A Bolt from the Blue Page 16

  Meanwhile, the members of the first rope team, who had been proceeding down the mountain when lightning hit, had seen the flash but did not know that it had struck members of their climbing party until Rob contacted Dave on the interfamily Motorola radios. Rob couldn’t bear to use the word “dead” to describe Erica, instead telling Dave that she was “down.”

  Dave was by that point at the Upper Saddle with Reese and Kip, but he came back up to do what he could to help. Since he had fixed his rope at the main rappel to speed the group’s progress, he had to run down toward the Lower Saddle to borrow a rope from the climbers from New York who had summited. Dave then hurried back up to the Upper Saddle to climb a soaking-wet Owen-Spalding route, traversing over and down the Exum Ridge to arrive at the scene.

  By the time Dave arrived, the other climbers had received evidence of life from below, as the radio finally crackled to life with Reagan’s voice, rambling incoherently. As Rob desperately asked about Justin and Jake, no straight answers, or answers of any kind, were forthcoming. Eventually, Justin himself got on the radio, and his father and brother heard for themselves that he was alive. Justin conveyed that Jake was with them, too, though unconscious. He continued to talk, but his voice was garbled as he listed the injuries the three climbers had suffered: paralysis, deafness, blindness, broken bones, lacerations. In the midst of a flood of relief that the three men were alive and the confusion of trying to process how badly they might be wounded, Justin’s next chilling report rocked the climbers. Slowing his tempo down, he haltingly explained that he had a deep laceration to his thigh. He couldn’t stem the blood flow, and it continued to hemorrhage severely.

  By this time, a helicopter had twice hovered within 100 yards of the climbers’ location and then had apparently given up and left the area. It was extremely tough for them to watch it turn and fly away. In their grief and trauma, the climbers hadn’t completely understood that the first flight was only a reconnaissance mission and that the rangers never intended to land that time. It seemed to them that there had been two failed attempts to reach the scene, that the helicopter was right there but couldn’t help. Frustration was replaced by despair after Leo’s insertion attempt was called off.

  The rangers contacted the climbers to say that the rescue had been impeded by clouds enveloping the ridge at 13,000 feet. Bob communicated the status of Justin’s leg injury, clearly terrified that his son would bleed out from a wound to his femoral artery before help could arrive. The rangers reiterated their commitment to reaching the scene as soon as possible but again indicated that given their inaccessibility, the weather, and the time, spending the night on the ledge might be inevitable.

  Before the lightning strike, Bob had been extremely shaken by slipping on wet rock while ascending Friction Pitch. Still, he began to rope back up. His son’s voice was weak and strained, and the snatches of phrases that Bob could make out were terrifying. He felt he had to climb down to assess the gravity of the injuries and try to stop Justin from losing any more blood if he could. Rob asked his dad if he thought he was strong enough to climb back up. In response, Bob merely looked at Rob, stricken. Both men were choking up, tears welling in their eyes.

  Despite having been struck by lightning and instructed by the rangers not to exert himself, Rob anchored himself to belay his dad. As the climbers above had no idea where the fourth rope team had ended up, Bob did not have a sense of how far he would have to rappel. In fact, the combined length of Friction Pitch and the distance the climbers had fallen totaled well more than 200 feet. Every three to four seconds on his descent, Bob paused to yell out, “You got me, Rob?”

  Every time, Rob shouted back down that he did, the unspoken answer to his earlier question to his dad cycling inside his head. Bob was not planning on coming back up. He just had to get to his son.

  TEN

  “Down and comfortable.”

  —

  Leo Larson, Jenny Lake ranger

  At 6:09 P.M., two hours and twenty-three minutes after the initial call for help, a rescuer arrived on-scene. The clouds had abruptly cleared off the Exum Ridge, and within minutes, rangers had rerigged the short-haul rope, and Laurence was back in the air with Leo again on the end of the line. Leo touched down on the ledge about 30 feet east of the accident site, but by then, darkness was closing quickly. Nightfall was less than three hours away.

  Leo saw members of the group at the site waving to him as he landed. The disturbing scene that he took in after he unclipped was like something climber’s would have expected to see in the old days, horror stories from the Alps, notorious peaks where a climber’s body could dangle for weeks.

  A couple of the climbers were hunched over, bloody and huddled. It was clear that a tragedy had hit. It appeared as if a bomb had gone off, like the pall after a storm. They were all very quiet, some of them crunched under rock outcroppings, a few sitting close, clinging to one another, knees up, arms pulled in, dazed. They looked shattered.

  To the climbers, Leo’s appearance was like the cavalry arriving, as if they were no longer without hope. His appearance—extremely tall, blond hair to the middle of his back, blue eyes, slightly nonchalant demeanor—certainly fit the part of a prototypical rescuer. His air of total confidence and control made his first question to the group all the more surprising.

  “Does anyone have a flat-head screwdriver?” he asked.

  The climbers looked around at one another and shook their heads. Rob answered for the group that they didn’t have one. Undaunted, Leo opened his pack, pulled out a butter knife, and used it to adjust what looked to be a 1950s radio.

  It was initially difficult for Leo to triage the climbers. In order to determine what needed to be done, he first had to sort out who had been hurt. Even the uninjured seemed shell-shocked, so it was hard to ascertain who had been hit, and the climbers kept telling him that there were three men below them.

  Although Leo, with one of the heaviest flight weights (body weight plus gear) at 225 pounds, had only been short-hauled in a nontraining scenario once before, he had responded to hundreds of accident scenes. In his experience, the victims were often so pleased to see a rescuer that they were overly talkative, repeating phrases like “Thank God you’re here,” but this group was stunned. The lack of talking was fine with Leo—as he says, he “would rather deal with that than hysteria.”

  When Leo landed, Clint had one boot off and couldn’t walk. He was standing on his right leg and obviously in considerable pain from injuries to his left leg and foot. Although Leo’s arrival on the scene was quick by rescue standards given the circumstances, there had been a time delay of almost two and a half hours since lightning had struck until he got there. Enough time seemed to have gone by that they had adjusted to their situation and gathered themselves together somewhat.

  Leo had a flash of seeing members of the climbing party on the lower trails just the day before, when they were happy, joking, laughing. He shook off the image and concentrated on managing the scene. Everyone had stood up near the ledge, with Erica just a few feet away, still in the location where she had been struck.

  Leo asked questions, assessed the situation. He asked Rob if Erica was dead, and Rob responded in the affirmative. Clint did not appear to have heard this exchange.

  “Erica is dead,” Clint told Leo.

  Although Clint did not have the use of his left leg, he was standing, balanced on his right leg, closest to Erica. Leo wasn’t positive right away what his relationship to her was, and he asked Clint a question to establish husband and wife.

  Still in shock, Clint was not crying or angry or emotional. At that stage, he was numb, lucid, stoic; it seemed to Leo as if he had had enough time with Erica that the full gravity had not yet sunk in but that he had started to accept her fate.

  Leo’s first job was to assess whether Erica actually had been killed. He turned to where she lay crumpled on the rock, looking almost peaceful, as if she was sleeping. He noted that some of her helmet had m
elted, that there was superficial spidering on her body. Her eyes were closed, her face swollen and bruised. Her hair was badly singed, and there was a strong burning scent. Rigor mortis had already set in. Leo bent down over Erica. He had no doubt that she was dead, but he checked for a pulse before he quietly pronounced it officially.

  Even though Clint was resigned to the reality of what Leo would find, Leo’s confirmation that his wife was dead still seemed surreal to him.

  “You must know what true love is,” Clint said to Leo. Leo told Clint that he didn’t understand what he meant, to which Clint responded, “You save lives for a living.”

  At that point Leo felt that it was important to move Clint away from Erica. He brought all of the climbers back behind a boulder to finish evaluating them. He walked over to Rob, paused in the midst of the madness, and seemingly in slow motion, he put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, looked directly into his eyes, and said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Leo deemed Rob, Sherika, Steve, and Dave to be walking wounded. He then turned his attention to Rod, pointing at him hanging limply from the rope.

  “Is he still alive?” he asked the climbers.

  At this question, the group of climbers showed their first real signs of animation, insisting that he was, explaining that when they yelled at him, he would move in response. To prove their point, they all began screaming Rod’s name down at him, urging him to gesture with his hand.

  There was no movement from Rod, and Leo got on his radio, now operable after the butter-knife adjustments, to call for a body bag for Erica. Fearing that he was ordering two body bags and had given up on Rod, the climbers redoubled their efforts to elicit a response from their friend. Finally, whether related to the commotion above him or not, Rod groaned feebly.

  The possibility that there was still a chance to save Rod’s life ignited the climbers’ energy and instantaneously swung Leo’s focus to the logistics of his rescue. He radioed Renny asking for more rangers, fast.

  In triage for mass-casualty incidents, patients are coded according to the urgency of their need to get to the hospital. Green is ambulatory with perhaps a broken arm. Yellow is serious but not immediately life-threatening. Red is high priority, needing quick intervention to save the patient’s life. Black is dead. Making those triage decisions can be tricky, and it is usually done by one of the most experienced doctors or medics at the scene. Leo was eminently qualified to gauge triage levels.

  At this scene, Erica was the lowest priority. Rod was the top priority, being in the most desperate condition. Since saving him would involve such a complicated rescue, however, Leo determined that the evacuation of Clint—in the yellow triage category and in combination with the loss of his wife—should be conducted simultaneously with the efforts to rescue Rod.

  By this time, Laurence had inserted Craig Holm—flight weight 200 pounds with his medical gear—into the scene. The time was only 6:15. Immediately after inserting Leo, Laurence had returned to the Lower Saddle, Craig had connected to the short-haul line, Laurence had flown back up to the accident scene, and Craig had unclipped from the short-haul rope, all in six minutes.

  As Craig was inserted, he had called out his distance to the ground and his rate of descent, giving Laurence and Renny a reference off the ground. He waited until the rope bag hit the ground to call up, “Down and comfortable,” while still clipped in. He then unhooked himself, quickly spinning the ’biner off, making sure the ropes didn’t tangle, trying to hold the line for the least amount of time possible. He radioed that he was “Unhooked and clear” and gave Renny the lift signal with his hand.

  The weather had cleared somewhat by the time the second flight arrived. That was a fairly typical weather pattern in the Tetons—it was still extremely windy, but the storm seemed to have moved through. The winds were 24 mph straight from the west, but Laurence took this into account, dropping Craig and then, once the weight bag was on the ground, letting the helicopter drift slightly in the currents as Craig unclipped from the line.

  As Leo discussed the accident scene and patient priorities with Craig, Laurence continued placing rangers on the rock, now two at a time. While short-hauling generally involves the insertion of one ranger on a rope at a time, in a multiple-victim accident like this one, every second was critical. In addition, it was possible that the storm hadn’t moved on after all, and if the clearing sky was merely a break in the weather, it couldn’t be counted on to last long. Based on load calculations at that time, the helicopter was able to carry more weight, so to cut down on the number of trips, Laurence agreed to put rangers on the mountain in sets of two.

  Earlier, between Leo’s aborted short-haul attempt and his successful insertion, Laurence had made three Lower Saddle–Lupine Meadows round trips, bringing Renny, Jim, and Craig in the first flight, then a total of six more rangers in the next two trips. The plan was for Laurence then to short-haul the rangers from the Lower Saddle to Friction Pitch one at a time. Dan Burgette was on the pad ready to receive the rope when Renny radioed down that Leo needed more help as fast as possible at the upper site to reach the Folded Man.

  Once Laurence confirmed that he had enough power to fly two rangers at a time, Marty Vidak, the ranger who almost had to stay behind to find the lost boy at Spring Lake, came to the landing area to short-haul with Dan. When the rescue call had first come in, Marty was just concluding a search for a lost hiker after trekking 17 miles. He was in Paintbrush Canyon, two miles up, and he could tell from the call-out that this was a rescue he didn’t want to miss. This was what he trained for, and to make sure he was included, he went belting down the trail toward the rescue cache. It initially looked as if his effort was wasted when he was diverted by the situation with the missing child, and then he got lucky when the fire crew offered to handle it.

  Outside of training exercises, Marty had only been short-hauled to a scene once before, and he had never been on the line with another ranger in a real rescue. He and Dan, with flight weights of 185 and 190 pounds, respectively, were some of the lightest rangers for Laurence to haul.

  Some rangers were obviously thinner than others, and even 15 pounds could be critical. There was also the factor of later trips being able to haul more weight because fuel had been burned off. While the pilot is responsible for the load calculation of how much weight a helicopter can lift given the elevation and the temperature, the Jenny Lake rangers also had the benefit of ranger George Montopoli’s genius. He had created a computer program that acted as a check on the pilot.

  The contents of Marty’s pack included his harness, sticky rubber approach shoes, a climbing helmet, Snickers bars, granola bars, nuts, carabiners, and cordelettes. Marty, like most of the rangers, also carried some prusik cords, loops of cord that are tied in a friction hitch knot and put around a rope to grab it. Named after Karl Prusik, the Austrian mountaineer who developed this knot in 1931, “prusik” refers to both the cords and the hitch. Since they are lighter than other options, climbers often carry prusik cords for emergency use. They are handy for rope-rescue techniques, as they can work around multiple rope grabs (used, for example, in hauling systems) and provide a strong connection that will not damage or break the rope. The rangers are able to place prusiks on a rope extremely quickly and with only one hand if necessary.

  Marty had come to Jenny Lake in 2000. He grew up on the south side of Chicago and first started climbing peaks in his late teens. He initially climbed to get to the views, but climbing soon began to mean more than that to him. There was the fitness aspect and the ability to share the experience with friends and an amalgam of sensations that Marty describes as “body, mind, judgment, the pleasure of feeling movement through the mountains.” Most important, however, climbing for Marty was a faithful and trusted escape from the world. On even his most hellish days, the mountains were always there to clear his thoughts, refocus his perspective, take him away from the stress.

  Having gone to school to study forestry, Marty’s career progr
ession went from running the trail crew in the Tetons, to wilderness ranger, to wildlife biologist, to wildland firefighter, to Jenny Lake climbing ranger, all while working as a ski guide (in British Columbia for a Canadian guiding service) in the winter off-seasons. As a ranger, he experienced freedom, camaraderie, teamwork, and climbing merged with a rescue dimension. He flourished in the tight grasp of the ranger family, welcoming the idea that the rangers didn’t simply clock out and head home at the end of a tough day but stuck around together afterward to reflect on a harrowing rescue. He would have tried to become a climbing ranger sooner if he’d understood.

  Unlike some of the more solitary rangers, Marty prefers the parts of the job that involve interacting with the public and instantly lists “helping people” as the aspect he likes best about the position. He does the work for a motivation beyond himself, in keeping with his philosophy that his skills can make a difference, can effect change for the better.

  After Laurence successfully inserted Marty and Dan at the top of Friction Pitch, he went back for George Montopoli and Chris Harder and brought them to the scene on the short-haul line together.

  To the injured climbers who had anguished over the sight of the helicopters flying away earlier, it was spectacular to see the rangers flying in suspended from a long rope, stacked two on top of each other, landing on a precarious little mountain ledge. They felt that they were truly being saved.

  After Leo’s initial failed insertion, Laurence was aware that other rangers were, as he says, “humping” it up the mountain, and he was assuming that they would be climbing with bivy gear (short for “bivouac”) for the rangers and victims to set up an overnight camp. Instead, the weather cleared, Laurence “roared up” the mountain, and the mission turned into an intricately choreographed air ballet.