Part I: Seasoned Alaska pilot recounts Knik Glacier crash landing Part II: 'Perfect storm' of deadly conditions tested Alaska pararescuers Part III: Another aircraft crashes before successful rescue from Alaska's Knik Glacier About the series: As the attention of the world in August turned to efforts to rescue four survivors of a Western Alaska plane crash that left former Sen. Ted Stevens and four others dead, a separate effort was under way to save five people trapped on a glacier some 300 miles away. With a mountain storm raging, the men of the Alaska Air National Guard's 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons would go to extraordinary lengths to rescue a pilot and four tourists. This is their story.

Part III: After 21 hours spent in exhausting and perilous travel to cover only four miles on the storm-ravaged, crevasse-mined Knik Glacier, Alaska Air National Guard pararescue specialists Maj. Jesse Peterson and Tech Sgt. Chris Uriarte finally reached Don Erbey's downed airplane last August, but Master Sgt. Al Lankford and Tech. Sgt. Angel Santana were nowhere to be found.

At the crash site, Peterson and Uriarte determined quickly that the five people huddled in the wreckage of the downed Piper Cherokee 8,500 feet high in the Chugach Mountains would survive. None of them were seriously injured. The intact fuselage of the airplane provided a good shelter. And the guardian angels of the 212th Rescue Squadron, PJs as they are commonly known in Alaska, were equipped and prepared to babysit the group for days if it took that long for the blizzard savaging the high country to blow itself out.

Now, the worry for Peterson and Uriarte was about their colleagues. Wandering around blind in blowing snow near the coordinates of Erbey's crash the night before, the duo had agreed on a plan to split with Lankford and Santana in order to cover more ground. The PJs' global positioning satellite receivers put them on top of the crash site, but they couldn't find the plane. GPS is usually accurate to within 50 to 100 feet, but that was not good enough in a storm that cut visibility to 10 feet or less.

Two groups, they all knew, could search more area than one. So, Peterson and Uriarte, roped together in case of a crevasse fall, wandered away from the similarly roped Lankford and Santana. They were quickly out of sight and out of touch. The PJ's had lost radio contact due to wet batteries.

Once Peterson and Uriate found the wreckage, they thought they might be able to signal the others with old-fashioned means, but that proved almost laughable. "We tried launching flares," Peterson said. "We tried smoke." Mother Nature scoffed at the efforts. The flares and smoke disappeared into the white maelstrom swirling over the glacier.