Willits Man Honored For Rescue Of Couple On Snowy Summit

A Willits man and a fellow Caltrans employee received medals of valor recently for a rescue they performed on a snowy summit in northern Mendocino County, where they convinced a couple to leave their stuck RV just minutes before the vehicle was crushed by a fallen tree.

“Branches were snapping all around us like shotgun blasts,” said Michael Butner, who was a tree cutter for Caltrans in the winter of 2023, recalling that when snow began covering the highways and felling trees near Laytonville on Feb. 23, he and his partner Gonzalo Garcia, of Lake County, were dispatched to Highway 101 for a semi-truck that had jack-knifed at Rattlesnake Summit.

“There must have been 200 to 300 trees down between Leggett and Laytonville,” he recalled, describing how more and more wet, heavy snow began overloading branches and covering the roads as they drove from Highway 1 to Hwy. 101 until they reached the line of vehicles stranded behind the jack-knifed semi. At the summit, Butner said he and Garcia began clearing as many trees and vehicles as they could, starting with “helping those with all-wheel drive vehicles to turn around and safely leave.”

One vehicle that could not be moved, however, was a very large RV directly behind the stuck semi, so Butner said he and Garcia “advised the elderly couple in the RV to leave, because it wasn’t safe for them to stay there with all the trees snapping, and we offered to help them unhook the car they were towing and drive that vehicle from the area.”

But at first the couple refused, opting instead to wait out the storm in their RV, until Butner came back and declared urgently that “there are trees right above your RV that could snap at any moment,” he recalled, explaining that both his work as a firefighter and his mother, who was a nurse, taught him how to stay calm while quickly assessing an emergency situation and deciding how to react.

Finally, just in time, Butner and Garcia convinced the couple to leave their RV, because “once we got them and their car safely moved, by the time I walked back toward the RV, a tree had fallen and crushed it. If they had still been in it, they would have been injured very badly, or worse,” he said.

In recognition of their determination to save not only the couple in the RV but others trapped on that summit, Butner and Garcia were two of nine Caltrans employees who received Medals of Valor at a ceremony held at the State Capitol in Sacramento on June 26.

In a press release, Caltrans described the Governor’s State Employee Medal of Valor as “the highest honor California bestows on its public servants,” and that both gold and silver medals “are given annually to state employees for acts of heroism to save lives or protect state property.”

Attending the medals ceremony was Butner’s daughter, Tiah Ross-Butner, who also received an award that week, as her artwork was declared the winner of the 2024 Congressional Art Competition for California’s Second District.

“I asked her, ‘so, will you be onstage with me then?!” Butner recalled with a laugh as his daughter explained to her dad that no, she would be honored at the U.S. Capitol, not the state one! “But she did come to Sacramento for my ceremony, then flew that night to Washington D.C.”

In a press release, the office of Rep. Jared Huffman (D – San Rafael) noted that Ross-Butner “received round-trip airfare to Washington D.C. to attend the awards ceremony, and that her piece, titled “Where We Come From – Klamath River,” will hang in the U.S. Capitol for one year along with other art pieces from each congressional district across the country.”