near the airport. Inside the fence, work continued on a new runway, with a water truck wetting the site to keep construction dust down. All the early-morning activity may have surprised Colt and forced him to rush. After he raised the hangar door and muscled the heavy plane out using a manual towbar, he placed the bar back in the hangar but didn’t close the door. If he had, his crime would not have been discovered for many hours, if not days.
Colton climbed into the Cessna’s cockpit, stuck his screwdriver in the ignition switch, and cranked it to the right. This time the engine caught.
The road guys were used to small planes buzzing in and out of the airport, but they sensed that this one was in trouble. The snarl of the Cessna’s engine sounded too high pitched, like it was overrevving. They stopped working and watched the plane accelerate along the ground to the southwest. The runway in that direction is called 2-0, but a couple witnesses said Colt didn’t bother with the runway and instead was attempting to take off from the taxiway, a narrow strip of asphalt that ran parallel to 2-0. They watched as the Cessna struggled into the air. It didn’t gain altitude nearly as fast as it should have, and was headed straight for a stand of trees.
Gardiner speculates that Colton either set the variable propeller to the wrong pitch, or left the flaps at the neutral setting, which doesn’t offer the wing extra lift for takeoff. The witnesses also said he used only half of the runway. Instead of taxiing to the end of the field, pausing to look for traffic, and then taking off, Colt exited the hangar farm at the runway’s midpoint, turned left, throttled up, and just went for it.
“That plane should have been at seven hundred feet by the time it reached the trees,” says Gardiner. Instead, at the last second and with the turbocharged engine “balls to the wall,” the Cessna barely cleared the trees.
AIRBORNE WITH ENOUGH FUEL to carry him at least seven hundred miles, Colt had choices. He’d been heading east, putting plenty of distance between himself and all the recent newspaper, TV, and Internet coverage that had plastered his photo all over northwestern Washington. Regional law enforcement at every level now had a clear bead on his MO. All the real heat, though, was limited to the two small islands where he’d made the biggest impact. If he kept moving away and could stay off the radar for a few weeks, he’d be forgotten everywhere else.
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Northern California, British Columbia: there was a lot of world-class secluded wilderness within his range. When millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane went down in the Sierra Nevadas it took a full year, and ultimately a lucky break, to find his remains. With Colt’s proven fearlessness at off- field landings, he had countless places where he could drop the plane and disappear into the rugged wilds. If he didn’t want to play survivalist, he could land closer to civilization and use his technical know-how to steal identities and melt into the fringes of society. He could even head back to Reno, where he’d previously been able to hole up incognito.
At this point, Colt had won. He’d escaped from a prison home. He’d escaped from two small islands where everyone was hunting him. He had a grubstake and a fast, long-range getaway vehicle. Colt had even one-upped D. B. Cooper, because he had control of the plane and could land wherever he wanted to instead of having to jump out with a parachute. In four hours, Colt could touch down more than a thousand miles away from where all his problems began and where he had the greatest chance of getting caught. He’d brought on all his current troubles because he couldn’t stomach another year and a half in a laid-back juvenile group home. Now, with more than a dozen felonies already hanging over his head, capture meant facing up to ten years in prison. And, since he’d turned eighteen the previous spring, this time it would be nasty big-boy prison. It made sense for Colt to get lost and stay that way.
Or not.
ONCE IT SAW THE Cessna clear the trees, the Boundary County road crew shrugged and went back to work. An early-bird local pilot, though, arrived at the airport and knew immediately that something was wrong.
“You out flying this morning, Pat?” he asked Gardiner on the phone a little after 7 a.m. “Nope,” came the expected answer. “Well, your hangar door is up, the back door is busted again, and your plane’s gone.” Gardiner told him to dial 911 and said he’d be right down.
After a quick look around the airport, the local police dialed their own 911. Those deep bicycle tire tracks set off alarm bells that, according to what the authorities told Pat Gardiner, rang all the way to Washington, D.C., to Janet Napolitano’s office at the Department of Homeland Security. It certainly wasn’t some drifter breaking into hangars, and drugs were the most benign explanation for a missing plane carrying a heavy load. The alternate scenario was the stuff of nightmares because there was now a missing plane potentially carrying more than six hundred pounds of anything imaginable with the range to deliver it to Spokane, Sea-Tac Airport, Whidbey Naval Air Station, Naval Base Kitsap—home to a fleet of nuclear submarines and a stockpile of nuclear weapons—or the city of Seattle.
An APB went out on the plane. The Civil Air Patrol was put on alert and missioned to check every small airfield within range. Calls also went out across the border to the Canadians. Air traffic control (ATC) radars blanketed the region and the Cessna’s Mode-C Transponder automatically squawked a transponder code that identified the plane to controllers. Surely, they’d get a quick fix.
Colton flew south, over the infamous Ruby Ridge, and down Idaho’s panhandle. Above Lake Pend Oreille, he had his chance to turn left and follow the Clark Fork River, which would have led him southeast through the mountains away from Washington. Instead, he continued south another sixty miles and then turned west. Colt added to his troubles by flying the plane across the Idaho-Washington border south of Spokane, another federal offense on top of the one he committed by carrying firearms over the Canadian border.
Colt flew on to Walla Walla, Washington, just north of the Oregon line, then turned northwest and headed for Moses Lake. Moses—named for a Sinkiuse chief—is home to Grant County International (formerly Larson Air Force Base), where Boeing and the U.S. Air Force test and train pilots to fly their heaviest jets. It’s one of the largest airports in the country, and it has stood by as an emergency landing strip during every NASA Space Shuttle mission. Grant County’s relatively endless 13,500-foot runway wasn’t Colt’s idea of a safe place to land during the day, though. He continued toward Wennatchee, where he had friends, but didn’t look for a landing spot there either. He crossed Lake Chelan, a breathtakingly cold and deep fifty-five-mile-long basin fed by Cascade snows, then once again rock-and-rolled through the turbulence over glacier-topped mountains on his way toward the town of Granite Falls.
Except for his big swing south to avoid the most dangerous sections of the Cascades, Colt now flew on a line that ran direct from Boundary County Airport back to his Camano Island home—the very heart of his problems.
The Cessna’s fuel tanks, however, couldn’t disregard the big detour. Colt knew he had to get the plane on the ground very soon. But again, he ran into trouble with the weather. As the plane’s hour meter ticked over 313, Colt found himself above rugged terrain shrouded in fog and mist. The last minutes of his flight showed some dramatically erratic flying as he desperately tried to find a landing spot before his fuel ran out.
“There’s fuel and then there’s usable fuel,” says Pat Gardiner. The Cessna 182 can run out of fuel with five gallons still in the tanks—and that’s if it’s flying straight and level. If the pilot puts the plane into an uncoordinated maneuver, such as a turn where the aileron and rudder aren’t working together to keep the plane following its nose, the fuel flow can “unport” even though there’s enough gas to keep the motor running. “Unporting” is another of those nonchalant aviation code words. In English, it means “Oh shit, why did the engine stop?”
According to investigators, Gardiner’s Cessna did some unintentional acrobatics just before landing. Colt later told a friend he was flying upside down at one point. As he got down to his last few gallons of usable fuel, he finally found a break in the mist and what he thought was a decent landing spot. From one thousand feet, it looked okay: an ice cream cone–shaped field of patchwork green and brown, roughly five hundred by nine hundred yards and separated from the banks of the Stillaguamish River by about a hundred yards of trees. Down lower, though, at the point of no return, it became obvious why there was this one treeless spot amid the forested hills: it was a logged clearcut.
The misnomer about the word “clearcut” is that the forest floor is left clear. In fact, the trees are severed several feet up the trunk, leaving behind jagged stumps anchored to the ground by strong roots. At this spot, a summer’s worth of fast-growing vegetation camouflaged a minefield. Hundreds of immovable cedar and fir stumps spiked the field, any one of which could totally destroy the plane and its pilot.
The final seconds of this flight were a terrifying blur and by all rights should have been Colt’s last. The plane
