Chapter 1: The Crash

The plane felt sluggish all afternoon.

At takeoff in Grants, N.M., the Cessna 177 Cardinal lumbered off the ground.

It feels like it's hanging in the air, Stephanie thought.

She remembers that her husband, Christian, 29, noticed, too.

"Is this all the power that we have?" he asked his friend and flight instructor, Doug Kinneard, 48.

Christian, Stephanie and Doug were on a day trip to Christian's family ranch in Bluewater, N.M. Christian had earned his pilot's license the month before and wanted to log hours on the 1968 Cessna that Doug supervised.

Their four kids stayed in Mesa with Christian's mother.

Christian had always dreamed of flying. When he was little, his mother found him chewing a fistful of birdseed, hoping he might grow wings.

Stephanie bought Christian his first flying lesson on his 28th birthday. Sometimes, she and the children rode along.

He had promised her that he would fly the family to the Utah mountains whenever she missed home. One of nine children, Stephanie is the only one who left Utah.

Christian and Doug took turns at the controls that day. On their way home to Mesa, Doug turned the plane toward St. Johns, a small town on the high plains of eastern Arizona about 80 miles away. They planned to refuel.

Just before touchdown, the Cessna lost power completely. Doug made a hard landing. The plane bounced as it hit the runway, and the engine wouldn't restart. Christian and an airport worker pushed the plane to the fueling area, and the tanks, one on top of each wing, were filled.

Afterward, the engine started easily, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report. They prepared to take off for Mesa.

Stephanie climbed into the backseat behind the pilot's spot. Christian took the controls, Doug next to him.

At 3:45 p.m., the plane sped down the runway and lifted just over the airport's edge.

It seemed to hang there for a second, low in the sky.

The airport worker watched as the plane's engine lost power, the left wing dropped, and the plane began to fall toward the homes below.

From her seat, Stephanie could hear panic in Doug's voice.

"What's happening?" she remembers him asking. "What's going on?"

"You've got the plane," Christian said to Doug, who took over the controls.

"I've got the plane," Doug replied.

Stephanie buried her head between her knees. Everything around her turned quiet and awful and slow.

She closed her eyes and saw her four children. Claire. Jane. Oliver. Nicholas. They were happy, laughing and holding hands. Stephanie clung to the image as the plane careened toward the street.

Neighbors heard the power lines snap as the plane came through, then a long scrape as the plane's metal belly shredded across the asphalt. The power lines had severed the landing gear.

There was a crunch as the right wing hit a parked truck, sending the plane spinning into a large woodpile next to a home. The plane caught fire. More than 36 gallons of fuel spilled onto the stacked logs. In open air, burning wood and fuel produce flames of at least 572 degrees Fahrenheit.

A long plume of black smoke rose above the St. Johns plateau.

The impact left Stephanie, Christian and Doug briefly unconscious.

Christian woke quickly. He remembers seeing Doug slumped over in his seat, bleeding from his head.

Christian thought he could hear Stephanie yelling behind him: "Christian! Get up! Get out!"

He thought he felt her hitting the back of his seat.

He could see flames out the window. The door was stuck, blocked by something outside. He kicked and pounded until the door opened about 12 inches, enough to squeeze through.

He did not turn to look over his shoulder, at the back seat, at his wife. He thought he could hear her still, yelling.

"Follow me," he called to Stephanie and climbed out, expecting steady ground. He fell into the burning woodpile instead, tripping on the logs. As he got up, he touched his hand to the plane for balance. When he pulled his hand away from the hot metal, his palm had been nearly severed. It hung loose, attached only at his wrist. He would learn later that the heat had burned his fingerprints away.

Dizzy with pain, Christian thought he saw Stephanie's arm, pushing his seat forward like she was ready to climb out.

The flames on the woodpile were reaching Christian's waist, his arms, his jaw. The rubble was shifting. Christian turned his attention to their escape and kicked a path to the bottom of the woodpile. He rolled on the ground to extinguish the flames on his body.

When he stood up and looked behind him, Stephanie was not there. The path he made was lined with fire.

Christian ran to the other side of the plane, hoping to help Doug and Stephanie escape. Flames covered the door.

Christian's arms and legs stung as the burns sunk into his skin. Pain radiated from his back, one vertebra shattered by the landing.

He ran toward the door, the heat intensifying as he approached. About 10 feet away, he paused.

Later, Christian would say, "I had a choice, right there - I had the best intentions of going in, but I didn't. I stopped and I turned around - I was thinking that Stephanie was going to die unless I went in there - and I had the children in my mind. They couldn't lose both parents that day."

Christian and Stephanie are faithful Mormons and believe that God is with us on Earth, his voice a holy spirit that can be heard or felt in times of need. Christian thought he heard it then, telling him that Stephanie would be all right, that he should turn away.

He ran across the street calling for help, feeling hysterical about his decision, what it meant to leave his wife in that plane.

Witnesses heard him scream as the flames crept higher up the plane.

"My wife," he screamed. "My wife, my wife!"

Stephanie remembers it differently.

When she woke in the back seat, everything was on fire.

The flames crackled in her ears, pushed in at her from every side. The smell of fuel and burning plastic made her choke. She couldn't see Doug through the smoke. She screamed for Christian.

He was gone.

"They left me," she thought.

Stephanie doesn't remember unbuckling her seat belt or climbing over Christian's seat. His door had shut. Stephanie reached for the handle. It singed her palm. She touched the handle over and over until she could stand the heat long enough to get it open.

Stephanie put her hands over her eyes and ran through the fire.

She heard her skin pop and sizzle, smelled her burning hair.

She felt nothing.

Outside the airplane, she dropped into the dust and rolled next to a house, stopping on the lawn beneath a silver maple tree. A tire swing hung from its branches.

Across the lawn, she could see Doug. He had escaped the plane, disoriented and on fire. She watched a neighbor tackle him to the ground, rolling with him.

More neighbors came running. A man drawn by the smoke went to Stephanie. A former fireman, Chris Baca knelt beneath the tree and put his hands around Stephanie's head, holding it to protect her spine.

He asked for a wet sheet and told the neighbors to drape it across her body. He told Stephanie to be still.

She asked about Christian.

He's across the street, the neighbors told her. He has help. He's OK.

Stephanie stared up at the tree. The undersides of the leaves were silver-gray, glittering in the sun.

"I don't want to be here," she thought. "I can't believe this happened to me, to us."

Everything had been going so well. Christian loved his new job as a facilities manager at an engineering consulting firm, and she stayed home with the kids and taught yoga at night. After a rough year living with Christian's parents, they had purchased their own house in Mesa. Stephanie reveled in decorating the rooms and creating traditions for her young family: homemade pizza on Saturday evenings, lullabies every night. She chronicled all of it on her popular blog, the NieNie Dialogues.

The pain came then. She felt it in waves: adrenaline drowning it out, then fading and letting it in. There were flashes and ebbs as nerve endings burned and died in her skin.

Stephanie looked down at her nose and thought she saw bone.

Grayish-brown skin peeled off her hands. Her fingernails were black. She could see the bones of her fingers, too.

She begged the man who held her head to cut off her clothes. It felt like they were still on fire.

"I can't," Baca said. "I'm so sorry. We have to wait for the ambulance."

He stared at her green eyes.

Sometimes she pleaded with him for help. Sometimes, she was silent.

He asked her name, her age. When she started to fade, he asked about her children. She smiled, and then her eyes turned dark.

"What are my babies going to think of me?" she asked. "Please don't let me die."

"Look at me," Baca told her. "Please look at me. You're going to be fine."

Stephanie smiled again. She reached her hand back and put her palm on his cheek. Burned skin hung off her arm.

"Thank you," she told him. "Thank you for being here."

The ambulances arrived.

Paramedics cut off her clothes, fed her ice chips. They moved her to a stretcher for the ride back to the airport. Three helicopters were on the way. Stephanie could hear the whir of the propellers chopping through air.

"I don't want to do this," Stephanie said as they prepared her for the flight to the hospital. "I just want to go home and make dinner for my family."

* * *

"Today is the big hike," Stephanie says to her daughters, Claire and Jane, at breakfast. "Do you think I can make it?"

"I hope so," Claire says.

The day goes quickly.

Stephanie and Christian remember the events a year before. They recite their memories to each other, out loud.

Right now we were saying goodbye to the children.

Right now we were heading for St. Johns.

Right now, we were in helicopters, sleeping with morphine.

Stephanie checks her e-mail. Some of her blog readers write that they are coming to the hike. She is nervous. She is always afraid to show new people her face.

Right now Doug's family came to the hospital, and the doctors told them to say goodbye.

In the late afternoon, Stephanie gets ready to go to the mountain.

Christian ties her shoes. Her fingers can't grip the laces.

The drive to the trail is short, and the mountain is large in the windshield: wide and hulking, flat along the gray crest, one of the last peaks of the western Rocky Mountains before they fade into the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. Canyons carve lines along the face of the mountain, and trees grow in the hollows.

It makes Stephanie happy to see the trail up close. Everything feels right, the same, like it used to.

Scrub oak and grass grow along the path. The sky has settled into an impossible peacock blue.

The mountain smells the same, too, Stephanie thinks, like sagebrush, rain and warm dirt.

She is greeted with a cheer, a crowd 100 strong. Her parents are here, her children, siblings, friends and strangers who read her blog.

Stephanie stands by the gate to the trail and hugs each of them.

"You're so beautiful," says one woman.

"I'm not," Stephanie says. "But thank you. Thank you for being here."

"I'm so proud of you," says another.

"We're people you don't know," says a mom, leading her children through the gate. "We pray for you and cheer for you."

Another stranger whispers in her ear: "Stephanie, you give me hope."

Stephanie wipes tears onto the gloves that protect her hands, and sends the crowd ahead.

She wants to climb with her family.

Christian takes Stephanie's hand to make sure she won't slip. Her daughter Claire squeezes her other hand. Her parents and siblings have already begun to climb with Stephanie's three other children. Stephanie starts slowly up the mountain.

The first steps hurt. Pain radiates across her knees where open wounds strain and contract as she climbs.

They pass a map of the trail to the Y: 11 switchbacks, 5,808 feet of walking. Once, Stephanie ran it in 17 minutes.

Claire is already asking if they're halfway there. Not even, Stephanie tells her.

The first switchback is hardest: a long climb that stings the lungs and muscles.

The rest of the switchbacks creep up, harder than they seem because of what has come before.

Read Stephanie Nielson - Chapter 2: Surgeries and prayers >>