On a summer afternoon in August 1926, 7-year-old Jack Strong wandered away from his family’s camp at Paradise Park on Mount Hood to find his older brothers and took a wrong turn instead. He would spend the next four days alone on the mountain, surviving on huckleberries and fish he caught with his hands, before rescuers found him 30 miles away, hiking near Reid Glacier.
Jack’s brothers, Ray and Winston Strong, had gone fishing at Lost Creek, and when the boy could not find them, he kept walking in the wrong direction, according to OregonLive. Jack later said he cried for the first 15 minutes after realizing he was lost, but he calmed down and pressed on, fishing in a separate pool and eating what he caught raw. His mother, meanwhile, left a note telling searchers to find a phone and call his father. Ray and Winston traced the boy’s path from Lost Creek to the Sandy River before seeking help from U.S. Forest Service rangers, who assembled a search team.
What followed was one of the largest wilderness searches the region had seen. Local newspapers called on woodsmen to join the hunt, a nearby shingle mill and lumber company shut down operations and sent all of its workers into the field, and a detachment of infantry from the Vancouver Barracks joined the effort. The Mazamas and the Trails Club of Oregon, established outdoor groups active in early Pacific Northwest mountaineering, also joined the search, per the same OregonLive account. A dozen women stayed behind to cook meals for the search party, while Jack’s father searched near the Sandy River, reportedly telling rescuers at one point, “I’ll kill you if it’s not true,” when word of a possible sighting reached camp.
Federal Officials Opened Restricted Watershed for the Search
The scale of the operation was extraordinary enough that the federal government opened the Bull Run Watershed Reservation to searchers, an exception to strict rules that have closed the area to public entry since 1904. The watershed has served as Portland’s primary municipal drinking water source since 1895 and today supplies water to nearly a quarter of Oregon residents, according to the City of Portland. Letting search parties into the protected 102-square-mile reservation underscored just how urgently authorities were trying to find the boy…