Sonoma County Sheriff’s Henry 1 chopper makes remarkable rescue of Palo Alto couple

Chris Haas felt a pang of sadness watching the news Friday night. Carol Kiparsky and Ian Irwin, the elderly Palo Alto couple reported missing five days earlier, still had not been found. What began as a rescue effort had officially become a recovery operation.

Haas, 36, is a tactical flight officer on Henry 1, the Sonoma County Sheriff's helicopter. He had a personal stake in this case, having spent hours the previous Sunday searching for the couple from the air. Fog kept the chopper from the wooded areas around Inverness, where the Kiparksy and Irwin, both in their 70s, had rented an Airbnb.

“We were asked to do a shoreline search,” he recalled, “to see if they'd washed up on shore.”

After reporting to work on Saturday, he'd just completed his preflight checklist when pilot Paul Bradley emerged from the airport hangar's office with incredible news. Kiparsky and Irwin had been found, alive, in a densely wooded section of Tomales State Park.

It was now up to Haas and Bradley to extricate them, and ensure this story had a happy ending.

The couple had ventured out of their cabin for a view of the sunset on Valentine's Day. They were overtaken by darkness and became lost. They spent eight days in the wild, drinking muddy water and eating fern buds, said Michael St. John, unit leader of the Marin County Sheriff's search and rescue team, which found Irwin and Kiparsky.

Among the team's volunteers was Quincy Webster, a Redwood High School senior and aspiring aerospace engineer who has applied to Stanford. On Saturday, Webster was paired with Rich Cassens and a golden retriever search dog named Groot. Their assignment: comb a mile-long, deeply inhospitable drainage above Shallow Beach.

That part of the park features “uniquely difficult vegetation to get through,” St. John said. “It's coyote brush mixed with pine trees, poison oak, berry vines and stinging nettles.”

Though multiple teams had searched the drainage before them, Webster and Cassens approached it from below. It took them 90 minutes - often bushwhacking on their bellies - to cover 300 meters. That's when they heard the couple's feeble cries for help.

Despite his youth, Webster is a veteran of some 25 search and rescue missions - not all of which ended well. He recalled a 2017 search in Hicks Valley for a missing person who was found deceased.

“To get a live find on Saturday was just amazing,” he said.

It took Bradley and Haas just 13 minutes Saturday morning to cover the 35 miles from Henry 1's hangar near Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport to Shallow Beach, on Tomales Bay. After locating the couple, they noticed a slight gap in the thick canopy of trees through which Haas could be lowered on a “longline,” or rope.

They landed at a nearby staging area, where a paramedic boarded the chopper. Two minutes later, Henry 1 was back in the air, and Haas was lowered through that gap in the vegetation. He and the paramedic determined that Irwin was in worse shape, and should be airlifted first. While he was being strapped into a “basket,” Marin searchers arrived, having hacked their way through underbrush with machetes and a chainsaw, with another portable stretcher.

“When I come back,” instructed Haas, before leaving with Irwin, “I'd like her packaged” on that stretcher. Kiparsky was good to go when Haas made his return trip through that hole in the trees.

“Everything went about as smoothly as it could have,” he recalled.

The Sonoma County team had little time to rest on their laurels. Later that afternoon, they pulled a pair of hypothermic men out of the Pacific Ocean. Their kayak had capsized. The tide and winds had sucked them a mile and a half out to sea. While dangling over the surf with the first of those men, Haas grabbed the victim's spectacles just before they fell into the Pacific.

“You know,” he told the man, as they skimmed over the surface of the sea, “I got Lasik five years ago, and it was the best five grand I ever spent.”

Webster, the high school senior, was less blasé about Saturday's events.

“It means a lot,” he said. “This is why we do search and rescue. To save lives.”

While Saturday's rescue was among his most memorable, Haas said, it was nowhere near his most dangerous. On a pitch dark night in 2017, he and Bradley braved high winds to pluck a hapless tourist off a Marin Headlands cliff 200 yards from the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Paul was so close to the cliff face that he was getting pieces of dirt in his mouth as he was lowering me,” Haas recalled. “It was one of those rescues where, afterward I was thinking, ‘There's no way that really happened.'?”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On twitter @Ausmurph88