A pilot with deep roots in the Flathead Valley played a big part in the recent rescue of a lost snowmobiler from the Alaskan wilderness.

Charlie Kauffman and his son, Ryan, spotted Steven Craig from the air about 45 miles northeast of Homer three days after Craig failed to return home from snowmobiling Jan. 11. 

Kauffman said Craig had walked well outside the main area being searched by as many as 100 people, and he was outside the area that Kauffman was assigned to search on Jan. 13.

“We had more fuel and more time, and I thought we might just as well keep looking. And I just kind of had a hunch,” Kauffman told the Homer News.

In an interview Friday with the Inter Lake, Kauffman said his hunch was based on cellphone calls that Craig made that were determined to have been transmitted through two cell towers. To Kauffman, the cell tower locations and the timing of the calls indicated Craig was traveling north after his snowmobile ran out of fuel.

“So we just kept looking ... we found him walking on this clear hillside,” said Kauffman, who graduated from Flathead High School in 1970 and learned to fly through Stockhill Aviation at Kalispell City Airport.

Kauffman said Craig got turned around because of low visibility and had wandered away from an area where there are many winter cabins. When he was found, Craig was about five miles from the nearest cabin, Kauffman estimates.

The Kauffmans tossed some meals ready to eat, sandwiches, water and a blanket from the airplane and returned to Homer to get help in retrieving Craig. 

Kauffman hopped in a helicopter and guided the pilot back to Craig’s location.

“The guy, he was just done. He had been walking for two nights and he was soaking wet. It was time to get him out of there,” Kauffman said. 

Kauffman, 60, moved to Alaska about 30 years ago with his wife, former Columbia Falls resident Carolyn Chubb. Prior to leaving the Flathead, he learned to fly, attended a vocational school for aircraft mechanics in Helena and worked at the Columbia Falls aluminum plant.

“We decided to come up here for a year, and I guess we forgot to leave,” Kauffman said with a chuckle.

Now he and his wife operate a laundry business in the Homer area, and he keeps busy with airplanes along with sons Ryan and Travis.

Kauffman was raised in the Lake Blaine area by his parents, Aldine and Mable Kauffman, who are now deceased. But he has a sister and a brother and many other relatives in the Flathead as the result of grandparents who had 15 kids after settling in the area in 1911. Kauffman said he regularly visits for family reunions at Bitterroot Lake. 

“I’ve done pretty well up here, and I like the country,” he said of Alaska. “But I kind of look at there as being home.”

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.