Two hikers were rescued by crews with the Alaska Air National Guard just after noon Tuesday. The pair was stranded on a glacier on the southern Kenai Peninsula since Friday night.
Edward Eagerton, a representative for the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, says that 36-year-old Jennifer Neyman of Soldotna, and 45-year-old Christopher Hanna of Soldotna were released to medical personnel at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna and are both reported to be in good condition.
Eagerton says a satellite locator beacon that Neyman and Hanna carried with them was crucial in helping rescue crews find the two.
“They were able to communicate their situation to other people and they were able to communicate their location and so it gave us an idea of where to go as opposed to having to wait for the weather to clear so that they could perform a search which, you know, with the size of the area, could have taken days to finding them if at all. In this case, it gave our people the ability to know exactly where they were going,” said Eagerton.
Bad weather and difficult terrain hampered rescue efforts for three days, but Monday night four Alaska Air National Guard rescuers were delivered by helicopter onto the glacier. They located the two hikers who had dug snow caves after their tent failed.
The pair was stranded near Bear Glacier in the Harding Icefields in Kenai Fjords National Park Friday after they flew out to the glacier to hike and ski. The plane that was supposed to pick them up Friday evening could not return due to bad weather.
Editor’s note: The caption of a helicopter photo that originally appeared with this story misidentified the helicopter pictured. It was a UH-60 Black Hawk, not a HH-60G Pave Hawk. The photo has been replaced with one of an HH-60G Pave Hawk. Additionally, Jennifer Neyman was incorrectly as a resident of Wrangell. She lives in Soldotna. And finally, location references about where the pair was stranded relative to the Bear Glacier have been corrected. They were stranded near the glacier, not in it.
