Willits man honored for rescuing couple on snowy peak – Anderson Valley Advertiser

A Willits man and a Caltrans colleague recently received medals for their bravery after a rescue on a snowy mountaintop in northern Mendocino County. They convinced a couple to abandon their trapped RV minutes before it was crushed by a fallen tree.

“Branches were snapping all around us, like gunfire,” said Michael Butner, a Caltrans tree trimmer in the winter of 2023. He recalls that as snow began to blanket the highways on Feb. 23 and trees were being felled near Laytonville, he and his partner Gonzalo Garcia of Lake County were dispatched to Highway 101 for a truck that had jackknifed near Rattlesnake Summit.

“There must have been 200 to 300 trees down between Leggett and Laytonville,” he recalled, describing how increasingly wet, heavy snow began to weigh down branches and blanket the roads as they drove from Highway 1 to Hwy. 101 until they reached the line of vehicles stranded behind the battered semi. At the summit, Butner said he and Garcia began clearing as many trees and vehicles as possible, starting with “helping the ones with four-wheel drive turn around and get out safely.”

One vehicle that couldn’t be moved, however, was a very large RV directly behind the stuck truck, so Butner said he and Garcia “advised the elderly couple in the RV to leave because it wasn’t safe for them to stay there with all the trees snapping, and we offered to help them unhook the car they were towing and move that vehicle out of the area.”

But at first the couple refused, opting to ride out the storm in their RV, until Butner returned and urgently explained that “there are trees right above your RV that could come down at any moment,” he recalled, explaining that both his work as a firefighter and his mother, who was a nurse, had taught him how to remain calm while quickly assessing an emergency and deciding how to respond.

Finally, just in time, Butner and Garcia convinced the couple to abandon their RV, because “after we had safely moved them and their car, a tree had fallen and crushed the RV as I was walking back to the RV. If they had still been in there, they would have been seriously injured or worse,” he said.

In recognition of their determination to rescue not only the couple in the RV but others trapped on the summit, Butner and Garcia were two of nine Caltrans employees awarded the Medal of Valor at a ceremony at the State Capitol in Sacramento on June 26.

In a press release, Caltrans described the Governor’s State Employee Medal of Valor as “the highest honor California bestows on its public servants,” and that both gold and silver medals “are presented annually to state employees for acts of heroism in saving lives or protecting state property.”

Also in attendance at the medal ceremony was Butner’s daughter, Tiah Ross-Butner, who also received an award that week, as her artwork was named the winner of the 2024 Congressional Art Competition for California’s Second District.

“I asked her, ‘So, are you going to be on stage with me?!’ Butner recalled with a laugh as his daughter explained to her father that no, she would be honored at the U.S. Capitol, not the statehouse! “But she did come to Sacramento for my ceremony and flew to Washington, D.C. that night.”

In a press release, the office of Rep. Jared Huffman (D – San Rafael) noted that Ross-Butner “received a round-trip ticket to Washington, DC to attend the awards ceremony, and her work, titled “Where We Come From – Klamath River,” will hang in the U.S. Capitol for a year, along with other artwork from every congressional district in the country.”