Searchers

Tuesday find drowning

victim

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

The search for a man presumed drowned in the South Fork of the Flathead River ended Tuesday after his body was found.

Searchers from North Valley Search and Rescue, the ALERT helicopter and the Sheriff's Department worked every day last week looking for Gabriel Brown, 21, of Kalispell. Brown went for a swim at the Devil's elbow July 17. He went out into a swirling current and around a rock formation that creates the large swirling "elbow" in the river and was never seen again.

Flathead County search and rescue coordinator Tom Snyder had scaled back the search as of Monday. North Valley Search and Rescue continued Sunday evening with their crews.

But then Monday night the Hungry Horse Dam operators lowered the water in the river and then increased the flow in an attempt to dislodge Brown's body.

It was a tactic that was also used early on in the search to no avail. But on Tuesday, it worked and Brown's body was recovered about 1 p.m. about a half-mile to a mile down from the elbow, said NVSR President Jack Thompson.

Searchers suspected Brown's body was hung up on underwater ledges not far from where he went in.

Last week searchers took two 20-pound sacks of potatoes and sunk them in the river where Brown was last seen swimming.

The sacks went down into eddies and never came back up or left the area. One had a line with a buoy on it and the other sacks had an electronic transmitter inside it.

As of Sunday, the one with the electronic transmitter was still giving off a signal.

The intent wasn't to duplicate where Brown went exactly, but to show the general area where he may have been sucked into, Snyder said.

The swirling currents in the area were too dangerous to dive into at the time.

Another indication that Brown's body hadn't gone far was searchers did helicopter flights at noon everyday and could see the river bottom from Pressentine Bar up to within 300 yards or so of the Elbow, and there were no signs of him.

"Special thanks goes out to the efforts of the Flathead County underwater dive team that spent several hours diving in the cold and dangerous waters looking for the deceased," said Flathead County Sheriff Jim Dupont.