A small, orange and silver plane swooped low, circled, and waving its wings, flew east toward the dam. They took heart in the fact that they’d been discovered.
Half an hour later, the plane flew over again, very low, dropping an orange streamer fastened to an envelope. The envelope was torn open by a branch, and the message floated down by itself. With fresh horror they read it. It said, “Fire down by river bridge on ridge top. Get going.”
It was signed simply, “Ost.”
Hurriedly they looked around for smoke. Seeing none, frightened, trapped in a strange, wild country, with all nature seeming to turn against them, they knew not where to turn.
In an effort to find out about the fire, Ost borrowed the hip boots a woman had given Fredericks and started off in the direction of the slide. The plane circled over him and wagged its wings, an action he interpreted to mean that he was going in the right direction. He continued, climbing the muddy lower end of the slide, the rubble, the great cube-shaped boulders, big as cars, all mixed in with trees, some stripped bare, others still complete with all their branches.
On the slide he met two men walking in from the outside. They told Ost that the river bridge was 15 miles upstream, past the dam, and advised him to keep the group where it was until helicopter help came.
The plane message about the fire was still a mystery. It remained so for several months, until Ost finally got it explained. The message had been one of several dropped from a plane by a Forest Service guy, Otto H. Ost, in 1957 to instruct a ground crew to proceed to a fire a couple of hundred miles from the Madison Canyon. The streamer, Otto Ost figured, had been found, returned, and sent out without removing the two-year-old message. The note from Ost to Ost was a powerful coincidence.
“Doesn’t it strike you as almost planned?” Rev. Ost said when he got the explanation.