’s May 23, and Harry Burleigh is both mentally and physically drained. His body is beaten up, his mind wandering. That morning, he hears a bellow through the woods. It’s human.

“This man, I call him ‘Guffaw Man’, shows up and he helps me to sit down,” he recalled when he engaged one of the first rescuers. Another search and rescue team member helped hold him so that he could relax while the first man put fresh socks on Harry Burleigh’s damaged feet. A third rescuer presented Harry with a bottle of Gatorade, blueberry/raspberry flavor.

A fourth searcher in the group asked what he had been eating for the past 17 days. Harry Burleigh said the menu consisted of some millipedes, termites (“Tricky to catch”), the occasional scorpion, one crawfish and a big snail.

As the initial search and rescue responders were attending to Harry, a very worried woman received a phone call back in Roseburg.

“Around 2 p.m., I got a phone call from (Deputy Ward),” Stacy Burleigh recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve got some good news ... Harry’s alive!

“We both started crying on the phone. He said they had found him and he was being helicoptered out.”

Harry Burleigh was immediately transported by helicopter to PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at Riverbend, where he spent his first 12 days in the intensive care unit. He was suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, hypothermia and gastrointestinal issues, not to mention the fact that his feet had suffered a significant amount of trauma.

“They swelled up like two big footballs with little bitty toes on them,” he said.

He was down to 152 pounds when his normal walking-around weight was at about 180. He was emaciated due to the lack of nutrition. He joked that during a recent morning when he and Stacy were brushing their teeth together, he noticed just one sign of his body’s recovery. He explained by flexing his right arm to show an impressively constructed biceps muscle.

Harry Burleigh’s body is recovering. There is still a combination of nerve damage and pain due to swelling in his feet, for which he still requires a cane to maintain his balance, although the nerve damage is expected to heal and the swelling to dissipate.

However, he said that during a time when he could have easily died in the elements, his soul was enriched.

“I left that mountaintop with something I didn’t have before. My body was beaten beyond what it could give,” he said. “My mind was stretched beyond what I thought I could do.

“But my life spark, that loving energy that we have inside of us, was filled.”

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Dipstick.

We don’t go into the local county Forest Preserves without a day pack that has food, water, and our IFAKs.

Whats impressive..at least in his day in age..is he has survived being married for 40 years.

LOL!

His wife has the patience of a saint.

He’s an idiot.

He’s thirsty but is tramping through rivers and waterfalls.

He’s hungry but doesn’t fish.

He’s lost but goes farther and farther away from his car and the trail. Worst, he climbs higher.

Was the sun in his eyes when he left his car? Like, hellooooo.

Something like that happened to me once. *shudders uncontrollably* Me and my friend ended up hiking 40 miles out of an area that we’d blundered into. By some luck we walked into a bunch of national forest campsites just as it was starting to get REALLY dark. Some nice guys who were fishing gave us a ride back to our car, it was like 50+ miles. We didn’t have decent jackets, hats, and only one water bottle for two people. What a nightmare!

But we got to see some amazing stuff on our hellish journey.

A function of no compass, no map. I always make a point of knowing the direction roads, streams or other escape routes are if I should become disoriented. Which can happen.

Great story. And reinforces the old concept. What’s on your body lets you survive, what’s on your web gear lets you do your mission, and your pack gives you comfort and do things better.

That basic boy scout knife, a firestarter, signal mirror, a ziplock bag to use as a canteen with some water purification pills, and a space blanket would nearly fit in the space of a pack of playing cards and weigh nothing.

And he sounds like very comfortable in the ourdoors, but if you are out there a lot, those personal locator satellite beacons are about 300 bucks. Sit down, press the button and wait for the rescue.

What a great story. I cannot imagine going 17 days with only a few grubs, termites, snails and millipedes to eat. Don’t millipedes and centipedes make you really sick?

I’ve got friends from the Roseburg and Sutherlin areas and I’ll send this to them.

Sunset on May 5 in Roseburg, OR was 8:19 pm. In the deep, tall forest, it’s dark a lot before that. Setting out for a 2-1/2 mile round trip on the trail at 4 pm was not the smartest thing to do. It was probably already getting dusky at 4 pm. Lesson 2 is always take some basic survival gear with you, especially when you are alone.

13 posted on 07/22/2021 8:27:26 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (“Criminal democrats kill babies, folks. Do you think anything else is a problem for them?” ~ joma89)

But good job on his mentality at least. A positive “ I WILL make it” mindset really matters a lot.

Also, the wife waiting 48 hours because she thought that was the law. (even though it is 24) When you know something is wrong call when you know that and raise holy hell. It does sometimes help.

Read the whole story. He was drinking when he was at the bottom of the canyons, but the planes couldn’t spot him. He figured he would have a better chance of being spotted by search planes on a ridge top which was a long hard climb...but there is no water on the ridge.

Wandering around is the #1 rule he violated. And, yes, it is surprising that he was on a fishing hike but didn’t catch fish for food.

16 posted on 07/22/2021 8:31:08 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (“Criminal democrats kill babies, folks. Do you think anything else is a problem for them?” ~ joma89)

17 posted on 07/22/2021 8:33:35 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (“Criminal democrats kill babies, folks. Do you think anything else is a problem for them?” ~ joma89)

I did read it.

Surprised he didn’t take a fall and end up dead.

He proved the well known fact pilots have a hard time seeing a wee little human in a forest, ridge or not.

And fishing line! But as someone else pointed out, he has fishing gear and skill, is surrounded by mountain streams, and somehow never fished. Interesting.

When I was 12, a friend and I went out in the jungle near my house in Subic Bay in the Philippines.

Heh, no map. No compass. And we got lost and wandered around in circles for a couple of hours. I climbed a tree and spied a familiar road a few hundred yards away, but without climbing that tree, it might have been a thousand.

We knew the area pretty well, and there were established boar paths we followed, but...there you have it.

I was lost enough to get nervous. I respected things a bit more after that.

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