you get into a place called black canyon, which is, you know, vertical cliff walls and black timber down in the bottom of it that you know, it s like finding a needle in a haystack in there. by 8:00 p.m., mckenzie was five hours overdue. the rescue pilots were tired, and running out of fuel and daylight. and then the authorities called. the military would take over, the man said. would send out a team in the morning. and in 30 minutes bobbi and her friends would be ordered out of the air. bobbi had one last area to search. shell canyon in the big horn mountains. rough, rugged, horrid terrain. out of all the wrong ways she could ve gone, it would ve been the worst. she combed shell canyon, back and forth in the growing dark. nothing. in all that time i kept thinking, why didn t i give her
i used my gps and pulled up google earth on my phone, just trying to look for the airport. and i did find it. but it was about ten minutes just of looking for it. she landed, ate lunch, refueled. so i was kind of rushing myself, after i fueled up, to get out of there because i was like, well, i wasted about 45 minutes here, just eating and gassing up and everything. mckenzie texted her instructor bobbi powers to let her know she was ready for take-off, heading home. i was actually super-excited for this leg of the trip because i was going to be over water the whole way. i had something to follow the whole way there. but somehow, just after takeoff, she transposed a zero in her gps directional heading. so instead of going northeast towards home, she flew southwest, and straight into some of the tallest peaks in the country, the absaroka mountains in wyoming. that one simple zero made a huge difference. but at first it looked okay.
fuel she wants. just get her her fuel. while they were fueling the plane, bobbi got on the phone, and began to organize a search party. friends, friends of friends. and in minutes, she and her husband were airborne. my husband said, you have to call the parents. worst day of my life and i did not want to do that. but i wasn t brave enough to call her mother because i m a mother. so i did the next best thing. i called her grandfather. the pilot? yes. and i said, mckenzie s missing. and he said, i will be in the airplane in 15 minutes. mckenzie s grandpa drove to where her uncle jared was working. it was around 4:00, 4:30. and my dad pulled up, and said mckenzie s missing. i m sorry.
and a large caliber handgun because it s grizzly country. there s mountain lions. there s, you know, coyotes. it s not where you d want to see yourself, let alone a young girl. brian kjensmo was in his super cub. he s a graduate of bobbi s flight school, and he and all the pilots knew what might be waiting out there. i think that every person that was in the air had worst case scenarios playing through their minds. 5:00 p.m., mckenzie had been missing over an hour. counting bobbi and her husband, and mckenzie s grandfather, there were nine small planes in the air, scouring the ground. over the radio, they agreed to divide the miles and miles of southern montana and northern wyoming into a grid. someone would say i m going to go look in the carbon basin and someone else would say, i m