Young rider comes home for the holidays

The best present the Danny Lowe family of Anchorage is getting this year won't be found wrapped and under the Christmas tree on Dec. 25. No, it will instead be the lively presence in the room of 8-year-old Jurnee.

After a week in the intensive care unit at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, Jurnee came home this week, much to the relief of her parents. At mid-month, Jurnee had been rushed to Mat-Su Regional by a helicopter after a frightening head-on collision of snowmachines on the frozen and snow-covered surface of Big Lake, a recreational playground often abuzz with motorized sleds on weekends this time of year.

On Sunday, Dec. 13, Jurnee was riding with her brother, 21-year-old Jered, when his Polaris Indy slammed head-on into another snowmachine driven by 44-year-old Tim Reading of Anchorage. Jurnee, who was sitting in front of Jered, went over the cowling of the sled and took the brunt of the impact in the collision. She was knocked unconscious and suffered serious internal injuries.

Jered "thought she was gone,'' Jurnee's mother, Rebecca, said Wednesday.

Rebecca herself was in Anchorage when the accident happened just before noon. She got a phone call telling her Jurnee was being rushed to the hospital. Doctors thought at first they might need to do surgery to save her life.

"It was really scary,'' Rebecca said. "It was a nightmare. We were all devastated.''

Fortunately, as it turned out, Jurnee was young and tough and the damage to her liver, spleen and kidneys looks to have repaired itself without doctors needing to perform surgery. It is something of a Christmas miracle.

"The doctors say there is going to be no permanent damage,'' Rebecca said.

What happened to put Jurnee in the hospital remains a bit of a mystery. Jered told his mother he saw another snowmachine coming at him at speed and realized they might hit. Jered, she said, veered right to avoid a collision at the exact moment the other driver veered left.

Reading, who suffered minor injuries in the collision, could not be reached for this story. Trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said troopers checked to make sure drunk driving was not a factor in the collision, and pretty much left the case at that. Since the snowmachines were off road, there are apparently no state laws that apply to how they are driven, she said.

And even if they'd been on one of the Big Lake ice roads, Peters said, she's not sure whether troopers would have had any jurisdiction. The Big Lake ice roads are seasonal roads put in over the lake ice. Rick Feller of the Alaska Department of Transportation said it isn't even clear if they legally qualify as roads.

If they were legally state roads, it would be illegal to ride a snowmachine on them. But then, he admitted, it might be safer for everyone if snowmachines kept to the ice roads because at least there all drivers know to keep right.

Away from the roads, who knows where anyone might go.

Trooper spokesman Beth Ipsen on Wednesday said the trooper who investigated the Big Lake crash is himself still wondering what happened.

"It didn't make sense to (him), either,'' she e-mailed. "(He) doesn't remember who turned left or who turned right, but he said they were headed toward each other and turned into each other when they collided. They were on the lake and weren't on any specific trail and had plenty of space to move around.''

Snowmachines are basically allowed to run wild on the lake. There are no speed limits or traffic controls. Drivers used to be required to have a state driver's license to run a snowmachine, but the Legislature dumped that regulation years ago.

Feller said plenty of Alaskans are opposed to any sorts of restrictions on snowmachine riding even if increasing numbers of  people are getting killed and injured every year.

"It's that rural Alaska, urban Alaska; old Alaska, new Alaska thing,'' he said. "Those sorts of issues are right now on the precipice. When you get to the end of the road system, you really see that individualism at play. People think, 'Hey, I went all the way to the end of the road system to get away and now the government wants to impose regulations?'"