50 years later, a reunion between the boy who died and the man who brought him back

Fifty years ago this month, deep in the forest in the High Uintas wilderness area, 11-year-old Scott Nicol lay dead at the bottom of a Spring Bar tent as his Boy Scout leader, 23-year-old Fred Jepsen, kneeled next to him.

Fifty years later, they’re sitting in the living room of Fred’s home in Taylorsville talking about it.

You don’t need to tell either of them about how fragile life is, and how much we need to rely on one another to keep it going.

Fred and Scott — everyone called him Scotty back then — were in the middle of a six-day Boy Scout backpacking trip in the rugged mountains in northeastern Utah. They had just completed a 10-mile hike over Dead Horse Pass when someone in camp shouted out, hey something’s wrong with Scotty! He wasn’t moving. He didn’t appear to be breathing, either.

Word soon reached Fred, the trip’s de facto leader, a position thrust on him chiefly because he’d done this very hike the year before and could make sure they didn’t get lost. It had been a tiring day. Scotty had awakened with a cough and a scratchy throat — a product, Fred suspected, of the boy walking through streams with his boots on the day — and Fred had spent most of it nursing Scotty along the trail. He’d hoisted the 90-pound boy on his back for five or six miles when he complained he couldn’t walk any farther.

Now what?

But the mood changed when Fred got to Scotty’s tent and noticed everyone had stopped talking.

Two of the other adult leaders had arrived on the scene ahead of him. This was a troop affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from a ward in Pleasant Grove. Fred, an outsider who had been invited on the trip because his in-laws lived in the ward, caught the tail end of the priesthood blessing the men were giving Scotty: “we command you to live until we find help.”

When they were finished, Fred felt for a pulse. There was none.

The quiet of the camp was interrupted only by boys whispering Scotty’s dead!

But that didn’t mean there was nothing left to do.

Shooing the others aside, Fred knelt down, ripped off Scotty’s shirt and started administering CPR: five compressions on the chest, followed by one breath in the mouth, repeat.

The odds of this happening, of having someone practiced in CPR arriving at that precise moment in time, are incalculable. Not a lot of people, especially non-physicians, even knew CPR existed in 1974. The first effort to teach the public en masse had taken place only two years earlier, in 1972, and that was in Seattle.

Just three months prior, that clueless-about-CPR club included Fred. It was only by chance he’d been introduced to cardiopulmonary resuscitation when in spring semester he needed to take an elective at the University of Utah and chose a class on first aid.

Mad, frustrated and scared, instead of counting off the seconds in the usual “one one thousand, two one thousand,” Fred inserted cuss words as he started doing compression.

But angry or not, Fred Did. Not. Stop.

Part of what kept him going was remembering from his CPR training that once you started you couldn’t quit until one of three things happened: 1, the person started breathing, 2, someone qualified in CPR spelled you off, or 3, you were too exhausted to go on.

But even after he passed the point when exhaustion and common sense said he should quit, a bigger part that kept him going was remembering those men promising Scotty that he’d live.

Daylight turned to dusk, dusk turned to dark, midnight came and went, the cussing ended, and still Fred kept going.

Then, around 1 a.m., Scotty’s body twitched. A few seconds passed and it twitched again.

Then Scotty started to breathe.

It had been 6½ hours since Fred started CPR.

Not at all sure this would last, not even sure this was actually happening, Fred didn’t move, didn’t leave Scotty’s side. The boy was still unconscious. But he was breathing. Every few minutes Fred checked his pulse just to make sure.

At first light the camp sprang to action, fashioning a makeshift stretcher to haul Scotty over Rocky Sea Pass and out of the Uintas.

But the fortuitous turn of events, i.e. miracles, was not over.

In the night, three of the oldest boys in the troop had set out for the ranger station at Mirror Lake to see if they could muster help. They set such a pace they quickly dropped the leader who went with them. When the leader came back to camp, there was considerable doubt whether the boys would make it over Rocky Sea Pass — a rugged stretch of wilderness that included a two-mile stretch of treacherous glacier boulders — in the night.

But they did make it in the night, and they found the ranger, who called for help, and when the forest service said it couldn’t authorize sending a helicopter, Scotty’s mother, who by now had been notified, got on the phone and called Utah Gov. Cal Rampton, who in turn called the National Guard, and before Fred and the others even had a chance to pick up their stretcher they looked up and there was a chopper descending from the heavens above Dead Horse Pass.

The degree of difficulty for a 1974 helicopter to land and take off at 12,000 feet is a story for another day, but with Fred and Scotty aboard they were soon airborne. Fifteen minutes later they landed at the helipad at University Hospital.

Scotty regained consciousness that afternoon. He was diagnosed with a bad case of bacterial pneumonia, but the doctors found no sign of brain damage. After two weeks he was free to go home.

The news spread like wildfire, or as fast as wildfire could spread in the days before social media. Fred and Scotty were featured on local TV and in all the daily newspapers. Reader’s Digest sent a reporter to Utah to write the story.

The American Medical Association, wanting to confirm if what they were hearing was true — CPR for 6½ hours! — sent a representative to Utah to interview Fred, Scotty and the others for verification. To this day Fred thinks it might be a world record. He’s never heard of one lasting longer.

In June, a reader emailed the Deseret News. He thought the High Uintas CPR story of 1974 deserved a 50-year anniversary re-telling. He said he’d heard about the rescue only recently when he took one of Fred’s classes.

You probably don’t need more than one chance to guess what Fred teaches.

For 50 straight years he’s been a CPR instructor.

As soon as he got home from Dead Horse Pass, Fred certified. He estimates he’s taught over 100,000 people in groups large and small over the past half-century. He did it on the side when he worked full time for the Boy Scouts of America. At 73, he’s now retired from his day job, but even though he’s in a second bout with prostate cancer, he says he’ll never stop teaching CPR.

I tracked down Fred, called his cell, and discovered that he and Scott hadn’t seen each other in decades. They both got busy getting on with their lives. While Fred immersed himself in his Scouting career, Scott joined the U.S. Army and saw the world. He was stationed in Korea, California and Hawaii before settling back in Pleasant Grove and retiring with his army pension in 2015. Now, at 61, he works for Pride Transport in Salt Lake — when he’s not riding his motorcycle, playing his guitar and enjoying life with his wife Sue, their four kids, eight grandkids and three greats.

Fred was able to locate Scott’s contact information and forward it to me so I could call and ask if he was interested in a reunion, and would it be OK if the media was there?

Both men jumped at the chance to get together again. It turned out Scott’s job is only a mile or two from Fred’s home in Taylorsville. Instead of going straight back home to Pleasant Grove after work on a recent July afternoon, Scott steered his motorcycle to Fred’s street.

They look a tad different than 50 years ago, when Fred was a strapping 6-foot-1, 180 pounds and Scott was 90 pounds soaking wet. They agreed they wouldn’t have given each other a second look if they’d passed on the street.

Didn’t matter. As soon as they shook hands the years melted away.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you, but I know what you did,” said Scott. “I’ve really been looking forward to this. I get to say thank you. I literally owe you my life.”

Not a day goes by, Scott said, that he doesn’t think about that night. Not about the details of what happened — to this day he can’t remember anything from when he walked into camp until he came to in the hospital almost 24 hours later — but about what wouldn’t have happened.

“You’d be dead,” said Fred, “simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” Scott agreed.

When Fred, downplaying his role, observed, “many little miracles made this happen,” Scott added, “I won’t say I’m religious like he is, but I’m spiritual and I definitely believe God played a big part in it.”

It pleased Scott to hear that Fred tells the story to all his CPR classes, and that through the years Fred’s students have relayed many instances of using their training to help save lives.

Fred: “When I tell the story I always ask, ‘think what would have happened if we hadn’t done that, think how many lives would have been adversely affected,’ and then I say, ‘Look, even if you forget some of the things I’ve taught you, if you’re ever in a position to help, try, just try, you’ll never feel bad about trying to save somebody’s life.’”

In parting, after leaning in to give a big bear hug to Fred (who is not a hugger), Scott said, “I don’t take life for granted, I never have. I was dead and he brought me back to life. You don’t get a better second chance than that.”

With that, Scott walked to the curb, kicked his Harley, waved so long and roared off. Big as life. And Fred? He went inside to get ready for his next CPR class. Once you start …