Here's the latest on Niki and Nick Thomas
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
Niki Thomas was, by all accounts, mighty well organized.
Her brother called it ?hyper-organized? - ?where you and I would have one or two maps, she would have 10,? he said.
Which makes it difficult for John Zahhos to explain in any rational way how his 51-year-old sister and her 15-year-old son came to die late last month, lost in the mountains north and west of Missoula.
?She had more maps than anyone,? Zahhos said. ?They were categorized into three-ring binders with colored tabs, each in its own plastic sleeve.?
In other words, Niki Thomas, a mild-mannered Minnesota librarian, was not the sort to head off on a lark into the wild and wintry unknown. And yet, on the surface at least, it appears that's exactly what she did.
?The family's just beside itself with grief and shock,? said ?uncle? Harry Coin, who married into the Thomas clan. ?We all have questions. We're just all trying to come up with a story to tell ourselves. What were they thinking? So far, we haven't found a very comfortable story to tell ourselves.?
The story, so far as it is known, begins the morning of March 28, when Niki Thomas drove her son from Thompson Falls to Missoula for a dentist appointment. It ends six days later, on April 3, when the two were found in the woods, dead of hypothermia, some five miles from their car.
But the roots of this story reach back a full half-dozen years, to a troubled time when Bill Thomas was dying of cancer. Niki watched helplessly as her husband weakened, and Nick, not quite a teenager, slowly lost his father.
?He battled that cancer for seven or eight months,? Zahhos said, and while the older sons - Louis and Michael - had already left home, ?Nick and Niki went through that daily.?
The strain, he said, came with a price that would finally come due.
?The times when they were truly happiest were when they were all still together as a family,? Zahhos said. ?They were both survivors, but I don't think Niki or Nick ever completely healed.?
In fact, Zahhos said, it was healing that brought the Thomas family from Minnesota to Montana.
?The local education system just wasn't working out for Nick,? Coin said. ?They were muddling through, but it was tough.?
It wasn't that the young man was into drugs or crime or gangs or anything, Zahhos said. Rather, it was ?just a depressed attitude, an emotional state.?
And so Niki Thomas - who her brother says was ?selfless, completely, utterly selfless and devoted to her boys? - started looking for ways to help her son. That help, ultimately, came in the form of Spring Creek Lodge Academy. Located about 15 miles west of Thompson Falls, Spring Creek is a boarding school renowned for turning around troubled teens.
One year ago, Niki sent her boy west from their home in Rochester, Minn., ?to help Nick become a young man, with honor and integrity,? Zahhos said. ?And that's what Nick wanted, too.?
It was a proactive decision by a tightknit family, he said, and it was working.
?Nick knew he was growing up and he was proud of it,? Zahhos said. ?He loved the mountains, loved being in that area. The rules and the structure just clicked and worked for him. He was there for the right reasons, and he was OK with that.?
What was not OK, however, were his teeth.
Nick Thomas, like so many other teens, needed his wisdom teeth removed.
And so on March 27, his mother flew into Kalispell from Rochester, landing not long before midnight. By 3 a.m., she was checked into the Lakeside Motel in Thompson Falls.
It was a short night, though, and by 6:30 she had picked up Nick for his 10:40 a.m. appointment with a Missoula orthodontist.
Her route to town took her east on Highway 200, down Highway 135 to Interstate 90 and on into Missoula. It's a long drive, made longer surely by her lack of sleep and a long stretch of heavy road construction.
Later that day, on the way back to Spring Creek, son Louis called his mother on her cell phone. She was on I-90, she said, and Nick wasn't feeling well. It was 2:30 p.m., and it was the last time anyone heard from Niki Thomas and her son.
When they didn't arrive at Spring Creek by 7:30, school officials worried. When they didn't call from Thompson Falls, Louis worried.
By morning, family was arriving from Minnesota, and the search was on.
Six days later, Nick and Niki were found dead on a little-known logging road that cuts over the mountains between DeBorgia and Thompson Falls.
?Who knows,? Coin said. ?Maybe she'd just had enough of 135 and 200 and the construction delays and decided to go a new way.?
Or maybe, Zahhos said, ?they were brought there for a purpose, by the hand of God, to join Bill. I know there was a reason, and they were OK, and that's all that matters.?
Niki Thomas not only had the maps, she had the know-how.
?These people had a cabin in northern Minnesota, and they knew about cold,? Coin said.
They played broomball at 20 below on frozen lakes, snowmobiled abandoned rail beds.
?To head up a snowy mountain pass in heels and a light coat,? Coin said, ?we just don't get that. Why would they believe that's a good decision??
Coin, in his search for answers, desperately wanted there to have been a sign on I-90 flagging the mountain road as a good route to Thompson Falls, or at least a sign showing them the way back to Highway 135 - anything, he said, that would have encouraged them to make such a move. Then, he said, it would make sense.
But there are no such signs. In fact, the only signs they would have passed are signs indicating that ?County Maintenance Ends Here,? and they were the sort who surely would have known what that meant, Coin said.
The Forest Service road Nick and Niki took is not gated or signed as closed, ?but we don't plow snow,? said agency engineer Eric Barclay, ?and so basically all our roads are seasonal.?
Perhaps they chose the route simply because, unlike most logging roads, it appears on state highway maps and looks like a good shortcut.
But why then did they push on uphill once their rental rig got stuck, rather than walking back down the way they came?
?It looks like they just made a series of poor choices,? Coin said.
But how poor were those choices, really?
Certainly, few locals would blaze up a mountainside logging road into snow-choked wilderness looking for a shortcut at this time of year. But, Coin reasoned, in most of Minnesota there's no such thing as a ?seasonal? road.
Likewise, most Montanans might hike back out the way they came once their rig bogged down. But in Minnesota, he said, there's always a house just up the way a bit.
?In Minnesota,? he said, ?it's flat, flat, flat. Cell phones work everywhere. Roads are plowed, and they go somewhere. You have to assume there's a house not far up the road. You can't go any direction for very long in Minnesota without coming across a house.?
Also, uphill's surely the way to a cell-phone connection.
And so to Nick and Niki, Coin said, taking a road clearly shown on a highway map would not have seemed a bad choice. Likewise, hiking on up the road once stuck wouldn't have seemed a bad choice, either.
In fact, there was still gas in the rig when it was found, enough to run the engine and keep warm for quite a while.
Yet they didn't wait, didn't go back. Obviously, Coin said, they were not feeling desperate. They were simply moving on after getting stuck in the snow.
The very notions of wintertime road closures and huge swaths of undeveloped and unoccupied federal lands, he said, were simply foreign to them. How could Niki know that 85 percent of Mineral County is national forest land, with nary a cabin or homesite?
They were in trouble without even knowing it, and so they made decisions that now seem difficult to comprehend. Had they known, Coin said, they likely would have made very different choices.
Or perhaps not.
?If they were worried, if they were not at peace,? Zahhos said, ?they would not have made those choices. They were led for a purpose, and it was time.?
There's a Web site where friends and family have gathered to honor Niki and Nick Thomas, a place where their pictures smile out from the screen.
She's short in the black-and-white image, her head barely reaching her son's chin. But her eyes are wide and alert, looking straight into the camera - no nonsense, but happy and bright. There's a depth to her smile that makes you smile back. He wears a buzz cut, tall and handsome, eyes hidden in shadow, necktie loosed, collar open, embracing his mother with a grin.
He would have been back home to Minnesota come fall, back to school with his friends. And she would have been right there with him, the school's librarian.
On the Web site, people say in many different ways what wonderful people they were, say that Nick was growing into a man of character and integrity, that Niki was happy, genuine, warm, strong, courageous, a trusted confidante.
?They were absolutely the genuine article,? Zahhos said.
But mostly those who have logged on say, over and over and over, that the whole accident simply doesn't seem real.
Perhaps that's why Zahhos looks beyond the earthly for a story he can hang on to.
?When you strip away all the other possibilities,? he said, ?nothing makes sense unless you believe they were brought there for a purpose. That might not make a lot of sense to some people, but that's OK.
?They're together again as a family. Personally, I take comfort in that. They were healed enough, and it was time for them to go. They adored the mountains. God took them up that mountain, and they were OK. They were OK.?
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at
[email protected]