One body found, another person missing after Whatcom rafting accident Tuesday
One body has been recovered and another person is missing after a rafting accident on the Nooksack River Tuesday afternoon near Glacier.
Whatcom County Fire District 14 and 19 crews and Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office rescue teams were called at 2:56 p.m. Tuesday, June 14, to the 10400 block of Mount Baker Highway in Deming near the Snowline Inn for a water rescue.
Five people, including a guide, were aboard the raft at the time it overturned in the North Fork of the Nooksack River, Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Deb Slater told The Bellingham Herald in an email Wednesday morning.
The guide managed to get two people out of the water, but the two others were swept downstream, Slater reported. The body of one of those two people was later located.
The search for the person still missing will continue Wednesday, according to Slater, with Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office Swiftwater Search and Rescue and Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue (BORSTAR) crews.
No other information about the person who died, the missing person or the three survivors was released.
Tuesday’s fatality was the first on the Nooksack River involving a commercial rafting company in approximately 20 years, Triad River Tours Executive Director Luke Baugh told The Bellingham Herald Friday, June 17, and it was the first on a river in the Puget Sound region in Western Washington since Memorial Day weekend 2013 on the Skykomish River.
Bellingham-based Triad River Tours, which Baugh said was not involved in Tuesday afternoon’s incident, has had employees make protocol scouting runs on the Nooksack this spring, checking conditions out, but it has not begun commercial rafting runs on the river in 2022.
The nine miles of the Nooksack between Glacier and Maple Falls is listed as Class III or IV whitewater, according to Leavenworth-based rafting guides RiverRider.com, as it travels from a narrow, steep gorge along the upper third of the route to more casual reaches on the bottom portions offering views of Mount Baker and other peaks in the area.
“It’s a beautiful river, but it can be dangerous and even deadly,” Riverriders.com owner Jim Behla told The Herald.
Behla, who said he began rafting the river in the 1970s, added that snowmelt and recent rain storms can create high river levels. Those levels, coupled with log jams that can move along the river, make for some “really wicked conditions” that require some highly technical maneuvers to avoid, Behla said.
This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 8:54 AM.
