By Lindsay Whitehurst
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — A private plane carrying three Salt Lake City firefighters crashed in a remote area high in the Uinta Mountains on Friday, and one died of his injuries.
Dylan Hopkins, 25, was a paramedic and firefighter in Salt Lake City for four years. Late on Friday morning, he and fellow firefighters from Station No. 5, Bryon Meyer and Craig Weaver, took off in a Cessna 172 for a weekend trip to Colorado Springs, Colo., said Salt Lake City Fire spokesman Scott Freitag.
Somewhere over Wasatch County, pilot Weaver was attempting an emergency landing when his plane crashed in a small, remote clearing high in the Uinta Mountains. Weaver, who is also a flight paramedic for AirMed, called the helicopter rescue’s dispatch center on his cell phone about 12:15 p.m. as he and Meyer tried to revive Hopkins.
Three rescue helicopters launched a frantic search for their injured colleagues, whose white plane was nearly impossible to see in the snowy mountains 9,800 feet above sea level.
Weaver’s voice cut in and out about 50 times under spotty cell phone coverage, as rescuers combed a grid around where the plane dropped off the radar.
“We could hear the emergency transmitter going off through the cell phone, but we couldn’t triangulate it,” said Brain Simpson, AirMed program manager.
The search lasted for an hour and a half, but at 1:49 p.m. dispatchers heard the helicopters’ rotors through the phone line and knew they had found the spot. All three helicopters landed in the snow.
Flight paramedics took over the effort to save Hopkins and continued after landing at University Hospital. He was declared dead about 3 p.m.
Weaver and Meyer reached the hospital in serious to critical condition and are now stable.
“We are a family,” Freitag said. “We deal with this sort of thing every day, but when it happens to one of our own it is very hard.”
In his short time with the department, Hopkins distinguished himself by continuing to learn new skills, like heavy rescue.
After his death, his father remembered a 6-year-old Hopkins writing about how excited it would be to become a firefighter one day, Freitag said. Hopkins was not married and had no children, but his parents will be offered the department’s counseling services.
“He was always smiling,” Freitag said.