CASPER — Lost in the Big Horn Mountains, presumed dead by family and friends and hallucinating because of too much wind and too little food, Travis McMahan, stumbling up a creek, found a dead fish.

“It looked all rotten,” he said. “It was all muddy and sitting there.”

It was Saturday. He had gone missing 14 days earlier while on a hunting trip with two friends. For the previous 10 days, he had subsisted on snow and two dehydrated food rations — one chicken pot pie and one mashed potatoes — that he found in a sheepherder’s cabin.

“I cut its head off and skinned its back,” he said of the fish. “And there was good meat in there, so I ate it.”

Later that day, his father and 15 friends — making one last-ditch search effort before a snowstorm was forecast to hit — found him. His father, who had expected to find his son’s body, was the first person he saw.

“We were going to find my son, sooner or later,” Dave McMahan said. “But, yeah, we didn’t know what to expect.”

“He really didn’t say much,” Travis said of his father’s reaction to finding him. “He was just in tears.”

Beth McMahan, Travis’ mother, said she too thought her son might be dead.

“Getting close to the end of the two weeks, I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “I didn’t know how to feel. I just know I was scared to death for the phone to ring.

“I didn’t know if it was going to have a good outcome.”

McMahan said he dropped to his knees when he knew he had been found. When he did, he raised a sign he had made out of an air mattress and duct tape that read, “HELP.”

His rescuers offered him granola bars and Gatorade. He stuffed himself so fast that later that night, when his mother ordered pizza, he could only eat one slice.

“That last week up there, every night I could sleep, all I could dream about was food,” McMahan said Wednesday when recounting the experience. “I didn’t even want to go to bed at night because all I could dream about was food.”

When he would sleep, huddled up in the cabin he found, “I would wake up eating air,” he said. “I would hate to starve to death, I know that.”

 

Snow moves in

 

The first night he was lost, on Oct. 24, a snowstorm hit the southern Big Horn Mountains. McMahan, who had gone hunting for the first time roughly two weeks earlier, had come up the mountain the previous day with two elk-hunting friends. It was his first time in the Buffalo Creek Campground area, which is roughly 35 miles north of Waltman off Big Horn Mountain Road.

The three men left their campsite on Saturday at about 5 p.m., each heading in different directions to go scouting. A few hours later, when McMahan started back toward the group’s camper, the snow and sun had begun falling.

“That storm, when it came in, it came in sideways blowing snow. It was covering the tracks so fast,” he said.

McMahan became disoriented and lost the tracks he hoped would lead him back to the camp. All he had with him was a small flashlight, binoculars and a lighter.

He believes at one point he was roughly 30 yards from the campsite. The light from his flashlight, though, revealed two eyes just up the path from him.

“I swear there was a mountain lion about 20 feet in front of me,” he said. “It just stopped me dead.”

“It was kind of spooky.”

McMahan said he backed away from the eyes and planned on circling around to the other side of the camp. He followed some tracks he found, but couldn’t find the campsite. He came across Buffalo Creek and began following it, but, he said, “I followed it the wrong way.”

Soon, the creek itself was covered in snow.

“You couldn’t even see, it was so snow-blind,” he said. “You’d open your eyes and just get pelted.”

McMahan huddled himself between two rocks for shelter that night. He used his jacket to shield himself from blowing snow. Though he had “a couple of layers” of clothing and a stocking cap on, he had forgotten his gloves. All night long, he used one hand to wipe ice away from his face and, when that hand became too stiff with cold, would warm it using his lighter.

On Sunday, Oct. 25, after marching through waist-high snow in some points and beginning to hear voices, he found a fence line and followed it, eventually finding a sheepherder’s cabin.

The two other hunters, after spending most of Saturday night searching for McMahan, had called the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office about 10 a.m. Sunday and reported him missing.

The windows and door of the cabin McMahan found were covered with steel bars, he said, but he was able to get into a nearby bunkhouse that had firewood in it. He was shaking so badly, though, that he couldn’t steady his lighter long enough to start a fire.

He took his wet socks off and spent the night with his feet in a $2.99 orange stocking cap he had bought just before heading up the mountain.

The next morning, he heard the sound of helicopters echoing through the ravine he was in. He ran up hills, trying to spot the helicopter, he said, but after topping a hill, there would be another.

“It’s so deceiving up there,” he said. “I just never got over that last hill where they were at.”

Over the next few nights, he was able to start a fire in the bunkhouse. He would melt snow in a coffee can and make drinking water. He would rub glowing sticks from the fire on his feet in an effort to warm them, he said.

By Thursday, he was worried.

“I was like, ‘I’ve got to get in that cabin, or I’m going to die,’ ” he said.

Using a mile-marker post, McMahan eventually pried the cabin’s door open. He found slight food rations inside and, he said, “I rationed them out.”

“Instead of three servings, I got 10 out of them.”

He used rubbing alcohol to treat his wounds.

“By that point, too, my feet and my hands and my face were like fried,” he said.

He used a wood-burning stove to heat himself.

McMahan spent the next week venturing out during the day, looking for the campsite. He made a “HELP” sign and placed it at the top of a hill, moving it to different spots he thought helicopters might pass over.

He also wrapped aluminum foil around the end of a broom in hopes that he could reflect the sunlight when a search helicopter passed overhead. He guesses he walked four miles each day before making his way back to the cabin each afternoon.

Stewart Anderson, director of the Natrona County Emergency Management Office, said the cabin McMahan stayed in was roughly two and a half miles due west of the Buffalo Creek Campground.

 

Running on empty

 

By Friday of the second week, McMahan was running out of rations and faith.

“Every time I would stand up, I would head-rush. I basically couldn’t do anything,” he said.

On Saturday morning, after two weeks in freezing nighttime temperatures and having run out of food, McMahan left the cabin for the last time.

“I just made up my mind that I wasn’t turning back,” he said.

After following fresh tracks into a ravine and eating the raw fish, he heard someone screaming at about 3:30 p.m. Up a hillside, he saw men wearing orange vests and, after falling to his knees, hoisted his makeshift sign.

“They couldn’t see me, but I could see them,” he said.

The Natrona County Sheriff’s Office, because of inclement weather, had suspended its search indefinitely two days earlier.

McMahan, exhausted and craving milk, rode back to Casper in his father’s truck.

 

Bouncing back

 

McMahan, a thin 39-year-old with brown hair reaching his shoulders, looks back on the experience with the same carefree attitude with which he seems to meet life.

He lost roughly 15 pounds during his two weeks in the Big Horn Mountains, and his clothes don’t fit him very well right now.

“My little sister probably weighs more than me now,” he said with a shrug.

He went to the doctor Tuesday, but that was more for a sinus infection he’s been battling than for a post-rescue checkup.

Still, he says the experience has changed him.

“I got a little bit of soul searching done. I realized life’s too short to be taking it for granted like I’ve been doing,” he said. “It definitely opened up my eyes to a lot of things about how I’ve been living my life up to this point.”

He has slept the last few nights with roses his girlfriend gave him next to his bed. Also nearby is a framed picture of his 8-year-old son, Ty.

“I’ve probably seen him more in the past few days than I have this whole year,” he said.

He hasn’t given up hunting trips, though. There’s already a turkey-hunting expedition scheduled to take place in about two weeks, and he’s looking forward to visiting the Big Horn Mountains again.

“We’re going to have an annual trip every year, since now I know those hills every which way,” he said, laughing. “I think I’ve pretty much explored that whole area.”