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Danger afield for Broncos Elam

Broncos' Elam had a few tense moments thrown his way during the offseason

Lee Rasizer, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 5, 2006 at midnight

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His wife has jokingly referred to him as Indiana Jones. But while a certain local NFL kicker wears many hats (helmets?), a fedora may not be one of them.

Jason Elam. Jason Bourne. That's more like it.

Globetrotting the world, escaping danger.

Elam's offseason away from the Broncos was such he might as well have been the title character in one of those Matt Damon spy- thriller movies.

Traveling to the Gaza Strip. Experiencing the kinds of concussions not found on the football field but from live bombs only hundreds of feet away. Watching militants with AK-47s sprint past, gearing for battle. Staying just a stone's throw from a missile strike from an Apache helicopter.

So what else to do for an encore after those narrow escapes from a volatile area of the world, but pilot an old Korean War-era airplane through the blue skies over Alaska and experience engine failure.

Did we mention a stare-down with a giant brown bear as the aircraft barely averted splashdown?

And there were those the past few months who thought Ben Roethlisberger was taking chances without a motorcycle helmet.

"I'm getting shot at and bombed, and grizzly bears are after me. Yeah, I usually don't do all that stuff," Elam said with a smile. "But it was an interesting offseason."

And his most dangerous.

"By far," he said. "And it wasn't meant to be."

It all started innocently enough in March, when Elam went on a church trip to Israel. As the vacation was winding down, he decided to send his family home and stick around for a mission to deliver food and supplies to the disenfranchised in poor, overcrowded refugee camps in the Gaza Strip.

For the relief effort, Elam met Tom Doyle, a longtime friend based in Colorado Springs who works for E3 Partners, which performs evangelical, church planting and relief work around the globe, and an associate, Nawaz Lalani. Doyle was in contact with the pastor of the only Baptist church in Gaza, and arrangements had been made in advance.

The word on the street was that there had been no violence in the area for weeks. And the reconnaissance was necessary, given Elam's high profile as an American football player and the fact that, while there are missionaries who are used to serving in war-torn areas, Elam wasn't.

Doyle had been to the area probably 25 times, including eight times on missions within a four-year period.

But he feared this time, should anything go astray, "This could be an international incident."

Feeling the booms

The group was given the all- clear at the Israeli and Palestinian checkpoints, though, so any worries subsided. And the pastor they were headed to see also told them there had been no violent activity for weeks.

The three proceeded to "No Man's Land," a tunnel leading into Gaza, where a representative of the church was expected to be waiting.

Bombing began about midway through their walk through the passageway.

"Big booms. I mean, you feel them in your gut," Elam recalled. "Windows are rattling and being blown out. So we get to the other side and they're like, 'Get in the car! Get in the car!' "

As the group was being whisked to the pastor's house in the center of the city, away from the border violence, Palestinian gunmen with masks - Hamas, probably Islamic Jihad - raced past the vehicle.

"I'm thinking, 'What have we gotten ourselves into?' " Elam said.

Doyle frantically was making and receiving phone calls from friends as the vehicle sped away.

It was only then that he learned there had been an episode in which an Israeli soldier was killed, and retaliatory warning strikes were in full force, springing the Palestinian militant groups into action.

"I'm just thinking, 'I've done the stupidest thing in my life,' " recalled Doyle, who one time led chapel services for the Broncos. "I've got Jason Elam in here and this is terrible. It's a conflict. It's a war. So we were just praying."

The car made it to the pastor's house about 10 miles from the border, but the scenes on the way still are etched in Elam's mind.

"Everybody was burning stuff in the streets, American and Israeli flags, and shouting stuff in Arabic," he said. "I don't know what they were saying, but it didn't sound friendly."

The bombings wouldn't cease for 48 hours. Every three minutes, another blast came and went.

The blasts were violent, too, while the three sat in the pastor's house.

"They would scooch your chair right back," Elam said.

The group ventured to the church the night after they arrived, even with the soundtrack of violence playing in the background. Elam played soccer with Palestinian children and spoke to them about his faith in Christ, while the children watched in rapt attention.

"And in the background I could hear bombs going off," Doyle said. "Jason was so into what he's saying, he's not hearing them."

After three days of this drama, Elam and Doyle tried to sleep at the pastor's house, which was situated next to a mosque in the heart of Gaza City. They couldn't help but discuss the events in which they'd become entangled.

A trip to Jordan was scheduled the next day to depart the area, and both of them were wired, as the bombs rattled their nerves. They decided to each take a sleeping pill to try to get through the night.

When they awoke the next morning, Elam was puzzled to find his bed situated about a foot and a half from the wall it had been positioned against. He and Doyle headed to the breakfast table, and the pastor asked them if they were aware of what had happened.

They weren't. Both had slept through a missile strike only 1 1/2 blocks away. The Apache helicopter blew up the home of the person who had been identified as the assailant in the Israeli soldier's death.

A tour of the area uncovered a 15-foot crater at the home the missile had hit. At another point on the trip, Elam hid with his camera across from the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority and clicked off pictures of snipers poised for action.

After about two days, it was deemed safe to leave the area.

"Jason said that, being a kicker, your prayer life is always good, and I can imagine, with 60,000 people in the stadium and you've got to kick this thing 40 yards to win or lose. People go home ecstatic or depressed," Doyle said.

A different perspective

But the experience in Gaza apparently gave Elam a whole new perspective.

"They don't know what tomorrow holds," Doyle said Elam told him while they were there.

At least Elam didn't try to fly on this particular trip.

"Not in Israel," he said. "I'd get shot down."

Elam has piloted an airplane under a variety of circumstances, if not that particular one.

Certified for 15 years and with 1,500 hours of flight experience, he has taken numerous backcountry flights, landing on dirt strips and beaches and navigating mountainous terrain across the country.

But he never had lost an engine, until about five weeks after his Middle East experience.

Elam, also an avid outdoorsman, often makes forays up north to enjoy the splendor of the Alaskan wilderness. He was on another one of those trips in May.

All week, he had been "just dorking around" Anchorage and the surrounding area, flying a single-engine, high-wing 1957 Piper Pacer known as a "taildragger" because of its unique three- wheeled landing gear configuration. He owns a similar plane, a DeHaviland Beaver, made that same year.

The final day of the trip, a friend suggested Elam make one final flight, to the other side of the Cook Inlet, part of the Aleutian Range, to check out a cabin, owned by an acquaintance, for bear hunters in the area.

There was plenty of time to make the excursion and still catch a scheduled red-eye flight back home. And since a traveling companion, Mike McNeill, was interested in taking some pictures, Elam thought it might be an entertaining diversion.

So off they went. Their final destination was, in Elam's words, "in the middle of nowhere," about an hour's flight away.

They took off from Soldotna, on the banks of the Kenai River, near Anchorage. The route crossed Beluga Point and took them south, over myriad oil and gas platforms. McNeill and Elam were told that when they were getting close to the lodge, a couple of islands would become visible, followed by a river and glacier.

It was about that point that the weather began to turn.

Turbulent times

A storm front Elam thought he could beat came in quicker than expected. The plane began experiencing moderate to serve turbulence. The whitecaps in the ocean raged.

As Elam recalled, "I started thinking, 'This isn't fun.' "

Also that it would be best to turn back.

But just then, the hunting cabin came into view. It had a distinctive green roof, so there was no doubt this was the one they were seeking.

Elam dropped the plane down and marked the coordinates on the map, in case he ever wanted to return. McNeill, in the passenger seat, was taking pictures. Outside, as they approached the base of Mount Iliamna, the conditions weren't improving.

"It was getting nasty, but right then, we saw a big, big brown bear, a grizzly bear, right on the beach just walking around," Elam said.

The plan was to circle around for a Kodak moment. The plane dropped from about 700 feet to 300 feet but needed more throttle. Elam tried to get some, to no avail.

"It just started spitting," he remembered.

He pushed the throttle all the way forward. Nothing again.

He pumped the throttle. Same response.

"I'm coming down," Elam thought to himself.

"I'm watching the bear as we're going across the beach," added McNeill, also a pilot and owner of an outfitting business in Jackson Hole, Wyo., who has known Elam for about a decade. "And all of a sudden, I look over and I'm like, 'Jace, we don't want to put it down here.' "

McNeill's camera was flung into the back seat as he noticed Elam going through emergency procedures. The tanks were flipped in an effort to draw fuel. The fuel-air mixture was checked to make sure it wasn't too rich.

The magnetos, part of the ignition system, were double- checked. There was no panic, but the plane wasn't going to stay in the air long. The only question was where to land.

Boulders and driftwood filled the nearby beach, which, at about a 45-degree angle and more mud than sand, complicated matters. The tides were huge.

"There was one little spot that I had," Elam said of his only option to bring the plane down safely without a water landing.

A couple-hundred-foot strip, 10 to 15 yards wide, was it, and there was only about 10 seconds to pull the flaps in and make it happen. The left wing was only about a foot off the water as the plane set down; the hope being that the mud would suck the tail wing down and stop the momentum.

It worked. The plane sharply snapped to the right as it hit the ground.

"It came to just an instant stop in the sand," McNeill said.

And nearly on that bear they had eyed.

"So we're stopped and the bear's right there," Elam said. "I mean literally right off our wingtip. So we couldn't get out of the airplane."

The engine remained dead. The radio was worthless because of the remote area. They wouldn't have been stranded long, because their friend in Anchorage knew their destination, but, regardless, McNeill turned to Elam with some gallows humor.

"I said if the bear wants us, he's going to have to eat through the crunchy stuff before he gets to the soft, cushy stuff inside."

Getting off the ground

About 10 minutes passed and the engine inexplicably revved back up. The bear shot back along the tree line. And while, at the time, Elam had no explanation as to why the plane responded, it was time to go.

Full throttle this time got the tail wheel out of the goop. A huge piece of driftwood barely missed the propeller as the plane took off. Elam kept within range of oil rigs as he climbed back to 5,000 feet for the return flight, just in case the plane's engine failed again. But the two made it back unscathed.

Elam later found out that a problem with a gasket in the carburetor was the root cause of his first-ever engine failure. He flew the same plane again last month.

McNeill said the episode happened too fast and Elam is too accomplished a pilot for nerves to have gotten involved. Elam added that everything happened so fast, all he could do was react.

"There's certain people where you go, 'Are we going to be in trouble?' And certain people you want to be in an airplane with, and he's one of them," McNeill said.

Had the plane lost power at the apex of its altitude, it could have coasted a long way but likely wouldn't have reached the beach.

"I might have had to set it down in the ocean, which I can walk away from it, but it's going to destroy the airplane and be really cold," Elam said.

McNeill said that 20 minutes before the plane was forced to land, it was soaring above cliffs and trees with no place for it to be set down.

"You're relieved," Elam's buddy said. "But you're also thankful that no one got hurt."

That sentiment just about sums up Elam's entire offseason.

Perhaps the plan next year will tone things down a bit, maybe a nice trip to the Bahamas, soaking up rays on a beach.

It would placate his nervous wife, who wasn't happy with Elam's adventures the past few months, and give them quality time with their four children.

"We're going to Disneyland," Elam joked about his future plans.

Better stay off Space Mountain.