On Saturday, May 18, at 7:30 p.m., Grace Zeller’s cell phone rang in her Brainerd home. Caller ID showed her boss, Jake Willis, calling.
Zeller, 35, is a helicopter pilot with the Department of Natural Resources Enforcement Division. She knew Willis wouldn’t just call on a weekend to chat.
“What’s up, Jake?” she asked as she answered the phone.
Willis, the division’s chief pilot, oversees seven pilots. Their duties typically include elk surveys, invasive plant eradication and other conservation work, as well as assisting conservation officers.
Sometimes they also fly the search portion of search and rescue missions. But most of the time they leave the rescue to Minnesota State Patrol pilots and their specialized aircraft.
This night would be different.
“I was working at my deer hunting cabin when I got a call from St. Louis County about paddlers who had gone over a waterfall in Boundary Waters,” Willis recalled. “It was too late to send a float plane to do a rescue — float planes can’t land on the water after dark — and there were no other helicopters available, not the State Patrol, not the Forest Service, and not the Coast Guard. So I called Grace to see if she was available, and I emphasized that if she wasn’t comfortable with the mission, I would support her no matter how she did it.”
Although Zeller is still quite young, she is the only full-time female helicopter pilot the DNR employs and has already logged many flying hours.
As a child growing up in Wyoming, she always wanted to fly and was particularly enamored of helicopters. She earned her pilot’s license and a college degree in Oregon, flew helicopters commercially in that state and in California, and also ferried gawking tourists over and into the Grand Canyon.
“After the first few weeks, flying in the Grand Canyon was like riding a taxi,” she said.
In January 2022, she was hired by the DNR.
Destination: Curtain Falls
“I was told the Boundary Waters incident was at Curtain Falls,” Zeller said. “I quickly looked it up on Google Earth and the question I had was, ‘Where would I land?’ I also didn’t know how bad the injuries were to the canoeists and at that point I thought the best thing I could do was get a doctor out to stabilize the injured until morning.”
It was 35 minutes between the time Zeller hung up her phone, put on her flight suit, drove to Brainerd Airport and, with the help of another DNR pilot, completed her pre-flight check and took off into the now dark night.
Also known as “Little Bird,” the MD500 helicopter Zeller flew is a relatively small four-seater with a shorter main rotor radius than larger DNR helicopters. This would be important if she had to land in a heavily wooded section of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
“There was a North Memorial air ambulance at the Ely airport when I landed,” Zeller said. “But their plane wasn’t rated to land in Boundary Waters. So I loaded up three medics, two from North Memorial and one from the Iron Range, along with their gear, and headed to Curtain Falls.”
A state patrol plane was already circling Curtain Falls, and the pilot used the plane’s infrared camera to locate the island below the falls, where four paddlers were. Two of them were injured after going over the falls, along with two Good Samaritan paddlers who happened to come across them.
It was the Good Samaritans who had alerted St. Louis County sheriff’s authorities to the accident earlier that evening, using a cell phone and a portable satellite communications device.
Two other canoeists who had also fallen from the falls in the accident were missing. As the state police pilot searched the area, trying to locate them with his heat-seeking camera, he gave Zeller the island’s GPS coordinates.
Both pilots and canoeists on the island were lucky with the weather. The moon was about three-quarters full in a mostly cloudless sky, making nighttime visibility about as good as it could be.
This was important, because although Zeller was an instrument-rated pilot, her helicopter was not equipped with the navigation equipment needed to fly “blind” through low clouds, heavy fog, and storms. So Zeller flew by sight to Curtain Falls, a distance of about 15 air miles from Ely.
Along the way she got another chance.
“One of the medics had night vision goggles and he was also familiar with helicopters, and both of them were helpful when we flew to the falls,” Zeller said. “The people on the island had started a fire, probably to keep warm but also to guide us, and with the night vision goggles the medic could see the fire from far away.”
Video (00:09) Infrared footage from a Minnesota State Patrol aircraft shows a DNR helicopter on the right after it landed on an island where two injured paddlers were awaiting rescue.
As Zeller approached the island, she lost radio contact with the State Patrol pilot. Gone with the lost connection were any recommendations the pilot might have made about where she might try to land.
“The medic using the night vision goggles found a rock a short distance from the island and that’s where I landed first,” Zeller said. “The rock was small and I was able to get both skids down, but I couldn’t get the helicopter all the way down.”
Looking for a better LZ
As the medics exited the plane and waded through the water toward the island, Zeller held the cyclic, or control stick, of the plane in her right hand, making small adjustments to keep the skids on the rock. In her left hand, she held the collective, which was mostly in half-hover. Her feet, meanwhile, balanced the anti-torque pedals, adjusting them only when the wind picked up and the collective shifted.
“The most important thing in tight LZs (landing zones) like this is not to make any quick movements,” she said. “To stay relaxed.”
When assessing the situation on the island, the medics determined that one canoeist appeared to have a broken leg and was also close to hypothermia. The second canoeist also had a leg injury — it would later be determined that he had broken his pelvis.
The doctors were confident that neither rower would be able to cross the water separating the island from the helicopter.
“I was on the west side of the island and the medics told me there was a rock that looked better to land on the east side,” Zeller said. “So I took off, circled the island and found a smooth rock that sloped down a little bit toward the water. I was able to land there and idle the helicopter, spinning both the main rotor and the rear rotor.”
By now it was midnight, and while Zeller waited in the helicopter, the medics came up with a plan. The canoeist with the leg injury, who was shaking and possibly going into shock, would fly back to Ely first with two medics, while the Iron Range medic would remain on the island with the other injured canoeist.
“The medics got the first guy into a chair, and I imagine it was painful to sit up with a broken leg,” Zeller said. “Then the medics climbed in and we took off.”
In Ely, the injured paddler was strapped to a stretcher and flown to a hospital in Duluth by North Memorial’s crew.
Soon Zeller was up again, this time flying back to Curtain Falls alone. She approached the island without the aid of the medic’s night vision goggles, illuminated the slick rock with her landing lights, set the helicopter down, and waited while the second wounded canoeist and the remaining medic climbed aboard.
“Buckle up?” she asked once the doors were closed.
“Yes,” was the answer.
And yes.”
Then she took off.
Epilogue:
The accident occurred when the four paddlers in two canoes were fishing above the falls. One canoe capsized, causing it and one paddler to be swept over the falls. When the paddlers in the second canoe attempted to rescue the capsized paddler, that canoe and all three paddlers went over the falls.
Kyle Sellers, 47, of Ham Lake, was one of two surviving paddlers, and was the first to be evacuated by Zeller.
Erik Grams, 43, of Ham Lake, also survived. He was the second person flown out.
A third paddler, Reis Grams, 40, of Lino Lakes, brother of Erik Grams, died. His body was found June 3 by the St. Louis County Rescue Squad.
The crash also claimed Jesse Haugen, 41, of Cambridge. His body was found May 31. Funerals have been held for both.
A fifth canoeist in the group, Jared Lohse, 33, of Cambridge, was staying at the party’s campsite on the day of the accident and was uninjured.
Zeller, meanwhile, landed the MD500 in Brainerd at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 19, eight hours after receiving the call from Willis.
For her work that night, Zeller will receive an award from the DNR Enforcement Division for her lifesaving action.
