What would propel two locals to spend their day off bushwhacking through some of the wildest terrain in the Roaring Fork Valley?
The most valuable piece of scrap metal around.
Joey Stokes and Heather Hall earned a $5,000 reward Tuesday following an 11-hour search for Aspenite Barry Cox’s missing propeller, which inexplicably fell off his single-engine plane while it climbed out of Aspen over the rugged wilderness above Ruedi Reservoir in December.
Cox, an experienced pilot with 7,400 hours of flight time, was forced to glide his Piper Malibu —its windshield coated with oil, making visibility close to nonexistent — the 12 miles back to Aspen/Pitkin County Airport with three passengers aboard the day after Christmas. No one was hurt during the emergency landing.
About one month ago, Cox put up a Web site, wheresmyprop.com, with a map of his GPS flight path and an offer for a $1,000 reward to the person who could find the prop.
“I’m out $80,000 at this point,” said Cox, explaining that finding the propeller might solve the mystery of how it fell off — and who was culpable — and thus get him reimbursed for the new engine he had to buy. (Insurance reimbursed him only the $23,000 for the propeller and cowling, he said.)
Cox himself flew over the area where the prop fell off — which is mostly above treeline, according to his Web site — but did not spot anything. The National Transportation Safety Board, which had been investigating the incident, had not yet searched the area, said Cox, but had given instructions and the wrong coordinates to the National Guard helicopter training base at the Eagle County airport.
“They were going to look for it eventually,” he said, but Cox decided to take matters into his own hands to eliminate the possibility that winter snows could erase any evidence of the downed prop.
So he loaded what he believed to be the correct coordinates and “search box” onto his Web site, increased the reward to $3,000 and waited.
On Monday, Cox put up a “final offer” of $5,000 to the person who found the prop, which he believed to be in an area with elevations of 10,500 to 11,700 feet.
When Stokes and Hall, who both work at Taster’s in Snowmass Village, set out Tuesday morning, they didn’t know about the “final offer,” said Hall. In fact, Stokes had been planning to search for the prop with another friend, who backed out. Hall decided to go with him at the last minute because they both had Tuesday off.
Photo courtesy Barry CoxJoey Stokes of Snowmass Village poses with local pilot Barry Cox’s lost airplane propeller that Stokes and friend Heather Hall found in the rugged backcountry above Ruedi Reservoir during an 11-hour adventure. Cox rewarded the pair $5,000 for the find.
“I was thinking it’d be fun to hike and exercise the dog,” said Hall. “We both realized when we started hiking that if we found it, it’d be pure luck.”
The pair had a GPS onto which they had loaded the coordinates from Cox’s flight path, and headed for the “search box” by following an arrow departing from the plotted start point.
They parked in a residential neighborhood where two helpful construction workers saw their GPS and deduced they were propeller hunting — meaning that others had gone in search of it before from that area.
Within a short while the pair were bushwhacking through sagebrush, then a heavily wooded area, and had been hiking for several hours with only a 20-minute stop for lunch.
Stokes, a Snowmass Village local who is entering his junior year at CU-Boulder, said he had been confident about finding the prop but his hopes waned after hours of trekking.
“I was kind of on my last legs just before we found it,” he said. “But that gave me a second wind.”
The pair had paused for Hall to eat an apple and determined they were approximately one mile from the search box. At that point they were taking a zigzag course through some brush to cover more ground.
“We were just walking and Joey said, ‘Hey look,’ and it was just there” to the right of their path, said Hall.
Bringing the prop back was the hard part, she said, as the 50-pound piece of metal was unwieldy and slippery. With one on each end, the two kept switching it around to get a good grip, and earned their shares of bruises and cuts stumbling through thick woods and falling on steep pitches. At one point they saw a man on horseback who took off before they were able to call for help.
The sun had set when they got back to their car, 11 hours after they had begun their trek.
Cox picked up a message on Wednesday morning that Stokes had left him Tuesday night, and met with Stokes to pick up his propeller and hand over $5,000 cash. Cox is sending the prop to the NTSB to analyze and “hopefully come up with a conclusion,” he said.
Neither Stokes nor Hall said they had any specific plans for the cash reward, but Hall said she might go for a nice ski vacation. Stokes also earned a bonus on his half of the reward, Hall said, because his dad had bet him he wouldn’t find it.
“It’s one of those things you’re going to remember forever,” she said. “You can’t go treasure hunting for a propeller every day.”
lutz@aspendailynews.com
