Lost skier found atop Hurricane Hill

PORT ANGELES – A Port Townsend man who lost his way near Hurricane Hill on Saturday was found safe in the freezing, snowy Hurricane Ridge area at about 1 p.m. on Sunday.

Randy Kraxberger, 53, skied out of the wilderness alongside the Olympic National Park search team after having slept in a snow cave overnight with temperatures in the teens.

“I went from the most low recesses to the greatest euphoria when I saw them struggling through the snow toward me,” he said Sunday from the park’s emergency operations center on Park Avenue in Port Angeles.

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When he heard rescuers’ voices in the early afternoon on Sunday, he didn’t know whether to believe his ears.

“I thought, is this real?” he said.

Kraxberger – who is on a winter break from his job as a commercial halibut and black cod fisherman in Alaska, living in Port Townsend, his home for 26 years – set out to simply enjoy a day’s cross-country skiing up to Hurricane Hill, which is past the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center.

He had skied, alone, to the summit of Hurricane Hill before weather conditions worsened.

In white-out conditions and high wind, Kraxberger lost sight of the trail and wasn’t sure where he was.

“It had started snowing and the tracks got covered up fairly fast, and I got a little disoriented, thinking I was a little further east than I actually was,” he said.

He called his wife of 30 years, Lisa Enarson, on his cell phone at about 3:15 p.m. Saturday, asking her for the Visitor Center phone number.

Enarson phoned the park headquarters and rangers began a search with a team of 12 rescuers on skis.

Kraxberger made sporadic cell-phone contact with searchers, but the phone cut off after only a few words, said Larry Nickey, park emergency operations coordinator, on Saturday .

His phone did not have a GPS locator, Nickey said.

Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said Saturday that two searchers had tried skiing beyond the section of road that serves as the cross-country ski trail, but that they turned around because of wind gusts of 45 mph, low visibility and high avalanche danger.

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