A Bolt from the Blue Page 10

  Many pilots voluntarily knocked themselves out of the running. As a result of split job duties with the national forest, the position was billed to candidates as firefighting work, and the pilots who applied didn’t necessarily take that to mean high-altitude mountain rescues. In big-relief mountainous terrain at 10,000 or 12,000 feet in elevation, sometimes more, the wind can flare up in an instant to 60 to 80 knots. Engine failure means a vertical descent of 1,000 feet per minute. Few pilots were equipped to handle those elements, and even fewer had a corresponding interest in taking on that kind of risk.

  In addition, not every pilot liked long-lining when the cargo on the end of the line was human, and plenty of competent long-line pilots simply wouldn’t agree to short-haul rescue personnel or patients.

  Conversely, it seemed that the applicants willing to fly rescue missions in the Tetons did not possess the requisite physical capability. The enormous, 3,000-foot drop-offs in the range tended to cause a pilot’s depth perception to drop off as well. When transitioning over a chasm, a pilot had to adapt to a sudden change in closure rate and depth perception. It was a tough operation to transport a ranger to a rock face—delicate to visualize, complex to compensate for mountain air flow and wind. On top of that, there was a very real and highly specialized need for pilots to block out the depth—pretend it’s not down there, pretend it’s not scary.

  The few pilots both talented and eager enough to take on the level of peril associated with the position still had to fit in with the rescue crew. The rangers were searching for a pilot to whom they would doubtless be trusting their lives, and the connection had to be there, the feel had to be right.

  At the stage when Laurence arrived, the rangers had been churning through pilot after pilot. As Laurence says, “They chewed them up quite well. If their personality was shit, Renny and the boys would eat ’em alive.” Starting off, Laurence was buoyed by the realization that within at most one degree of separation, given the tightness of the Canadian, American, and English mountaineering communities, he and the rangers knew the same people, had all the same contacts.

  His initial interview more or less took a turn toward hazing. As it turned out, however, he breezed through the getting-to-know-you session, in which he sat in the middle of a group of rangers while they took turns launching multipart, high-speed questions at him. Single-malt Scotch may have been involved.

  Within moments, it became clear to the rangers that interrogation-style interviews did not faze Laurence; in just a few minutes more, they realized that he was destined to flourish in this environment. At six-foot-one, 190 pounds, with a hard, muscular build, short grayish hair styled high and tight, and unfaltering blue eyes, Laurence certainly looks the part of a dynamic, daring pilot. When he opens his mouth, British accent still very much preserved, and begins to banter in his offhand, irreverent way, the full force of his charisma nearly shimmers. Exceptionally charming, endearingly self-effacing, and generally awash with competence, Laurence is hard not to like.

  Laurence sums up his mutual admiration fest with the rangers this way: “I could tell that they knew what they were on about. They could tell that I knew what I was doing, too.”

  Personality test roundly passed, Laurence moved on to the dreaded pilot proficiency tests. The Jenny Lake piloting job focuses on long-line work with vertical reference—height above ground or object surface—as well as precision placement. The position requires painstakingly meticulous flying skills, since the pilot operates very close to the terrain while constantly monitoring the proximity of the rotors and the short-haul load to the cliffs. The pilot needs to be comfortable with slanting terrain and the angular component of the short-haul rope, especially when supporting a patient in a litter, and he must be able to adapt to erratic and unpredictable air movements.

  The pilot also has to be cognizant of the location of the helicopter in relation to the mountain, because in certain circumstances, the aircraft can actually be hit from above by rockfall, a situation that adds a sheen of complexity to the whole operation. Most helicopter pilots, meaning the overwhelming percentage who do not spend their careers executing high-altitude rescues, do not confront rocks crashing onto them from the sky.

  The proficiency tests are designed to evaluate not just the actual skills the rangers require in a pilot but also more subjective traits, such as the level of cool the pilot displays under intense pressure. Many of the exercises are scenario-based, with situations that are generally more worst-case than real-life. Some of these assessments cover aspects of the job such as aerial victim searches, but the majority of them involve short-hauling skills.

  The pilots use 100-foot ropes in most of the tests, although they are also required to demonstrate command over short-hauling with 150-foot and 200-foot lines. Shorter ropes, less than 100 feet, cannot be used because of potential complications arising from the downdraft of the helicopter, but depending on the slope of the mountain, there are situations in which a longer line becomes a necessity. Most long-line pilots feel that it is easier to maneuver with the 100-foot rope than the longer ones, but Laurence actually believes that the loads on longer ropes can at times swing less freely and move more smoothly through the air.

  The pilots are also expected to perform various accuracy assessments where they have to hit marks on the ground when setting down items suspended from the short-haul rope, but the really hard one, the one that separates out the best of the best, is the circle test. This is the test, in Laurence’s words, in which a pilot “needs to bring all tricks and goodies to the table.”

  The test was devised to establish how long and how well a pilot can hold a hover. In other words, it is meant to measure how successfully he can park a helicopter in the sky.

  The rangers mark off a circle 10 feet in diameter with stakes all around it. The stakes are six feet high. The 100-foot short-haul rope is attached under the helicopter with a 200-pound load on the end approximating the weight of a body, usually either a log or a tank filled with water. The act of keeping the helicopter still in the air already requires pinpoint intensity and a balancing act of forces, but the tension is ramped up exponentially with a suspended load undulating in the wind currents below.

  The exam requires a pilot to hover high in the air above the circle with the log on the end of the long rope directly over the 10-foot circle. The load cannot be more than six feet above the ground (the height of the stakes), and it cannot bump the ground, or the pilot fails.

  The pilot has to maintain the log in this position for a total of two minutes in the course of three minutes. There are two rangers standing by timing, one manning a two-minute timer and one clicking a three-minute timer. The load can swing or drift out of the circle briefly, but the pilot has to bring it back in immediately.

  There are maybe a handful of helicopter pilots in the world who could pass this test in the three minutes. Laurence passed it in two.

  He admitted afterward that it was the longest two minutes of his life, which is significant in that he recognized that it was not the longest three minutes of his life—Laurence seemed to realize even before he took the test that he wouldn’t need to take advantage of the extra minute of cushion. Control is the most important aspect of the exam, but overhandlers, known as stick handlers (an old hockey expression), would never be able to hold a stationary hover that long. When Laurence found himself overcontrolling, he made himself break, completely shut down to a stop. He jostled the controls slightly to stabilize the aircraft but didn’t shift the helicopter from its relative position in the air. The movement in his wrist was almost imperceptible.

  In reality, there was virtually no situation in which a pilot would be required to hold a hover with cargo that static for such a long time, but the rangers’ theory was that if a pilot could execute a trick that demanding, he should be able to handle just about anything Teton rescues could throw at him.

  Laurence attributes his steady hand in part to time spent emulating the helicopter pilots he
worked with in long-line logging. In his early days as a pilot, he admired the way they flew so smoothly that their logs would barely move, and he tried to match their movements. Helicopter pilots don’t tend to fly with one another much, but they do watch one another fly. When Laurence was first learning, he felt that there was always someone better than he, and he was competitive enough to say not just “I’ll try that” but “I’ll try that again,” as many times as it took for him to master a particular skill.

  One of Laurence’s major strengths lies in his ability to split off in his mind all of the emotional aspects of short-hauling. He considers a human on the end of the line as no different from a barrel of fuel or a diesel engine that has to be placed carefully on a landing pad. He compartmentalizes the idea that his cargo happens to be a person who needs to be set down in exactly the right place. The same principles apply—don’t drop the load, don’t bang it into anything. Unlike inanimate freight, however, the rangers were able to show their appreciation when their pilot avoided bashing them into the mountainside, becoming, as Laurence says, “huggy and unmanly.”

  Laurence does concede that he couldn’t help but feel a visual human connection when he looked down and made eye contact with a ranger hooking into the long-line. Just before takeoff, he often heard some cavalier variant of “I don’t want to die, LP,” to which his jaunty response was inevitably “I don’t, either.”

  Laurence left his wife at home in Whistler while he worked at Jenny Lake—she visited once or twice during the summer, but, as he explains rhetorically, “People are different when they are working, aren’t they?” The sacrifice of eliminating family distractions for the sake of his focus at work did not go unnoticed, leading Renny to refer to Laurence as both an exceptional pilot and a complex character. In the category of supreme compliment, the head ranger also asserted that in the cockpit, Laurence was “always in total control.”

  Those episodes of control were extremely sporadic—during the summer, there could sometimes be two or three short-hauls a week, then nothing for several weeks. Laurence received a daily rate for a 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. shift from June though October, whether he was flying or not. He was on call for 12 days in a row, meaning that he had to be within a one-hour call-out, then got two days off. The firefighting aspect of the position in conjunction with the national forest took up a lot of his work hours, but he still had a large amount of downtime, and the on-call system was set up fairly loosely. Laurence was basically instructed to go about his business within a one-hour distance parameter, and the park just sort of seemed to hope that the situation would work itself out. Luckily, Laurence, despite partaking in the occasional glass of Scotch, the drink of choice among the Jenny Lake rangers, was not a heavy drinker. In the evenings, he could almost always be found taking a mountain-bike ride.

  When he wasn’t cycling or performing death-defying maneuvers in the sky, Laurence was welcomed into the rangers’ inner circle on and off duty. His comic sensibilities meshed well with the rest of the team, running to the bawdy but not to black humor. Joking in the face of death simply wasn’t Laurence’s style, and the Jenny Lake rangers didn’t seem to find dark comedy so funny, either, despite its prevalence on most rescue crews.

  The affable, playful side of Laurence was the one most often on display with the rangers. He was notorious for initiating grab-ass games even while flying and for ramping up silly challenges just after takeoff. “Oh, you think that was funny? Watch this!” He and the rangers onboard would volley back and forth about who could be goofier on the way to a scene, with Laurence occasionally getting caught cursing on the radio as a result.

  It was only when he was about a minute away from an accident that Laurence revealed the impassive, contained piece of himself. When this persona came out, it came out quickly. Once Laurence determined that “the show was on,” his transition was total. Often flippantly describing him as a different person when he was on-scene, those closest to him knew that the sudden ruthlessness of his intensity was merely the other side of the same coin.

  Laurence’s first major rescue with the Jenny Lake team was on the oppressive North Face of the Grand. He inserted two rangers on the sheer rock face, and as soon as they unclipped from the short-haul rope, pieces of the mountain began to crash down from above. The rangers were forced to spend the night on the side of the mountain, with rocks intermittently rattling down on them. Once the victim had been evacuated the following morning, the rangers wanted to climb down (they preferred to “walk out,” is how they said it), but it was far too dangerous for them to move around on the mountain in the midst of all the instability. In evaluating the risk of the helicopter flying directly into a rockfall zone, Laurence contemplated how precisely he could time the extraction, weighing how much time he might have to do it versus how long it might take. In the end, he went blasting in, the rangers clipped into the rope in two seconds, and they all escaped unharmed. The whole escapade was sort of like one big trust-building exercise.

  Another time, the Jenny Lake rangers brought their short-haul operation to Sun Valley in a desperate attempt to save a father and son. The victims had already been stranded on a mountain for 36 hours when Laurence flew in with Renny. Given the location of the accident, there was virtually no place for Laurence to put Renny down, so he dangled him up against the cliff while Renny grabbed onto a crevice with one hand and unclipped with the other.

  It was during the CIDs (critical incident debriefings), where the rangers and pilot got together in the aftermath of the rescues to reevaluate them over Scotch or a few beers, that their immense respect for one another was revealed, Laurence announcing that he couldn’t believe how brave the rangers were, the rangers responding that they couldn’t imagine how Laurence could act so casually about what he did in the air. Laurence’s stock reply was generally that it was hard enough flying the copter without hanging underneath it. In truth, he was grateful that he didn’t have to interact with battered and disconnected limbs and that he wasn’t responsible for gathering and packaging body parts the way the rangers were.

  One body recovery that made an irrevocable impression on Laurence occurred on the north end of the range. He had been flying pass-bys searching for a climber for hours, only finally to find him draped on the mountainside like a rag doll, dead beyond all doubt. As much as the sight disturbed Laurence, he was overcome by knowing that the trauma must have run so much deeper for the rangers who actually had to cut the man free and load him into a body bag.

  The vast majority of Laurence’s rescue missions with the Jenny Lake climbing rangers occurred during daylight hours. His workday generally ended at 6:00 P.M. because the contract helicopters were not equipped, or permitted, to fly at night. On July 26, 2003, Laurence was unable even to insert the first ranger on-scene until after 6:00 P.M.

  At dusk, a helicopter pilot has less feeling for movement and speed and approach. He thinks that high might be low or vice versa, and he may confuse slowing down with speeding up. His depth perception shifts, virtually disappears. With night flying, as thrilling as it is for a pilot, everything about the environment changes, and much of it slips away. There are far fewer visual cues. And in the words of Laurence Perry, “When things go sideways in the dark, they tend to go sideways fairly quickly.”

  SEVEN

  “Jack is a mutant. I asked him and Jim to run up to the base of Friction Pitch. To haul ass, basically.”

  —

  Renny Jackson, head Jenny Lake ranger

  By the time of Leo’s second insertion attempt, Renny Jackson was onboard the helicopter as the spotter. Dan Burgette had started out in that position on the recon flight, but once Renny reached the rescue cache, given the complexities of the incident and the scope of the operation, it made sense for him to take over as spotter.

  Renny lost count of his rescues long ago, but he does recall his first significant one, just after he was hired, when he spent the night with a man who fell down a gully on Baxter’s Pinnacle. Ma
ss-casualty incidents (MCIs) are easier for him to remember, both for their rarity and for the fact that they overwhelm resources. In the vast majority of climbing accidents, only one climber, not several, falls off a ridge or gets struck by a rock.

  A two-patient rescue on the daunting North Face of the Grand in 1980 is an operation that Renny recollects vividly. A helicopter flew him and other rangers to 13,000 feet to the East Face snowfield near the summit, where they spent the night. In the morning, the other rangers lowered Renny down to two stranded climbers to assess their injuries. When he had the wounded climbers ready to be raised, he ended up trapped and swinging on the mountainside with them, as vicious winds and a lightning storm forced the rangers above them to seek cover. Five hours later, they were all successfully raised to safety.

  In another MCI, in September 1985, Renny and a second ranger left the valley in pelting rain to save five climbers trapped in a snowstorm on the Exum Ridge of the Grand Teton. The snowdrifts were more than three feet deep, and the wind was gusting at 80 mph by the time they reached 10,000 feet. Nearly crawling through the snow, Renny managed to follow a blinking headlamp to the victims’ location in a gully. Three members of the climbing party had already died, but Renny spent the night with the two survivors and at sunup began the laborious process of extricating them.

  The skills associated with the spotter position on a mission of this magnitude—most notably, split-second timing under the crush of manifold life-and-death decisions—rivaled whatever stone-cold self-possession was required of Renny in any of his prior rescues. The spotter acts as a go-between for the pilot and the ranger on the end of the rope, therefore orchestrating the mission on the mountain to a certain degree. The ranger in this position controls the pace of the operation—ensuring that the timeline is not unspooling too quickly, watching for warning signs such as communications becoming too terse, slowing the tempo down a bit if necessary.