'Safe and sound'

By JASON JUNO

sports@yourdailyglobe.com

Hurley senior Eli Talsma eats lunch daily with 8-year-old Nante Niemi and he’s gone sledding and tubing with him in the winter.

So when the search party Talsma joined closed in on the missing Hurley second grader Monday afternoon in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Niemi recognized him.

“When we were running up to him, he was like ‘Eli,’” Talsma said. “That was pretty emotional.”

Niemi went missing Saturday afternoon while camping with family. Forty-eight hours later, a private search party found Niemi about 2 miles from his campsite.

He was no worse for the wear when found at 1:30 p.m. CDT on Monday.

“Honestly, if you didn’t know he was in the woods for two days, you probably wouldn’t have known,” Talsma said. “He was all talkative. He walked out most of the way besides when we carried him for a little bit. But he was talkative, he was laughing, he was asking a bunch of questions.”

Matt Tingstad started searching for him Sunday with help from Leander Somero of Superior Search and Rescue in the Keweenaw. At the end of the day Sunday, Tingstad found his tracks in the snow. With a much bigger search party together on Monday — and a clearer idea where to look — they found him.

“He asked how long he’d been out there because he said it felt like two weeks. And then he said, ‘I bet my mom misses me,’” said Tingstad, whose wife, Melissa, is friends with Nante’s mom, Jessica Buerger.

The family was camping in Michigan’s largest state park, and probably its most remote, between Presque Isle Park and Lake of the Clouds. Much more specifically, they were camping on the Toledo Creek, roughly a half-mile south of Lake Superior.

To get to the campsite, they would have walked north from South Boundary Road along the Pinkerton Trail — a 2.6 mile path — to the lakeshore, according to Sgt. John Kelly with the state police’s Wakefield post.

Half of the family went hiking or fishing and the grandpa, uncle and Niemi went to get firewood about a thousand yards from the campsite. Niemi did not want to cross the Toledo Creek. They said OK, go back to the campsite, Kelly said.

“They assumed since there were a thousand yards or whatnot, and he had the guide of the river he would make it back fine, so they sent him back, the 8-year-old,” Kelly said. “Well, he never made it back, he got turned around.”

That set off a massive search operation that included more than 150 search and rescue personnel from the state police and other local police, nine K9s, and air and water support units, according to an MSP release. Other groups came from across the region.

The search also included Tingstad and his group.

They located Nante about 2 miles southeast of the campsite. That was somewhere between the Cross Trail and Big Carp Trail, Kelly said.

“There’s no specific place I can tell you because it’s out in the middle of nowhere,” Kelly said. “It was an area that we had searched numerous times. But he was lost, he was turned around, so he was circling. So that’s why he wasn’t picked up right away.”

Tingstad had some experience in that area. Finding kids isn’t much different than finding deer; and the kids don’t run away from you like the deer, he said. Tingstad said he started putting a plan together Saturday night after they heard from his mom. He went out there Sunday morning and met up with Somero.

“We just walked the area, we made a big loop around the outside of the area where he was to make sure that Nante didn’t get out of that area,” Tingstad said. “We put 12 miles on. At 12 miles, we split up, I went to the lake. Somero, he came back out to the vehicle because he had been out since 8 o’clock the night before. He was there right away.

“When I was coming back out, 6:30 p.m. at mile 14, after 14 miles of walking, I found Nante’s tracks in the snow.”

He took photos and video of the tracks. Without a head lamp, he got out of the woods before dark. He said he gave the information to those in charge of the search operation after exiting the woods.

Tingstad also sent that stuff to Jake Allen, of Marenisco, who got some more guys together. They had 12 when they went back on Monday.

On Monday, they went 1.03 miles in to get him and they went 1.3 miles back out straight to South Boundary Road.

“If somebody had went in there after I was out Sunday night, he could have been recovered,” Tingstad said. “But physically, I thought that was my best bet to get out of there Sunday night and come back Monday. Honestly what I thought was going to happen is I’d get that information to searchers Sunday night and they’d go get him Sunday night, but nobody was in there. ... I gave them exact coordinates, nobody ever went and checked those when we went back there on Monday. We were the first party to go back there on Monday and he was 232 yards from where I found his tracks the day before.”

They expected to find him alive.

“There was very minimal bear signs, there wasn’t any active wolf signs,” he said.

The temperature, 45 to 55 degrees, even at night, he said, wasn’t all that bad.

“That’s fine, it’s hoodie weather,” Tingstad said. “There was snow higher up in the elevation. Where we had to park our vehicles there was snow. The Little Carp Trailhead, there was like about a foot of snow on the ground there, but as soon as you dropped elevation, then there was no snow anymore. Getting in there, you had to walk through snow to get started going down there, so we knew he wasn’t up high.”

There wasn’t any snow at all where he was; in fact it was dry.

“He was in a hemlock forest, which is pretty common out there,” Tingstad said. “Hemlocks have a good thermal cover where they don’t let much air from the atmosphere into the woods. The trees hold all the temperature that’s at ground level in that little kind of sub cultural, subterrain in there. It doesn’t get as cold in there as you think it would. It protects the ground from getting cold.

“It was probably the best three days of the year to be lost out there besides early fall — no bugs, no critters, no snow.”

Talsma helped make sure Niemi wasn’t afraid when rescuers got there.

“That’s one of the reasons why they wanted me to go up there so bad because they knew he’d recognize me,” Talsma said. “We didn’t know if he was going to be scared or anything and that I’d be able to calm him down.”

The Michigan State Police said he withstood the elements by taking shelter under a log where he was found.

“What I heard is he didn’t drink any of the water, he didn’t eat anything,” Talsma said. “And then at night, he would find low pine trees and he’d take branches and leaves and cover himself with it and he would sleep there most of the night.”

It was quite a moment when they found him.

“It was interesting, all the young guys without kids ran to check his condition and see how he was,” Tingstad said. “And all the dads in the group basically just stood back and were like thank the Lord that he was alright, he was safe, and just sat back and took it all in that it was a success.”

Before he was found, the state police talked about the tough conditions in the woods. Before he went missing, the state park posted how tough the park was to get to with South Boundary Road closed to through traffic, Lake of the Clouds still inaccessible, trails still snow packed and rivers raging.

“Honestly, if any kid were to go up and get lost, I think the best one would have been Nante,” Talsma said. “I knew he’d be able to do it.”

Talsma led Hurley to the WIAA state boys basketball tournament last year for the first time since 1949. He also rewrote the school’s record book, becoming the school’s leading scorer late this season. Tingstad calls him “twenty-one thirty” for the 2,130 points he scored.

None of that compares now.

“This is probably the best thing that’s ever happened in Hurley because none of that other stuff really matters, but somebody’s life was on the line for this,” Talsma said.

“He made his mark here already,” athletic director Steve Lombardo said while he was waiting with Talsma for another interview. CNN and ABC News had already called Monday and the whirlwind continued Tuesday. “Another piece of who he is and what he’s going to be leaving here in a few weeks.”

Having Talsma out there to help rescue him contributed to the storybook ending. Connecting students of all ages has benefited them all at Hurley.

“It was pretty special for Nante to have a familiar face out there to see and feel comfortable knowing Eli,” Lombardo said. “Seeing Eli as well as a number of our other senior students who work so well with our elementary kids as role models for our school. They meet with those kids during lunchtime, at recess, interacting with them, which of course is a benefit of having a pre-K-12 building. We’re able to utilize a lot of our older students, Eli in particular, so to see how he interacts with kids on a day-to-day basis here, I knew that it was special for him and Nante, both, to meet in the wilderness together.”

Talsma has snowmobiled and hunted deer in the Porkies, and he had a connection with the other rescuers.

“Very fitting for him to be up there, he knows what he’s doing,” Lombardo said.

The Hurley staff met Sunday after hearing what had happened, Lombardo, also the elementary principal, said.

“We had a plan in place Monday morning to obviously support our students here,” he said. “Nante having four siblings, obviously a lot of students were connected to him and concerned.”

Once they found out he was safe, they announced the good news to the entire school to an “uproar of cheers.”

“It was certainly overwhelming, everybody was thankful, a lot of tears, a lot of happiness around the school. It certainly was a relief to be able to announce positive news to everybody,” Lombardo said.