It was Monday, Jan. 17, 1994, when 51-year-old Yellowstone Park Ranger Bob Mahn woke to 21 inches of fresh snow on the ground and readied himself for road patrol.

Mahn’s wife, Grace Nutting, said goodbye to her husband and returned to bed with heavy eyelids.

The whirring of the snowmobile, the sound easily spilling into their trailer at the East Entrance, faded as Mahn made his way toward Sylvan Pass for a routine patrol in search of possibly stranded visitors or avalanches.

When Mahn made it a few yards away from the trailer, only the fading sound connected him with the world. The falling snow caused such limited visibility it seemed to white him out from the world.

Sleep quickly came back to Nutting as the last sound of her working husband went away. She was left with the usual sounds – the wind and the rodents scratching in the walls – to lull her back to sleep.

Nutting had been practicing all weekend for emergency medical technician exams they were taking that night, a requirement for her Forest Service position at Wapiti Ranger Station, and she was ready to catch up on much-needed sleep.

Twenty minutes after Mahn left, another ranger woke Nutting over the radio asking if he should patrol the pass.

Nutting tried to check with her husband but couldn’t reach Mahn over the radio. She called the communication center, but they too couldn’t reach Mahn.

“They said, ‘We can’t even get background noise on it,’” Nutting said.

Bob and Grace

Nutting met Mahn shortly after he moved into the trailer at the east gate. They met at Pahaska Teepee.

“It was one of those things that just happened,” Nutting said. “We kind of circled around each other for two or three years before we really started to see each other.”

It was serious while not being serious.

“It really wasn’t getting anywhere,” Nutting said.

When Nutting told Mahn she had a job offer in Washington, which she intended to take, Mahn, 6 feet 4 inches and 274 pounds, started to cry. He didn’t want her to leave.

“Either it (the relationship) goes somewhere or it doesn’t,” Nutting told him.

Nutting didn’t take the job.

Some time later they were driving back from somewhere, each in their own vehicle, and about to go their separate ways – Mahn to the right, Nutting to left – when Mahn stopped his Jeep in the middle of the road.

Nutting pulled up beside him and Mahn held up a flannel-clad arm with unbuttoned cuffs, signaling to Nutting to roll down the window.

“When you want to get married?” Mahn asked her.

“I don’t know – why don’t we do it around my sister’s birthday,” she said.

“That sounds good,” Mahn said.

They rolled up the windows and went their separate ways.

They were married April 11, 1987.

They had their separate hobbies: Mahn liked antiques (specifically antique tools) and old cars, and Nutting was a birder.

Mahn had 12 running vehicles and the carcasses and pieces to about 20 others. Nutting has seen 5,126 species of birds and now has traveled internationally for birding expeditions, including to Antarctica.

Sylvan Pass

To reach the belly of the park, visitors must climb and descend Sylvan Pass. The pass rises to an elevation of 8,524 feet according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Along many of the switchbacks that make the pass are steep cliffs.

Visitor vertigo is common. At times, motorists get to the top, look down, and nerves get the best of them.

Mahn would call Nutting and she’d drive the visitors down.

“They were afraid, so I got to drive all of these cool vehicles down the pass,” Nutting said. “Racing cars, motor homes, but I drew the line at motorcycles – I’m just not that good with them.”

While Mahn and Nutting were acclimated to the danger, the seriousness of the pass was not lost on them.

“It was a risk we both took whenever we went up and down that road – that we would be hit by a rock, hit by an avalanche, hit by a rockslide,” Nutting said.

She had almost been hit by a rock shaped like a double axe coming off the pass. It passed in front of her windshield, rotating and chopping the air as it narrowly missed her.

Cars have been flattened by boulders, Nutting said.

“It’s a very dangerous road,” she added.

Mahn and Nutting checked avalanche conditions together, and they once were trapped by an avalanche. The snow, about 6-feet deep, rolled down beyond either side of the vehicle, not over them or burying the vehicle but creating a wall in both directions.

“I think he (Mahn) positioned himself – he knew where the snow would come,” Nutting said. “And we just waited until the plow came and got us out.”

It took about three hours before the plow could break through.

Jan. 17, 1994

Mahn drove the snowmobile up the road, away from the trailer, toward Sylvan Pass. It was a route he was used to traversing in any weather condition.

The horizontal snow pelted the windshield, sticking and further obstructing his view. The snow came over the front of the machine, so Mahn stood up.

Standing, the snow stuck to the visor of his helmet, so he lifted it.

The snow now pelted his eyes, slipped into the helmet and coated his cheeks to where his long, curly, graying beard started.

He could no longer see.

Five minutes after he had left the trailer, Mahn left the road and fell about 80 feet into a creek bed and an embankment of deep snow.

What happened between the fall and the bottom never will be known.

The coroner found petechial hemorrhages throughout the lining of Mahn’s chest and lungs, indicating he had taken a strike to his chest, which may have caused a heart attack.

According to an Enterprise story in 1994, the coroner said Mahn had suffered a blow to the head during the fall (a dent in his helmet was used to support the theory, Nutting said, but it’s unclear whether the dent happened before or during the fall) which had left him unconscious and face down in the snow, resulting in suffocation.

Only Mahn will ever know what really happened.

Following the radio silence, fellow ranger Art Jawad was sent to look for Mahn.

Jawad found the tracks leading off the ridge and saw a single snowmobile ski sticking out of the snow below.

Nutting and park ranger Julia Jawad, armed with poles and shovels, hopped on a light snowmobile and headed for the accident.

Frustration mounted as Nutting and Jawad climbed the pass, the snowmobile falling off the packed snow time and time again.

The Jawads and Nutting earned bruising they wore for weeks following the incident while getting to and recovering Mahn.

By the time Nutting and Jawad arrived, it was visibly too late, but Nutting and the rescue crew attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Mahn was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Jan. 17, 1994, at West Park Hospital.

‘Roll on Iron Horse’

People knew Mahn because of YNP, the cars, railway memorabilia and his size, referring to him as a “gentle giant” in Enterprise interviews following his death.

“They talk about the car parts, the car runs, and eating,” Nutting said.

Mahn spoke slowly because of a speech impediment, Nutting said. She thinks it may have been a result of his upbringing in a German-speaking home in Athens, Ohio.

“Most people thought that he was just good-ol’-folksy Bob,” she said. “They don’t really understand him – he had a first-rate mind.”

Mahn and the perception of Mahn have conflicted since his death, many remembering a smiling, slow-talking, large man with a “hefty chuckle and burly beard,” (as quoted in an Enterprise article after his death) but Mahn was more than that.

He possessed a professional interest in trains, from his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency. That professional interest became a personal interest, and also is why he collected memorabilia – it wasn’t just a simple childhood fascination that could be lived out as an adult.

The enthusiasm earned him the nickname “Iron Horse.”

What’s most important, Nutting said, is that Mahn was a government employee who lost his life in service.

“Something like 300 law enforcement people die every year in the U.S.,” Nutting said. “And they need to be remembered and appreciated for that sacrifice.”

Mahn was a captain in the Army, 1969-72, and joined the Park Service in June 1972. He worked in Washington, D.C., and Canyonlands and Golden Spike in Utah. He started with YNP in 1976 and was assigned to the East Entrance in 1982.

Mahn, a nationally registered EMT and a firefighter, assisted on accident calls up the North Fork.

Mahn went beyond the call of duty often.

A YNP visitor was involved in a snowmobile accident up Sylvan Pass.

The 80-year-old woman had broken her arm. The plan was to load the woman onto a sled and take her down the pass, but Mahn instead had her sit in front of him on the snowmobile. He sat behind her, his arms around her shoulders, hugging and protecting her all the way down the pass.

The woman called it the most comfortable and warmest snowmobile ride of her life.

Nutting has organized a semi-private memorial breakfast for the anniversary of Mahn’s death.

YNP staff from Mahn’s tenure, Forest Service staff, and others who knew him well will attend.

Following brunch, well-wishers will make a pilgrimage to Mahn’s grave at Valley Cemetery up the South Fork.

Before his death, Mahn had told Nutting, “Just plant me somewhere.”

Mahn’s gravestone, a pink granite rock with an engraving of the Jupiter (a locomotive Mahn had replicated by Disney which was placed at Golden Spike), is just one of the many old stones beneath the sagebrush and between the rocks at Valley Cemetery, marking his place among the locals. It reads, “Roll on Iron Horse.”

Nutting lives in a quiet house between towns. She doesn’t have a computer or a TV.

She has time to read, write and think, taking opportunities to watch the birds that fly by her windows. That’s the way she likes it.

She’s working on writing projects, one chronicling her life at YNP with Mahn.

“I’ve never found anyone that I’ve wanted to spend any time with since then,” Nutting said.

“He was just good company … he was just good to be around.”

(Corey Morris can be reached at corey@codyenterprise.com.)

Robert E Mahn