Profile - by Karen Plant

Karen Plant Profile April 9, 2008
They never found the hard hat he wore that day.
His family figures the hat was pounded deep into the ground by the rolling skidder tractor somewhere along the mountainside.
Jeff Erickson, 25 at the time, was logging up Bear Creek near Lolo the Tuesday after Memorial Day in 2000. No one witnessed the accident. And Erickson, who suffered a traumatic brain injury, recalls little up until six-months before the accident.
On a spring day in Missoula, nearly eight years later, a lean, fast-moving Erickson blasts water on the hood of a maroon F250 Ford pickup. He flashes a quick smile from beneath a black, red-flamed baseball cap. He wears a short-sleeved plain gray T-shirt. His forearms and elbows are peeling. Enveloped in a cloud of mist, he moves to the 20th truck in a line of 21. He quickly shoots the last two rigs clean before confidently striding across Bitterroot Motor's lot to attack a row of dusty Expeditions.
The day he'll never remember is a day others will never forget.
Although sawyers were downing trees just around the ridge up Bear Creek that Tuesday, they heard nothing over the drowning buzz of their chainsaws as Erickson's 19,000 pound tractor tumbled 300 yards down the mountain.
No one will ever know exactly what happened that day, but Erickson’s wife of 13 years still envisions the events. “It looked like he had logs in his grapple and he was on his way down,” Marcia Erickson said.
The grapple is the rear part of the skidder. Jeff was gathering fallen logs with the skidder’s huge claw-like extensions, and then driving down the winding road and depositing them along the roadside for a logging truck to haul away.

“It looked like he dropped down off the road,” she said. “He must have gotten on another log with the tire, and it kind of slipped and slid and made him start rolling. He rolled and flipped and flew all the way down the mountain.”
Along the way, the skidder tore out a full-grown tree and severed the top of another tree 30 feet up.
“So he was catching 30 feet of air,” she said. “There were big huge craters in the ground from where the skidder landed and tore the ground up.”
The Ericksons' lives seem to center around mountainside events. The two spent their first date at Discovery Mountain. “She knew I couldn’t turn down skiing,” Jeff Erickson said.
The couple met in 1990 at Hellgate High School.

“I kept stealing gum out of his locker. I finally asked him out on a date,” Marcia Erickson said.
He admits to being a daredevil. Photos show him flying mid-air in a perfect skier’s crouch while jumping from a 30-foot-high crevice, competing in a pole-climbing logger event, topping a tree over 100 feet up and lying almost horizontal as he circles a lake on a wave runner.
Jeff started helping Marcia’s family log their 60 acres up Ashby creek the summer before his senior year in 1993.
A flunking grade in English pushed him to drop out the following fall semester. While suspended from school for three days for failing to turn in an assignment, Jeff logged with his buddy and earned $150 a day.

“So Friday, we quit early. I turned my books in and quit school,” he said. Within two weeks Jeff passed his GED.
The couple married in July 1994. Their daughter, Kelli, was born later that year.
In 1996, they went into partnership with Marcia’s parents and started A&E Logging, subcontracting for Plum Creek Timber Co. mostly.
By 1999, the couple was ready to start their own logging company and planned to do so at the completion of the Bear Creek job.
“We were about three to four days to completing the job,” Marcia Erickson said.
But on the morning of May 30, 2000, Marcia’s dad found Jeff slouched unconscious in the skidder cab shortly after 10 a.m. “My dad broke his leg rolling the CAT the year before,” she said, and he had spent the morning at a follow-up doctor's appointment.
“He came up after his appointment and found Jeff on the road inside the skidder. Three tires were popped,” she said.

The only thing that stopped the skidder from rolling farther was the six-foot-tall log “deck” of piled logs that Jeff had placed along the road for the logging trucks to pick up.
“If that log deck would not have been there, he would've kept on a-goin',” she said. “That’s about 1,000 feet down.”
Jeff’s head was smashed against the tractor’s crunched cage. He was still buckled in, his legs splayed out to the side. “The scarring on his head was in like a diamond shape from the cage,” she said. He suffered no broken bones.
“Dad had to stand on top of the log deck to get a cell phone signal,” she said. “He called me at work."
Then the paramedic called. Marcia said he told her, “Your husband was disoriented when we got there. He was mumbling stuff. He wasn’t making sense. We aren’t sure of his injuries so we put him into a drug-induced coma.”
A friend met Marcia at Community Bank in Missoula and drove her to Saint Patrick’s hospital. “While we were driving, I could hear the life-flight helicopter coming in,” she said.
Five hours later, hospital staff let Marcia see him.
His arm and shoulder were bruised, he wore a neck brace, and an internal cranial pressure gauge was inserted into his skull to measure and relieve the built up pressure from the trauma. Later, Jeff was fitted with a trachea and ventilator.
He remained comatose for three weeks. On June 26, he was moved to Community Hospital's rehabilitation center and remained there until July 28.
In rehab, Erickson figured a way to escape from the hospital bed without making the alarm underneath him sound.
“My brain was working somewhere,” he said with a grin. Eventually, his bed was covered with a tent to keep him in – a veil bed.
“He couldn’t walk at that point,” Marcia Erickson said. "He had to learn to walk all over again.”
And his memory was hit-or-miss.
In rehab, Jeff recognized Marcia and Kelli. He couldn’t recall the phone number he had used every day for the past few years, but he remembered his childhood phone number. He couldn't remember if he had showered that morning, but when Marcia brought in their miniature pinscher of six months, he shouted out "Scooby-doo" just as always.
Recalling those harrowing days doesn’t faze either one of them.
“We’ve talked about it so much, it’s nothing really now,” Marcia Erickson said.
Jeff thinks all things happen for a purpose but admits, “I haven’t figured it all out yet.”
In recent years, the logging industry has suffered major cuts, he said.
“If we had gone on in logging, who knows where we would be now.”
Well, now they spend most of their time running Credible Pressure, a pressure-wash business, and Big Sky Fun, a bungee trampoline business.
"We used to do a lot of fun things together. Now it's like we only work," Marcia Erickson said.
Fifty percent of marriages fail within 24 months after a serious injury, according to traumaticbraininjury.net.
Although Jeff’s recovery has been difficult, his relationship with Marcia is getting better, he said. But he seldom spends time with friends, and he struggles to relate with his teenage daughter.
When asked about those relationships, he said with a penetrating stare, "What friends?" and "Kelli who?" Kelli was only five when Jeff was restrained to the hospital bed for his own safety.

"After he came out of the coma, he kept saying to Kelli, 'come untie me.' We had to tell Kelli, 'Don't listen to daddy.’ Now it's still in her mind -- don't listen to daddy," Marcia Erickson said with a half-hearted laugh.
Jeff is a self-described hard-worker, but he will sit down and watch a television episode of the logging show Axmen.
"The producers didn't do a very good job though," he said. "They should come here and film some real logging."