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Rawlins, Wyo., was cold, snowy and relatively quiet on the evening of Jan. 11. Several inches of newly fallen snow covered the area's open landscape, and Tana Davi was enjoying a quiet night at her post in the Carbon County Sheriff's Office.

As the dispatcher on duty that night, Davi spent the first few hours of her shift handling routine ambulance pages and training a new employee.

Shortly before 10 p.m., her radio crackled to life. A local ambulance crew awaiting the arrival of an inbound Yampa Valley Air Ambulance flight called to report the plane was late. The crew became concerned about the plane's status when the runway lights at Rawlins Municipal Airport went dark before it arrived. Earlier, the air ambulance had triggered the runway lights as it made its final approach.

Minutes later, fears became reality.

"Carbon County Sheriff's Office," Davi answered an incoming call.

"This is Jerry, Flight for Life," responded Jerry Yocom, a communications specialist with the Flight for Life program based at St.

Anthony Central Hospital in Denver. "We have an emergency."

Davi, aware of the reason for Yocom's call, immediately paged area law enforcement.

"I've got a Life Flight down somewhere in the area of the landing zone," Davi said, according to an audiotape copy of Carbon County 911 communications from that night.

Confirmation of the downed air ambulance sent the sheriff's office into a frenzy of action.

"OK, do you have any idea where they're at?" Davi asked Yocom.

"Listen, we understand that the landing lights did come on," Yocom said.

"They did," Davi confirmed, having already spoken to the ambulance crew at the airport.

"They were down 15 to 20 minutes ago, probably," Yocom said. "They approached from the south. You might want to start from that end."

"We have three people on board," Yocom continued. He'd later revise the count to four crew members. "We're in contact with one."

"And you have contact with one of them?" Davi asked.

"Yes, we do."

"OK, go ahead and give me conditions again of the people on board," Davi said.

"I'm going to give you condition of one, that's all we know about," Yocom replied. "Possibly broken legs. But we do have contact with him. Don't know how long we'll be able to keep him on the phone; he's on the phone with a flight nurse."

Search and rescue crews wouldn't know the fate of the plane's other passengers -- pilot Tim Benway and flight nurses Dave Linner and Jennifer Wells -- until discovering the wreckage hours later.

At the Flight for Life command center in Denver, a flight nurse named Dave was on the phone with YVAA flight medic Tim Baldwin, who had used his cell phone to call Yampa Valley Medical Center immediately after the crash. YVMC then connected Baldwin to the team at Flight for Life. Seated next to Dave was Yocom, who provided information given by Baldwin to Davi, who in turn relayed that information to Carbon County emergency personnel.

With search and rescue crews beginning to assemble and head to the area surrounding the airport, Yocom suggested the use of emergency sirens to narrow the search area.

"Tana, listen, would you ask your EMS people when they get down in the area they think the plane went down, if they would turn their sirens on, make some noise, we've got one of the people on the line," Yocom said. "We want to find out if he can hear."

Davi passed the message on to searchers.

"Whichever unit gets out in the area first, if they could start running their siren, we do have a subject on the phone, so we can hear to see if they're getting close," she said.

"I will run the siren," Sheriff's Deputy Mike Morris said. "We'll try to keep it down to just one unit at a time."

'He's getting cold,

and he's getting worse'

For the next hour and a half, the search effort was guided largely by using emergency vehicle sirens and flashing lights and asking Baldwin, who was pinned in the crashed plane, if he could hear them.

"Can he see any lights at all?" a searcher asked Davi.

"Not yet, and he's not hearing the sirens either," Davi said.

"He's still in the plane. He can't see anything," Yocom confirmed.

Moments later, Baldwin provided searchers the most promising clue yet as to the plane's location.

"Hey, listen, do you have railroad tracks in the area?" Yocom asked Davi.

"Yeah."

"Is there a train going?" he asked. "He believes that he may hear a horn or train or something like that."

Several minutes later, a searcher spotted a train nearing Rawlins.

"They could be over here south of the Sinclair highway," the searcher said.

Only later, after the plane wreckage was discovered, would searchers realize the railroad tracks were four miles away from the crash site. Sound travels great distances across the area's open terrain.

Limited visibility and snow prohibited the use of a helicopter or plane, Carbon County Sheriff Jerry Colson would say later, and the county's emergency locator transmitters weren't powerful enough to pick up a consistent signal from the downed aircraft.

Further hampering search efforts were rough terrain punctuated by ridges and draws and two-track roads covered by hard-pack snowdrifts.

"We were covering a lot of area, but there were a lot of ravines, and the terrain was rough," recalled Dwight France, the Carbon County fire warden and fixed-base operator at Rawlins Municipal Airport. "It was tough going."

As the minutes ticked by, Baldwin's cell phone gradually lost power.

"My only concern is we're going to lose that cell phone," Yocom told Davi more than an hour into the search. "We're going to lose him. He's pretty disoriented."

Davi then asked if the plane had a light that could be activated and used to locate the plane and Baldwin.

"Yes it does, but he can't reach that," Yocom said. "He can't raise his arms."

Davi relayed the message to searchers.

"The guy we have on the phone is unable to move," she said. "He cannot move his arms or any part of his body to reset that light. Also be advised we are losing cell phone service on that caller."

While searchers frantically combed the area, Baldwin's condition appeared to be deteriorating.

"He's very disoriented," Yocom said. "They're trying to keep him oriented. All we can really tell you is, when they turn those sirens on, how close they're getting."

Yocom suggested using a Global Position System to pinpoint the location of Baldwin's cell phone. Sheriff's deputies also attempted to contact cell phone carriers to see whether they could track the origin of Baldwin's call.

Time was ticking.

"He's getting cold, and he's getting worse," Yocom told Davi.

Moments later, the rescuers' best lead in finding the plane and its lone survivor was gone.

"We lost the cell," Yocom said.

'Keep on going'

News of the lost connection troubled rescuers, Sheriff Colson recalled last week.

"That's a feeling you can't describe," Colson said. "A lot of things ran through my mind. I didn't know if the battery had run out or if he had passed away.

"But you've got to put that aside and keep on going."

Shortly after Baldwin's cell phone battery died, rescuers were able to pick up a stronger emergency locator transmitter signal using a radio brought in by a search crew from Hanna, a town about 40 miles from Rawlins.

That signal eventually led searchers to the wreckage. At 1:55 a.m., about four hours after the plane crashed into a snowy ridge, rescuers reached Baldwin, who was conscious and able to talk to emergency crews. After extricating him from the destroyed plane, emergency medical technicians loaded Baldwin into the back of a Chevrolet Suburban for a bumpy ride to the closest paved road, where an ambulance waited.

News of the plane's discovery was punctuated by word that Baldwin was still alive.

"That was the biggest relief -- we made it before the elements took him," Colson said. "Everyone was real happy."

For Davi, who stayed hours after her shift ended to assist search crews and learn the fate of the plane's passengers, news that Baldwin was alive was overwhelming.

"It was just a feeling of pure relief," she said. "I almost started crying."

She wasn't the only one overcome by emotion. Emergency officials in the incident command center were jubilant upon receiving the news, Davi said.

"You could just see the relief on everyone's faces," she said.

More than 100 people, including community members who volunteered to help, participated in the search and rescue mission that saved Baldwin's life. Agencies that assisted include the Carbon County Sheriff's Office, the Rawlins and Sinclair police departments, Rawlins Search and Rescue, the Carbon County, Rawlins, Hanna and Sinclair fire departments, the Bureau of Land Management, Wyoming Highway Patrol, Rawlins Ambulance, Emergency Management, Red Cross and France Flying Service.

"We knew it was a race against time," Colson said. "It was a combined effort from everybody."

-- To reach Brent Boyer call 871-4234

or e-mail bboyer@steamboatpilot.com