Survival against the odds

In 1979 the plane carrying Norman Ollestad and his father, slammed into a mountain. Ollestad, the only survivor, had to find his way to safety

“I woke up in a blizzard and heavy fog—it was cold and windy. It took me a while to piece together that there were bodies sprawled about me. The pilot was definitely dead. Sandra was alive but had a dislocated shoulder. I saw my father crumpled behind my seat rack. I shook him and I spoke to him, but he didn’t wake up. I told myself he was just knocked out—I think that was something I had to do psychologically, just say to myself that he was only knocked out…”

So began 11-year old Norman Ollestad’s remarkable nine-hour struggle to survive — a struggle which he alone would win. Now, nearly three decades after the horrific air crash into a mountain on February 19th, 1979, Ollestad has returned to these memories to tell his story of struggle, survival, and how his relationship with his father ultimately saved his life. Now a father himself, Ollestad recounts his experience with the retrospective insight of his father’s unabashed thirst for life—a thirst that Ollestad now happily passes on to his own son, and to readers of his gripping memoir, Crazy for the Storm.

How would you describe what kept you going throughout those nine hours? What was going through your head?

I was in survival mode, which is an instinct that I think we all have in us. That instinct mixed with the fact that my father and I had had so many adventures from the time I was three –- back country skiing, training for ski racing, surfing, navigating the swells and so forth. I had a really close relationship with my father… we had a bond, and that’s what we did together. I’d faced a lot of fear in those adventures. So it was that culmination of shock and animal instinct kicking in, paired with the fact that I was used to having to tap into that instinct, used to having to face fear and think on my toes. Those adventures with my father also meant that I knew the specifics of the situation. I knew ice pretty well, and snow and the mountains.....

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