A week of heavy snow had knocked a tree onto the Monson’s cabin, tucked back from the road in the Mt. Hood forest. When they hiked in to it that dark Friday night, their flashlight landed on something dangerous: downed power lines. They backed away and headed to their car and home — disappointed at the lost opportunity.

But down the road, they encountered a Portland General Electric crew helping an elderly man dig his van out of the snow. The crew offered to help the Monsons once they had freed the man, seen him safely home and restored his power.

“So we went to dinner,” Monson recalls. “When we came back, they were outside the cabin, working on the lines. It was safe to go inside by then, so the kids hunkered down and fell asleep.”

A lost cause saved
Turned out the tree had knocked down the wires. The crew advised the family to get an electrician as soon as possible because the tree had damaged the electrical equipment on the cabin, which is typically the homeowner’s responsibility to repair.

“But they didn’t want us have to wake the kids and hike back out to our car through the snow,” Monson says, “so they worked for three hours on the roof to patch our electricity service back together and get us by for the weekend.”

Tina Monson is still amazed by how far above and beyond the call of duty the crew went. “It was cold. It was snowing,” she recalls. “They hadn’t had their dinner, and it was almost midnight before they restored our power.”

The effort meant a lot to her family. After all, this was just a vacation home; they had a warm house in Happy Valley waiting for them. “The crew could easily have said, ‘Call an electrician and come back next week,’ ” she says. “But instead we just went to bed, and we all got to play in the snow the next day. It turned out to be a fantastic weekend.”