Donnie Priest doesn't remember much about that week, and that's probably good.

"I see it as a still picture, but it's more of a third person, like you're reading a book about it more than you're actually living it," Priest said. "I was pretty out of it and pretty cold."

Understandably so.

Dan Ellison, though, remembers that week all too well - especially Friday morning.

"It's cold, it's windy, it's high altitude, I'm on oxygen … and we're working with a victim that's semiconscious and disoriented, pants are frozen, he's in a tiny little space, and we've got almost no fuel left. Other than that, it's a perfectly reasonable, easy day at the beach."

Twenty-five years later, those disparate sets of memories converged.

On Sunday, Jan. 3, 1982, 10-year-old Donnie Priest and his mother and stepfather departed Mammoth, Calif., in a four-seat aircraft bound for the Bay Area. In a brutal winter storm, Priest's stepfather abandoned a safer but longer flight route for a more direct but forbidden path, directly over Yosemite National Park.

"With our accident, there were a lot of big related things piled on top of each other," Priest said. "My stepfather tried to get a flight path to go over these mountains and they said no, you can't do it. And it's at the end of the day. You're already tired because you've been flying. You've got to go to work the next day. So you push the envelope. You also have a little pilot overconfidence, to put it politely.

"A lot of times, when people get successful in life, their ego is often bigger than their abilities, or their perception of their abilities is bigger than their actual physical abilities. Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew and you've got to pay the consequence."

The consequence proved fatal. The plane crashed that evening into the mountains on the east slope of the national park, 11,000 feet above sea level, killing his mother and stepfather.

"I think I was asleep during the crash because I don't remember it, and as far as I can tell we just flew straight into a mountain. If you ask me to draw the plane, I could draw the plane," Priest said. "I don't remember that I tried the radio, but I know how the radio microphone looked buried in the snow. I remember being thirsty … and I remember scraping with my hands to get snow to eat because I was thirsty.

"In the back of the plane there was snow behind me freezing the luggage together. There was a sleeping bag behind me and I remember grabbing it, trying to pull it out, couldn't pull it out. So you cuddle up or you use a blanket or whatever's around. I don't remember any of the rescue or the helicopter ride."

After the rescue was complete, Lt. Commander Dan Ellison started to realize that the effort was in some ways the sum of his life's work. Ellison, now retired and living in Helena, piloted the helicopter from Naval Air Station Lemoore in central California that plucked a barely alive Priest, the lone survivor, from the airplane wreckage a full five days after the crash.

"I didn't think about this during the course of the rescue, but as soon as we were back at the base and I had some quiet time, I thought, this is the culmination of 12 years of training," Ellison said. "All the weekend duty, the nighttime maintenance, the sweaty lockerrooms, the classrooms, the annual exams, all the preparation, all the practice, all the training, this is why I've been doing this. This is the sum total of my ability and experience, and if I do it as well as I'm capable of doing it, and all of the rest of the crew do it as well as they're capable of doing it, and we have a good aircraft that's going to perform to the limit of its specifications, we can have a successful outcome from this rescue.

"And that's the way I looked at it. This is why I wanted to be a pilot. And I couldn't have told you that before I started flight school, but I chose helicopters for a reason. I wanted to fly search and rescue, and I finally had a duty station where this happened."

After looking in the wrong place for two days, rescue teams learned of the revised flight path and adjusted their search.

"Now of course correlating that track on a map to a snow-covered area was not an easy thing to do because we didn't have any terrain features," Ellison said. "A peak here, a peak there, but nothing where we could really be precise. And you need to remember that this was 1982. We had rudimentary communications. We didn't have GPS. There weren't cell phones then. It was just a whole different time technologically."

On a brilliantly sunny Friday morning, Ellison aimed his helicopter for a saddle between two summits, a likely place for a light aircraft to try to fly through.

"And within a few seconds of taking that direction and heading for that notch between the peaks, my crew chief, a man named Jerry Balderson, I think he was in the right door, said, 'I see something ahead a couple of miles, it might be nothing,' " Ellison said. "And I turned and flew in that direction for less than a minute, and we flew right over the top of the wreckage of that airplane. There was maybe a few inches of the tail protruding from the snow, but because of the angle of the sun and our position right above it, you could see a perfect outline of an airplane."

Ellison dropped off two rescuers on skis, who were shocked upon reaching the wreckage to hear "Who's there?" coming from the airplane.

Donnie Priest was still alive.

Running low on fuel, Ellison had to maintain a hover in the face of a stiff wind and blowing snow, hard against the crest of the mountain ridge, while a hoist was lowered to the wreckage so Priest could be lifted.

Upon landing at park headquarters to refuel, the flight surgeon noted that Priest's core temperature was 84 degrees. Every second mattered as the crew raced to take off again, this time for Valley Medical Center in Fresno. For his work on the rescue, Ellison earned the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Ellison, a native of Stevensville, enjoyed a Navy career that spanned the globe and gave him several lifetime's worth of memories. After graduating from Annapolis, his appointments included service in Hawaii; in Antarctica, where he met his New Zealand-born wife; at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.; and at the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs.

He was a speechwriter for the Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff working out of the Pentagon, and spent two years as a legislative aid to Gen. Colin Powell when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Upon moving to Helena, he held a number of leadership roles in state government before retiring to his fly rod.

"I'm an ordinary guy," he said. "I came from a cattle ranch in the Bitterroot Valley. I've had a lot of extraordinary experiences, and this is one of the top few."

Priest didn't escape unscathed, physically or emotionally. His legs, badly frostbitten, were amputated just below the knees. His story gained national attention - no easy thing to deal with for a pre-teen who just lost his parents.

Ellison visited Priest in the hospital a few days later, and the rescuers held a reunion in Yosemite later that summer. Priest, who didn't remember the rescue then any better than he does now, begged Ellison for a helicopter ride, but Ellison said the rules prohibited it.

The man and boy connected once more a year later, briefly, when Ellison's tour brought him to port in San Francisco.

But that was it - until this week, more than 25 years after the crash that first brought them together.

Closure has been a long time coming for Priest. He learned to use his prosthetic legs as a teenager, learned to ski, wrestled in high school.

But he searched long and hard for his life's calling. Priest took a dozen years to finish college, then had several jobs in several cities. Throughout it all, he wondered about the people who had saved his life - but was wary of trying to find them.

"I was bouncing around a lot, and part of it is, (you hesitate) until you rebuild your life and you have something that you deem as worthy to society," he said. "I don't want to be a burger turner, you don't want to go meet these people that saved you to have them realize that all their efforts helped you flip burgers. You want to wait until you have all your ducks in a row and figure out what you want to do.

"I just didn't know what I wanted to do and I still had some growing up to do. And it was, you know, I want something more than this, there's a problem with this job. Or, there's not enough here, it doesn't match my personality. And you're trying to fit all these puzzle pieces together. You also have the notion in the back of your head, you want to give back to society. So how do you fit all those things in, with something that will provide enough food on the table so you can live your modest lifestyle and give you a couple pennies in your pocket for tomorrow. And then build from there."

Priest recently found what he's looking for and set up shop in Vacaville, Calif. He's a small business owner now. Precision Orthotic Prosthetic Solutions helps amputees fit and adjust their artificial limbs. Through his own experience, Priest knows the difference that can be made by shaving just a sixteenth of an inch from a contact point on an artificial leg.

"The better job you can do, the more activities somebody's going to have in their life," he said. "This job and career is the perfect match for me, and I am so happy with it. Hopefully it shows through the work that I do, but it should also show through the smile and the internal gratification you get."

Satisfied that he had found his calling, Priest's thoughts turned to the six people closest to his rescue effort in 1982.

"I was walking around with a little bit of weight on my shoulders because from my point of view, I owed all these people," he said. "All these people, I'm indebted to, because I'd be dead if it wasn't for them, and they also did all these heroic events for me.

"Now how do you say thank you? How do you return the feeling? You feel like people have given to you and you want to return that favor. And that makes you who you are. I can't ever repay Dan or repay the rest of the crew for what they did for me, but I can hopefully have that ingrained in my personality, so when I deal with somebody else down the road that I don't know, I can do (the same thing)."

From Ellison's perspective, there is no debt to repay.

"He doesn't need to thank me. He's here. I can see him, I can talk to him. He's helping people do stuff. I had a very small hand in that process and the fact that he's here when maybe he wouldn't have been here, and that's enough. That's good enough."

Priest earlier this year talked with the man who rode with him up the hoist to the heliciopter. A month ago, he hiked in Yosemite to a point near where the plane went down.

While he wasn't seeking the same sort of closure as Priest, Ellison, too, always wondered about the young boy whose life he helped save more than two decades ago. He traded Christmas cards with Priest's father each year, and kept up with the boy from a distance as he grew into a man.

This winter, he asked Priest's father for contact information and got it, only to get his subsequent letter returned in the mail. He checked with Don Priest again, and received Donnie's current location in Vacaville.

"The next thing I knew I'm getting this e-mail from him, and he says he's always wanted to go to Montana, and I said well I live here. And he wants to try fly-fishing, and I said that's my hobby. He said what about October, and I said that's my favorite time, most everyone's focused on hunting and the fish are hungry, and people are leaving them alone. This is a good time to come."

Despite offering the invitation, Ellison was a little nervous. He's unaware of any psychological protocol, official or otherwise, for how to emotionally handle the lingering relationship between rescuer and rescuee.

"There's no guidance that I'm aware of, and frankly, I was a little worried about how you have one of these kinds of reunions. I'm not sure how you do this," he said.

The two came face to face a week ago. They spent the week - a spectacular, autumn Montana week - on the water: the Bitterroot, the Clark Fork, the Missouri.

Ellison doesn't feel particularly like a hero, but there's a certain pride in his voice when he talks about the rescue, and about what's become of the boy whose life he saved in the 25 years since.

"It wasn't that I was clamoring to go out and do a rescue that had a lot of notoriety or anything else," he said. "I wanted to be good at my job. My parents always said, find something that you like to do that you can be better at than everybody else. And I don't think I was better at it than everybody else, but I think on that day, that crew, that was as well as they could perform their jobs.

"And the consequence was, we were able to be a part of the rescue of this young man whose courage and determination allowed him to survive for five days in conditions that most other people would not have been able to survive. And whose perseverance and approach to life since then are truly remarkable. And we had a small part in that, and he's now helping other people that have medical situations like he's gone through.

"He's really good at that. And that effort means that a lot of people are going to be the beneficiaries of that action that took place on the 8th of January, 1982."

So how about that long-anticipated, non-emergency helicopter ride?

"I still need to go on one," Priest smiled, casting a hopeful eye toward his host.

Countered Ellison, with a shrug: "I'm not current."

Reporter John Harrington: 447-4080 or john.harrington@helenair.com.