As a young college student working as a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming in 1976, Alan O’Hashi had landed a plum summer job along with his university gig.
He was a ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park.
A Cheyenne native, O’Hashi, now 72 and living in Boulder, Colorado, reflects on nearly a half century of being an author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker who continues to ponder and pursue topics of interest.
On the last day of July in 1976, however, his interest was just getting back to work after spending part of the weekend in Cheyenne at Cheyenne Frontier Days with a friend. Before that journey could be completed, the future news chronicler became part of one of the biggest stories of his life.
That’s when he got caught up in the sudden and devastating Big Thompson Flood, riding out the terrifying natural disaster in a Ford Pinto.
On The Way To Work
O’Hashi said his national park role first involved collecting fees at the front entrance, and then he was promoted to being a ranger at a campground.
The job came about with the help of the late U.S. Rep. Wayne Aspinall, a Democrat from Colorado.
Aspinall had taught a political science class at Hastings College in Nebraska, where O’Hashi earned his undergraduate degree.
“For whatever reason, we hit it off,” O’Hashi said. “And I asked him to write some letters to the Department of Interior on my behalf.”
Due back on duty at the park at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, O’Hashi decided to make the two-hour drive back to the park on Saturday evening, July 31, 1976.
He left Cheyenne and drove south to Loveland, Colorado, where he connected with U.S. Highway 34 to take him up to Estes Park.
In the evening sky above the mountain peaks before him, O’Hashi said he could see a “brilliant orange stripe” with a “black ribbon on top” across the western horizon.
As he drove his Ford Pinto wagon up toward the “narrows” of Big Thompson canyon, he became aware that everybody else was driving east. He alone was going west.
A shot along U.S. Highway 34 in a Rocky Mountain PBS documentary looking back at the flood reveals results of the flooding. (Courtesy Rocky Mountain PBS) 
The Continental Airlines plane that Alan O’Hashi was on in the 1990s had to make an emergency landing in Oklahoma City. (Courtesy Alan O’Hashi) 
A screenshot from a Rocky Mountain PBS documentary on the flood shows its destructive impact. (Courtesy Rocky Mountain PBS) 
The road washed out by the Big Thompson River in on July 31, 1976. (The Denver Post via Getty Images)
A Warning
“A Colorado Highway Patrol officer, or maybe a county sheriff’s deputy, waved me down saying maybe I better turn around up at Drake, which wasn’t too far from where I was, saying there was some bad water ahead,” O’Hashi told Cowboy State Daily. “And so, I kind of drove up and there was a trickle of water, and I slowed down.”
He understood that U.S. Highway 34 runs alongside the Big Thompson River for its length into Estes Park.
As he continued toward Drake to find space enough to turn around on the narrow highway he was suddenly met with a “big wall of water” that slammed into his Pinto.
Looking out the window, he could see uprooted trees floating by, along with propane gas tanks. After that, rocks started thumping against his car.
He remembers being in a low part of the road and seeing a speed limit sign and the top “foot” of the sign.
He witnessed a “lovely car” coming toward him eastbound that went off the edge of the road across from him and into the river below.
Thinking about what he should do, O’Hashi said a floating portable toilet snagged onto his Pinto bumper and carried the car to the canyon wall instead of “over the edge.”
“So, I climbed out the driver’s-side window and waited,” he said. “I was in maybe knee-deep or not-quite-waist-deep water.”
O’Hashi said he started walking up an incline when a Colorado Department of Transportation truck showed up headed westbound looking for people who needed help.
He was able to join others in the back of the truck who had found themselves stranded with the waters rising.
The truck took them to higher ground at Rainbow Bend where there was a gas station, cabins and a little store. That’s where O’Hashi spent the rest of the night.
If that Department of Transportation truck had not shown up, O’Hashi said he would have had to try and climb up the canyon wall.
It wasn’t until the next day he got a true sense of what he had survived.
“We got up the next morning and saw the aftermath of the flood,” he said.
O’Hashi said he never learned what happened to the people in the car that went over the edge, but believes the car was from Loveland because of the license plate he observed before it vanished.
Disaster Unfolds
That morning revealed to O’Hashi and the nation one of the worst floods in Colorado’s history. It happened as the state was preparing for its 100th birthday.
On Aug 2, 1976, The New York Times front page headline proclaimed: “65 Killed as Rains Flood Colorado Recreation Area.”
But the numbers would climb much higher in succeeding days until ultimately reaching 144 dead.
A story in the Grand Junction, Colorado, newspaper The Daily Sentinel on Aug. 5, 1976, projected total damage would hit $50 million.
That figure would be revised downward to $35 million to $40 million. Bridges and roadways, houses, and livelihoods were washed away in a matter of minutes.
Technician David Smelter with the Colorado Division of Wildlife stands guard against looters in flood-devastated town of Drake in Big Thompson Canyon on Aug. 5, 1976. The sign in foreground expresses feelings of local residents, but Smelter said looting hasn't been problem. (The Denver Post via Getty Images) 
The New York Times on Monday, Aug. 2, 1976, made the Big Thompson Flood one of its lead stories. (Courtesy New York Times) 
The Fort Collins Coloradoan more than a week after the flood continued to show its destruction and devastation. (Courtesy Newpapers.com) 
The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado, was one of several newspapers across Colorado and the nation who made the Big Thompson Flood front-page news. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
Like this year's flooding in Texas, the Big Thompson flood dominated headlines and news pages for several days. The Casper Star-Tribune on Aug. 5, 1976, ran several stories about the disaster. (Newspapers.com) 
The Rocky Mountain News had several pages dedicated to the disaster in its Aug. 2 edition. (Courtesy Denver Public Library) 
A helicopter responds in the aftermath of the Big Thompson Flood in Colorado on July 31, 1976. (The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Helicopter Drop Zone
O’Hashi said that Sunday Aug. 1, his major concern was getting out of the flood zone.
He and some other flood survivors who were at the gas station and store noticed a Chinook helicopter flying around.
They got some white paint and created a circle for a drop zone. The helicopter saw it and landed, allowing him and several others to get flown down to Loveland, where they were housed in a gym.
He said it was in Sunday afternoon at that point and he knew his parents, who then lived in Laramie, would try to find him.
With all the roads closed and phone lines down, he looked for a solution. He found it in a group who had a car and were planning to drive to Cheyenne.
O’Hashi said he hitched a ride and was dropped off at a college classmate’s home in the city. He tried to call his parents in Laramie to learn that they had driven to Loveland to try and find him.
“My parents came down and found I wasn’t in Loveland,” he said. “And then they must have given them word that I was headed to my friend’s house, and that’s where we hooked up.”
A Second Chance
About 10 days after being caught in the Big Thompson Flood, O’Hashi said he went back to Rocky Mountain National Park and continued to work the rest of the summer. He said the experience of being in the disaster changed him.
“I was actually given a second chance, and I was more grateful,” he said.
A memorial stone erected along Highway 34 on July 31, 2001, the 25th anniversary of the flood, recounted how a thunderstorm stalled over the canyon in 1976 sending the deluge down among the rocks and claiming the lives of dozens and changing the lives of many others.
O’Hashi said he thinks about the choices that led to him being part of that history.
He has made other choices in life that have put him in tight spots as well. On July 31, 1976, he said decided to try and get back to work Saturday night rather than drive in early Sunday morning.
As disasters continue to happen — such as the recent flooding in Kerr County, Texas, or a Dec. 30, 2021, Boulder County wildfire that claimed two lives, caused a massive evacuation and destroyed nearly 1,000 homes — O’Hashi said he’s come to understand that things happen in life, and the government will never act fast enough.
“It’s a matter of being prepared, like if you are in an urban area, get to know your neighbors and talk about what your options might be if something happens,” he said. “It’s hard to predict how everyone is going to react under pressure.
“I’m trying to figure out what we can do to make it less problematic when something like this happens.”
Following the summer of 1976, O’Hashi said he never completed his graduate degree at the University of Wyoming because before he finished his graduate thesis, he got his first “real job” in Gillette.
With his insurance settlement on the Pinto, he bought another Pinto station wagon.
Another Escape
While working in Gillette, that Pinto was rear-ended. O’Hashi said it was known at the time that the car had a problem with exploding gas tanks. His did not explode.
Another twist of being in the right place at the wrong time happened in 1997 when he was flying out of Houston on Continental Airlines and had left his airline ticket in the men’s bathroom.
He nearly missed his plane but was allowed to board after a janitor found it and paged him. The gateway door to the plane had already been closed, but they opened it and allowed him to board.
Once in the air, the plane experienced an emergency and landed in Oklahoma City, he said. He later was told it was a cockpit fire.
“It’s absolute chaos inside of an airplane,” he said. “No one has time to barely put on their seat belts, put their trays back and their seats in an upright position. It was total mass chaos inside with flight attendants tumbling down the aisle and books flying all over the place.”
His pondering of the incident is that maybe by getting onboard it changed the outcome, that his “presence” on the plane may have resulted in it not going down.
Even if somebody’s else’s time was up, his was not.
O’Hashi believes that disasters can have an upside along with the loss and upheaval that results from the event. He shared about it in a blog.
“If there’s one strange gift disasters leave in their wake,” he wrote. “They bring people together who might otherwise never share a meal, a conversation, or even a glance.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
