Pecos Wilderness plane crash survivors, saviors reflect on event 25 years later | Local News
A quarter century has passed since the day they escaped death, and Scott Sterritt and Robert Coleman remain astonished when they think about the implausible odds that fell in their favor.
The newspaper clippings and magazine articles detailing their unlikely rescue are slowly fading, but their memories of the plane crash are still vivid, their gratitude to their humble hero undying.
They could have easily perished in the middle of the Pecos Wilderness, severely burned after escaping the fiery wreckage of the small, twin-engine charter plane that Sterritt steered to an emergency landing after an engine failed over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the cool early morning of Sept. 28, 1997.
The emergency locator transmitter didn’t activate, and it could have been days or longer before they were found in the remote alpine terrain — perhaps longer than they could survive.
Instead, fate had a different plan. What could have been a fatal disaster became a remarkable feel-good tale that resonated across the country.
“Talk about all the elements lining up just perfectly to make things work out for us … to come out of it in one piece and have a story to tell,” Sterritt said.
As the injured pilot and passenger realized everything that could have helped them in a survival situation was ablaze in the aircraft, the one person with the perfect combination of skills and knowledge to get them out of their nightmare was approaching with her brother from a campsite about 100 yards away.
Lynn Bjorklund and her brother Eric Bjorklund stand by a trailhead in Los Alamos on Thursday afternoon. The two were backpacking in the Pecos Wilderness on Sept. 28, 1997, when they witnessed a plane crash. Lynn Bjorklund ran for three hours through the forest to call for help while Eric Bjorklund stayed behind to provide aid to the injured pilot and passenger.
Lynn and Eric Bjorklund, siblings from Los Alamos who were two days into a backpacking trip, informed the survivors that Lynn had years of search and rescue experience and wrote a trail guide to the Pecos Wilderness while working for Santa Fe National Forest.
She also happened to be an elite trail runner who held the women’s record in the Pikes Peak Marathon, considered one of the most grueling marathons on the planet.
Lynn, who was 40, could run out of the wilderness and get help while Eric, five years her senior, would stay with the survivors to tend to their injuries and keep their spirits up.
In this seldom-visited section of forest, near the headwaters of the Rio Mora, Coleman and Sterritt could hardly believe their luck.
“Me and Scott were looking at each other and going, ‘How in the hell do you crash 20 miles in the middle of nowhere and there you have the lady that mapped the wilderness area, and she’s a world-class runner?’ ” Coleman said. “I mean, you tell me God wasn’t there? You tell me this wasn’t something spiritual?”
Twenty-five years after the crash and rescue that appeared in media outlets like Good Morning America and Reader’s Digest, the survivors and saviors maintain a bond that only such a harrowing ordeal can produce.
Lynn’s 15-mile, three-hour run to reach her car and get to a phone to call for rescue helicopters garnered headlines for obvious reasons. But she deflects the praise, saying everyone involved had their part to play.
“Scott is an excellent pilot and managed to land the airplane in an impossible situation,” she said. “I’d had a decade or two of search and rescue training and had worked for the Forest Service as a wilderness ranger and probably knew the Pecos as well as someone could know it. Eric had been a Boy Scout and had first aid experience. It was just an amazing coincidence that we all happened to be there and were able to carry out a difficult mission to a good conclusion.”
“It’s one of those situations where you see that something needs to be done and you know how to do it, so you do it,” Eric added.
The crash
Coleman, then 48, went on a date the night before the fateful flight. A train engineer for Amtrak, he was scheduled to take a charter plane from Albuquerque to La Junta, Colo., so he could relieve a sick engineer and run a train back to Albuquerque.
When the woman slipped her new cellphone number into his pocket, an all-too-prescient joke slipped from his lips.
“I said, ‘What are you doing? That’s going to burn up tomorrow when I crash,’ ” Coleman recalled.
Robert Coleman smiles Wednesday in his home in Edgewood as he looks at a framed Runner’s World article highlighting the heroics of Lynn Bjorklund, who ran 15 miles through the Pecos Wilderness from the site of a plane crash involving Coleman and pilot Scott Sterritt to call in rescue helicopters.
The same day, the Bjorklunds were hiking through the Pecos Wilderness when they came across an old crash site from the 1970s. Written on the wing of the plane was a brief synopsis of who was involved in the accident and a report that they had gotten out alive.
“Camping that night, we were talking about that airplane and I said, ‘I would be highly annoyed if an airplane crashed on our campsite.’ I actually said that,” Lynn recalled.
Coleman met with Sterritt early the next morning for his charter flight out of Albuquerque. They made an immediate connection over their love of the air.
Coleman’s father and uncles had owned planes, and Coleman had flown before, though he didn’t have a pilot’s license.
Scott Sterritt and wife Shannon were married for just three months before Sterritt was involved in a Sept. 28, 1997, plane crash over the Pecos Wilderness that resulted in burns to more than 10 percent of his body.
Sterritt, 31 at the time, had been flying for 10 years and met his wife Shannon, a nurse, while piloting for Presbyterian Air Ambulance. They’d been married just three months, and Shannon was also three months pregnant.
Coleman listened intently during the preflight safety briefing. The only door on the plane was on the passenger side, and Coleman had Sterritt go over how to open the unique latch system multiple times so he would know what to do in case of an emergency.
As they were rising over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains east of Truchas Peak en route to La Junta, their emergency arose when one of the two engines on the Beechcraft Baron failed.
The plane couldn’t climb on one engine and they were losing altitude, sinking closer to the treetops.
Just then, an opening appeared. The golden morning light illuminated a dew-covered meadow — their only shot at a successful landing.
The plane barely cleared the last of the trees and skidded through the field before colliding with a large rock hidden in tall grass. The impact ruptured fuel lines in the front of the plane.
Sparks ignited a trail of fire in the grass and an intense blaze that filled the cockpit. Sterritt and Coleman could feel their hands and faces burning.
At the same time, the Bjorklunds had heard the plane fly low overhead and Lynn looked out of her tent just before the plane hit the ground and burst into flames.
“In my mind, I wrote them off immediately,” said Lynn, who had been in four previous search and rescue operations involving plane crashes that turned up no survivors. “I thought, ‘OK, these people have just died, and now we’ve got this enormous fire.’ ”
Steritt and Coleman, however, had survived the impact. When the plane came to a stop, Coleman used his preflight safety lesson to quickly open the door, and he and Sterritt escaped with mere seconds to spare before they would have been cooked.
The Bjorklunds didn’t see them exit the plane, so when they walked up to the flaming wreckage, they thought other backpackers had arrived there first.
“So we’re standing there watching it burn and all of the sudden Lynn and Eric walk up to us and ask us if we think anybody lived through that,” Sterritt said.
As they got a closer look, they realized they were talking to the survivors.
Ten to 15 percent of Sterritt’s and Coleman’s bodies were covered in severe burns. Coleman tried to find relief by rubbing the cold, wet grass across his face. The rock ruptured the plane beneath Coleman’s seat and the impact injured his legs and back, making it difficult to walk.
Worried they would go into shock, the Bjorklunds led the dazed men back to their campsite where they had a first aid kit and supplies.
Clearly, more help was needed soon. The men’s burns were swelling horribly and they were in intense pain.
So Lynn Bjorklund came up with a plan — and ran.
Robert Coleman rests against a fallen tree, trying to soothe his injuries following a plane crash in the Pecos Wilderness on Sept. 28, 1997. Siblings Lynn and Eric Bjorklund were near the site of the crash and rendered assistance to Coleman and pilot Scott Sterritt, with Lynn Bjorklund running 15 miles to civilization to call in rescue helicopters.
The sprint
A tag-along little sister, Lynn would run with older brothers Eric and Mark whenever they hit the trails around Los Alamos with their neighborhood friends. She loved being in nature and trying to keep with the older boys who, as it turned out, were some of the best runners in the country.
Ric Rojas was ranked in the top 10 in the mile when he was in high school. Anthony Sandoval went on to win the U.S. Olympic Marathon trials in 1980, the year the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Games.
Lynn said she thought she was a horrible runner because she could never keep up with them. Then she discovered the opposite was true.
“I remember my first run I borrowed some special racing shoes from one of the guys I ran with down the street, stuffed newspaper in the toes and was shocked that I actually did well when I was running with other women rather than chasing down these elite men that I trained with,” Lynn said of a one-mile race she won when she was about 13.
She kept on winning after that.
Lynn took titles in the 1974 and 1975 USA Cross Country Championships and set a high school record in the 3,000-meter run in 1975 that lasted 41 years. In 1981, she set a women’s record at the Pikes Peak Marathon that stood for 37 years.
At the time of the plane crash, she was working as a reclamation specialist for the Bureau of Land Management in Ely, Nev., and still running regularly. She was visiting the Pecos Wildernes to backpack in one of her favorite places she hadn’t seen in a while. The trip with Eric had been delayed multiple days due to inclement weather. Their other brother, Mark, a doctor, had to drop out late.
They weren’t planning on camping near the meadow where the plane crashed, but Lynn’s Belgian Tervuren, named Toulouse, had dumped the tent he was carrying the previous day, and the search for it set them back.
The day of the crash was Toulouse’s eighth birthday. A trained search and rescue dog and Lynn’s longtime running partner, Toulouse accompanied her in her quest for help.
After looking over the crash victims and before hitting the trail, Lynn determined the crash site’s exact location and planned the best route to make it to Jacks Creek Campground, where she had parked her vehicle.
The three-hour run was long and rugged. She tried to stay calm and focused, knowing a missed step could cost precious time.
“I was thinking a lot about them; I was praying for them and was hoping nothing disastrous would happen before we could get them help,” Lynn said.
After arriving at her car, she drove to a cabin that she found occupied and used a phone to call New Mexico State Police to dispatch rescue helicopters.
When a chopper met her at the trailhead nearly two hours after Lynn’s call, she convinced the crew to let her bring Toulouse aboard and then helped navigate them directly to the crash site.
About six hours after the plane had crashed, two helicopters arrived over the scene. Eric accompanied the grateful survivors as they went to get loaded up.
Feeling much better after being given a dose of morphine, Coleman asked the helicopter pilot to take a circle around the crash site as they were lifting off. Looking down at the remnants of the aircraft, he couldn’t believe he was leaving with his life.
“The plane was smoldering, totally burnt up, and I was thinking, ‘Wow, we got out of that. How did we get out of that?’ ” Coleman said. “A couple of seconds more and they would’ve just found us in there, crisped.”
Lynn and Toulouse had exited the helicopter to rejoin Eric upon landing. Much to the dismay of local media eager to speak to the heroes, the siblings continued their backpacking trip for a few more days before returning to civilization.
Robert Coleman is visited by siblings Lynn and Eric Bjorklund at the University of New Mexico Hospital in October of 1997 after the Bjorklunds helped rescue Coleman and pilot Scott Sterritt from a plane crash in the Pecos Wilderness.
The recovery
After arriving at University of New Mexico Hospital, Sterritt lost his sight that evening and didn’t regain it for several days. The swelling puffed his eyelids so much that he became temporarily blind.
Had he been in the wilderness, he said it likely would’ve been a death sentence.
“I would have been in real, huge amounts of trouble up there,” he said. “I would’ve known what to do, but I couldn’t see to do it. Having Lynn and Eric basically saved our lives.”
With similar burn patterns, Sterritt and Coleman went through treatments together and developed a closer bond. They both had skin harvested from their legs to cover their raw hands and would spend mornings in tubs having dead skin scraped off their bodies.
They were released from the hospital after about 2½ weeks but couldn’t use their hands for a couple of months. Coleman also had lingering issues with his legs, back and shoulders that required multiple surgeries and years of pain medication.
Sterritt’s new wife and mother-in-law helped him through the recovery process, while Coleman received support from Barbara Sanchez — the woman he dated before the crash.
Before long, life returned to something approaching normal.
Sterritt was back flying within about five months and his career gradually recovered. The father of three now lives in Fort Worth, Texas, working as a pilot and in the training department for American Airlines. He said he’ll sometimes integrate his story of the crash in his training if he feels the circumstances call for it.
“Coming close to death like that makes you appreciate life more. It makes me want to hug my kids more,” said Sterritt, who’s now 56. “It made me feel stronger about knowing how I handle myself in critical situations, which gave me confidence in my career.”
Coleman’s injuries prevented him from returning to work as a railroad engineer, but in recent years, he’s gotten parts in film productions playing roles like a grizzled mountain man.
The Edgewood resident, now 73, has also been working to get the story of the crash made into a movie and recently became engaged to a woman from Romania whom he’s known for more than a year.
The Bjorklunds’ epilogue also has been happy.
Lynn moved back to Los Alamos from Nevada in 2010 after 20 years away to return to work with Santa Fe National Forest. She lives within 10 miles of brothers Eric and Mark, and they continue to enjoy the outdoors together.
At age 65, Lynn still loves to run trails and occasionally takes part in competitions. Eric, 70, has retired as a software engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and spends his time directing and acting in theater productions in addition to his frequent hiking.
Brought together by a near-death experience, Sterritt and Coleman said they consider each other family.
They make sure to talk every anniversary of the crash, expressing their gratitude for their life and their friendship.
“He’s my brother,” Sterritt said of Coleman. “There’s always going to be a connection there. Even though we’re a long way apart, anytime he needs something, I’m there.
“We took care of each other before, and we’re not going to stop taking care of each other now.”
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