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Twenty Years After Accident, Father and Son Return to the River

Lewis Griggs and his son Ian fell into comas after a harrowing 1997 accident on the edge of Glacier National Park

By Justin Franz
Jason Matthews points to an area near where the incident occurred while walking along the bank of the Middle Fork Flathead River with Lewis Griggs, left, and Kevin Brockbank, right, on June 18, 2017. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

NYACK — On June 15, 1997, Lewis Griggs and his two children decided to celebrate Father’s Day with a whitewater rafting trip down the Middle Fork Flathead River.

The river that runs along Glacier National Park’s southern border was running high that day, just short of nine feet, but otherwise it was a perfectly sunny early-summer day in Northwest Montana. Nothing foretold the danger that lurked downriver.

After loading up the raft in Moccasin Creek, the Griggses and their guide drifted into the Middle Fork. As the raft sped up, propelled by the high spring runoff, Lewis looked over at his son Ian’s wide eyes. For a 10-year-old kid from San Francisco, Montana’s wild rivers were new and perhaps a little terrifying. Lewis leaned in to reassure the boy.

“Trust me, Ian, you’re going to love this,” he said.

At that very moment, 30 or 40 feet away, the roots of a tree that had been bearing the brunt of the Middle Fork’s high water gave up their hold on the Earth. A cottonwood tree, 40 feet tall and 10 inches around, started tipping over into the river, just as the Griggses’ raft passed underneath. The tree struck Lewis and Ian in the head. Another passenger was knocked in the back, and Kevin Brockbank, a 25-year-old guide for Great Northern Rafting, was hit in the leg. Ashley Griggs, Lewis’ 15-year-old daughter who was also in the raft, recalled later that there was blood everywhere and that both her father and brother were lifeless. She immediately thought they were dead. Brockbank, who had been guiding on the Middle Fork for five years, thought the same.

“I turned Ian over and immediately thought he was dead,” he said in a recent interview remembering the accident. “There was blood everywhere, and his eyes had rolled into the back of his head.”

Ian Griggs hugs his sister Ashley after a rafting trip along the Middle Fork Flathead River with their father Lewis, left, and his partner Johanna Eigen. Twenty years after a tree fell on their boat during a rafting trip, the Griggs family returned to float the Middle Fork Flathead River with some of the original guides from Great Northern Rafting on June 18, 2017. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

As Brockbank assessed the situation, another Great Northern raft pulled up to the scene. Becky Rygg and Jason Matthews were veteran guides on the river and had been taking a group of rookies on a training trip. Brockbank looked at one of the other guides and mouthed, “This is really bad.”

Using Rygg and Matthews’ raft, the guides began ferrying people to shore. There they began to triage the victims. Most of the guides had wilderness EMT training, and each tended to the wounded, ensuring that no one missed anything. Ian was unconscious but alive. Lewis was going in and out of consciousness, showing signs of a brain injury. Whenever he was conscious, he was combative and screamed incoherently. But in a moment of clarity, he asked, “Where’s my boy?”

A driver on nearby U.S. Highway 2 had seen the tree fall and called for help. But even as sheriff’s deputies and ambulances arrived, there was still a raging river between them and those in need. For nearly 90 minutes, the rafters were alone.

“We could see U.S. Highway 2 and we could see the ambulances but they couldn’t get to us,” Brockbank said. “We felt so alone. We might as well have been on the moon.”

In between checking on Lewis and Ian, the rafters had cleared a spot for a helicopter to land. An hour and a half after the tree fell, a chopper from Kalispell arrived and loaded Ian aboard. Lewis was ferried across the river in a boat from the sheriff’s office before being hauled into an ambulance and taken to a hospital.

Ian had a fractured skull and was in a coma for two days. Lewis’ condition was worse — doctors didn’t think he would live through the night. But he defied his prognosis and stayed alive, emerging from his coma eight days later. He was immediately flown home to San Francisco for treatment and therapy, but even then it seemed unlikely that he would ever recover from the accident.

“I couldn’t read, write, walk or talk,” Lewis said. “I didn’t know who my wife was. I didn’t even know who I was.”

For more than a year, Lewis received therapy daily in an effort to regain his most basic abilities. In 1998, a year after the accident, he returned to Montana to meet with the people who had saved his life but was still not well enough to finish his trip on the Middle Fork.

Twenty years after a tree fell on their boat during a rafting trip, Lewis Griggs and his children, Ian and Ashley, return to float the Middle Fork Flathead River with guides from Great Northern Rafting on June 18, 2017. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

In the coming years, Lewis rebuilt his life and returned to his career as a diversity trainer. He watched his children grow up and prosper. Ian, who had been in a coma for two days after the accident, came away from the accident relatively unscathed in the long run and got a perfect score on the math section of the SAT. Today, he’s an engineer in San Francisco.

But Lewis always wanted to finish the rafting trip he started on a warm June day in 1997. So a few months ago, he reached out to Great Northern Rafting to see if he and his two children could try again. Great Northern agreed to host them for free, and Lewis, his wife Johanna Eigen, Ian and Ashley returned to Montana this Father’s Day. Lewis also called on a few people who were there 20 years ago, including Brockbank, Rygg and Matthews.

On a noticeably colder June day, the group returned to Moccasin Creek and headed downstream. After a mile or two, they pulled off to the side and everyone searched for the spot where the tree had fallen two decades earlier. After a few minutes of stomping through the muck — the river’s course has changed dramatically in 20 years — the group found the wide spot in the trees across the water where Lewis and Ian slipped in and out of consciousness years earlier.

Lewis asked the guides who had been there that day to share the memories that stood out most to them. Brockbank recalled the helicopter screaming over the mountains to the rescue.

“For years after this accident, every time I heard a helicopter I got this feeling that help was on the way,” he said.

After a few tearful hugs, the group loaded back into the rafts to finish a trip 20 years in the making. A few miles downstream, Lewis, Ian and Ashley were splashed with Middle Fork’s cold water, washing away years of painful memories.

“Wet is so much better than dead,” Lewis screamed, with a smile a mile wide.

When everyone got back to West Glacier, they changed into dry clothes and prepared to say goodbye. But first, Brockbank had a gift for Lewis, Ashley and Ian: pieces of the tree that had changed their lives 20 years earlier. At some point during the summer of 1997, as the story of the accident quickly cemented itself in Montana river lore, one of Brockbank’s fellow guides went out to Nyack, cut off a chunk of the trunk and gave it to Brockbank. The tree has been with Brockbank ever since, and now he was passing a part of it on to the Griggses. Wooden gift in hand, Lewis thanked everyone for making the trip possible.

“I told Ian, ‘Trust me, you’re going to love this,’” Lewis said. “It only took me 20 years to prove it.”