A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  If the thunder cells hadn’t moved away and the clouds hadn’t lifted, the rescue would have gone in a much different direction. Many of the rangers realized much earlier in the day that the weather was going downhill, had seen the purple wedge of a heavy-duty storm in the early afternoon. As it was, the rangers kept scanning the skies and listening closely for signs that lightning had passed out of the area completely, racing not just darkness but the ominous threat of being trapped in a storm on the mountain themselves. At the end of the day, there would be no other flashes of lightning observed in that part of the sky on July 26 before or after the bolt that struck down the Idaho climbers.

  The rangers were moving incredibly swiftly and efficiently, and Renny led a discussion with the rangers about whether the pace was too fast. They agreed that it was quick but not too quick, and each ranger managed it the best he could in his own head.

  When the rangers were being short-hauled two at a time, since they were short on flight helmets, Marty flew with just his climbing helmet. Flight helmets are beefier and, in the event of a crash, provide better protection than a climbing helmet, which is mainly designed to allow rocks to bounce off the rangers’ heads without cracking their skulls.

  More significant, flight helmets are outfitted with radios so that the ranger or rangers on the end of the rope can be in communication with the people in the helicopter. Although there are backup procedures if radio communication was lost, the ability to communicate orally is extremely important. While it is only essential that one of the rangers on the end of the rope have a flight helmet, both rangers on the line ideally have the capability to be in voice contact with the spotter and the pilot. On this operation, where there were not enough flight helmets to go around, only Dan, assigned as the communications guy for the short-haul, had a flight helmet. Marty, therefore, could not hear what Renny and Laurence were telling Dan about where to land, when to unhook, and so on.

  Dan had a pretty heavy pack, loaded with oxygen, a C-collar, and a medical kit, plus he brought along two sleeping bags in a large stuff sack. Early into the incident, the rangers had realized that battling hypothermia would be a serious issue for the climbers on the mountain. The lightning storm left the climbers wet and cold, and they had been stationary on the mountain for more than two hours before help arrived. To reduce the risk of hypothermia, Dan was taking up supplies he had packed from the Lower Saddle cache, including the sleeping bags and a stash of heat packs. He attached the bag to his waist and dangled it beneath him as he was short-hauled in.

  As Dan and Marty started down toward the landing site on Friction Pitch on their short final approach, Dan was facing away from the mountain. He couldn’t see the landing site, so he couldn’t call out the two-zero, one-zero commands as they got close to the ground. As soon as he became aware of the situation, he radioed the rangers on the ground to ask one of them to provide the distances to Laurence and Renny from his position. Craig was on his radio ready to give distances, but by then, Dan and Marty had slowly rotated around in the air, giving Dan eyes on the landing spot.

  The two rangers landed in a comfortable bivy site, a protected area built up with rocks walls to deflect some of the wind should a climber have to spend the night. Ideally, the floor of such a site is relatively flat so the climber can stretch out and sleep. The bivy site Laurence set them down in was flat, had rock walls a couple of feet high, and was roughly six feet by five feet.

  Dan was feeling a little behind the curve, having been backward on the rope on the approach to the landing. Once he was on his feet, he remembered that he was the coms guy. He looked over at Marty and saw that he was already on the ground. Dan yelled to Marty about being down and comfortable, and Marty said that he was. In trying to catch up, Dan radioed the helicopter that they were both down and comfortable. As he was calling that in, he saw the weight bag in front of his face and instantly realized that it should have been on the ground before he called the down and comfortable signal. Renny called down to Dan that he was rushing it.

  They unhooked without incident, and Dan caught his breath. Marty and Dan were just to the north of the big boulder on the traverse ledge at the top of Friction Pitch. Leo and Craig were dealing with anchor issues near the ridge crest. Dan went around the boulder to where some of the climbers were and saw that they were all hypothermic to some degree. The temperature had been 35 degrees on the flight. Dan gave them the sleeping bags he had brought and started questioning them about their ability to get down the mountain.

  Realizing how cold both the injured and the uninjured patients were, the other helicopter, 4HP, flown by Rick Harmon, delivered a sling load of rescue equipment on a remote long-line hook. Included in the load were down parkas, sleeping bags, a tarp, technical lowering kits, two anchor kits, extra morphine, and extra IV fluids.

  The rescuers were forced by weather and fading sunlight to make several triage and treatment decisions to rescue the patients. They knew that evacuations would have to occur the following day unless they took immediate action to extract the climbers from the mountain. Two members of the climbing party—Kip and Reese—had stayed down in the Upper Saddle. That left only four ambulatory climbers—Rob, Sherika, Steve, and Dave—at the top of the pitch. In the end, given Rob’s and Dave’s knowledge of climbing, their familiarity with the route, the lateness of the day, and a shortage of rescue personnel, the rangers made a determination that those four climbers could safely climb down the mountain. They ideally wanted to send a ranger with them to escort them, but they didn’t have one to spare, so they sent them off down the mountain by themselves before it got too dark.

  The Folded Man, although the most inaccessible, remained the rangers’ top-priority patient. As medic for the upper site, Craig’s first priority was to get to Rod and assess his condition. Equipped with a rope and anchor gear, he began to construct a rappel anchor to access Rod below. He looped the rope around a huge block and ran a couple of extra loops. Leo helped him, even though doing so compromised his operations role.

  As operations chief, it was Leo’s duty to organize and delegate. He was supposed to sit back and look down on a scene, make sure it was coming together. He did not have the vision to oversee a mission while he was helping hands-on with the rescue. The moment a ranger in that role got sucked into actually assisting with the operation rather than directing it, he had lost control of his operation. Leo’s feeling was that he couldn’t do both jobs well, but here, he didn’t have that latitude. In this accident, he had to get involved. After a short time, Marty and George were able to jump in and help Craig with the rappel anchors.

  Meanwhile, Dan had been assigned as medic for the lower site, responsible for assessing the three climbers more than 200 feet below them. By that time, Rob’s dad, who had successfully reached his son and the other two climbers, called up on his radio to confirm that Justin had what appeared to be an open bilateral thigh fracture that was still bleeding significantly. Femur fractures can result in life-threatening bleeding, and it had been several hours since the climbers had fallen. The rangers knew that if the climber’s femur injury was still actively bleeding externally, he would be extremely shocky by that time. Based on Bob’s information, it seemed likely that Justin was the next patient in priority after Rod, and it amped up Dan’s desire to get down to the scene as quickly as possible.

  Dan and Craig reconfigured the med gear a bit, with Dan taking some of the supplies from Craig’s medical kit as well as his drug kit. Craig felt that they wouldn’t be giving the Folded Man a great deal of treatment on the mountain if they were to have any chance of getting him out before dark.

  While Dan was determining how to rappel safely down to the lower site, Rob told him that the rope going over the edge had been used by his dad to rappel to the climbers below. Dan looked at the anchor and saw two cams, metal mechanical spring-loaded devices that fit into cracks and crevices to protect a lead climber by securing the climbing rope, which is then clipped to a cam with a cara
biner. The devices come in varying sizes, from half an inch to eight inches to fit different-sized cracks. One cam looked and felt solid, but the other appeared a bit unsteady.

  Dan jiggled the anchor, and it seemed relatively stable, plus he knew that it had held the dad when he rappelled on it. Still, the events continued to move very quickly, and when the pace was too fast, the rangers were concerned about getting loose or careless. It took just one bad decision to injure or kill a rescuer. Dan didn’t trust himself to think straight with his tunnel vision focused on the injured people below, and he wanted a second opinion before he rapped on the anchor. He called to Leo, but he was still busy out near the ridge crest. Dan then asked Craig to check the anchor, and Craig deemed it unacceptable. The second cam had a bad placement, and when Dan wiggled it, he had probably pushed it further into the crack, which flared wider. As a result, the cam was no longer firmly seated.

  Craig constructed an entirely new anchor tied together with a cordelette, a long loop of accessory cord used to tie into multiple anchor points. When Craig was satisfied that it was rock-solid, Dan clipped in and started rapping.

  Dan’s pack was heavy with the extra medical supplies in it, and he was climbing down on a single rope. Intent on dealing with several snarls in the rope, he passed within 20 or 30 feet of Rod. He wasn’t rappelling straight down the climbing route, as his rope would have added confusion to Rod’s location. In addition, his 200-foot rope wouldn’t have reached the climbers nearly 240 feet below him.

  Instead, Dan rappelled down the gully just to the east side of the rock ridge that Rod was on, such that he couldn’t really see him when he got to his level. He was looking for where to put his feet and paying attention to what he was doing while rappelling, so he didn’t look over in Rod’s direction, but he did talk to him on his way down.

  The rangers, Dan included, feel that hearing is the last sense to fade away, and they are generally big believers in talking to unconscious people. Dan knew it hadn’t been that long since Rod had moaned when his friends called to him, but he didn’t respond to Dan. Nonetheless, Dan chose to assume that he was alive and told him to hang on, to fight, that people were up above setting anchors and would be down to help him as soon as possible.

  Dan rapped to the end of the 200-foot rope, which put him in a gully just to the north of the base of the Jern Crack. Having rappelled through the steepest section of the climb, he landed on a ledge that he was able to downclimb until he could climb up and over to access the three injured climbers.

  Just seconds before he reached them, Dan was shocked to see Jack and Jim pull themselves up and over the ledge where the climbers were trapped, exhausted but exhilarated after having completed their incredible run up the mountain from the Lower Saddle. Dan radioed up that he had arrived at the location of the three patients plus a fourth climber and that Jack and Jim were also there. The three rangers began to evaluate Justin, Jake, and Reagan as Chris Harder rappelled down from the top of the pitch to join them.

  Back in the air, Laurence brought an extraction suit to Marty via the short-haul rope. The rangers are not supposed to go chasing after the equipment dangling from the rope. They want the pilot to bring the line to them, as close as he can without the rangers having to run around. They reach out a little, but not over a precipice. Here, Laurence placed the end of the rope right into Marty’s open palm. He then departed for a couple of short revolutions in the air while the rangers attached the suit to Clint.

  Within an hour of Leo arriving on the scene, the rangers had secured Clint in an evacuation suit—the slinglike harness also known as a screamer suit—to ready him for extraction. In the rangers’ experience, most patients are fairly relaxed about the idea of being flown off a mountain on a rope 100 feet below a helicopter. For one thing, it happens fast. For another thing, climbers are, in general, less afraid of heights than the average person.

  Moreover, rangers begin their explanation of the process by saying, “What’s going to happen next is . . .” They describe the procedure, then announce that they are park rangers and this is the way it’s going to go. The rangers tell patients in a firm and clear tone what they can and cannot do in the air. The basic instructions are to sit back and go for a ride and don’t fidget.

  No one in the park has ever turned down the ride or even registered much in the way of resistance or complaining. There are stories of victims becoming unglued in the air and trying to leap from rescue litters in fright, but it has never happened to the Jenny Lake rangers. The patients they are loading into screamer suits are in dire situations so far out of their element, removed from their own experience, that they often can’t even process flying under a helicopter. As the rangers say, it beats walking out.

  The evacuation harness has a clip and a backup, two points of attack. Clint clipped in by himself with a daisy chain, a length of webbing with sewn loops that run the length of the chain. One end of the daisy is usually permanently girth-hitched to a climber’s harness to provide a safety attachment by quickly and easily clipping into an anchor with a carabiner.

  After orbiting nearby for a few minutes, Laurence returned to pick up Clint. To lift off with him from the top of the pitch, Laurence had to come back and hover directly over him. He couldn’t swing back into the mountain. The wind velocity was still very strong, and to keep the helicopter still, he had to pull up on it very slightly, watch what was going to happen, and then correct for it almost in advance.

  Once Marty had the rope in his hand, he hooked Clint’s screamer suit to the short-haul line via an O-shaped ring. He called, “Hooked and ready,” up to Renny and Laurence in the helicopter and, just in case radio communication had failed, also gestured with a finger over his head.

  As Clint was lifted up and off the mountain, he understood that Rod’s rescue was fully under way. His left leg had been badly scorched, 70 percent of it covered in second-degree burns and a five-inch spot of third-degree burns on his thigh where lightning had transferred from Erica’s body to his. Blood and pus and bodily fluids were oozing out of him everywhere. He was freezing and drained to the point of emotional and physical exhaustion. As the shock set in that he was actually getting away from the scene on Friction Pitch, his primary feeling was relief.

  Knowing that Erica was gone, he had moved through a lot of processing being next to her in that situation. He believes that if there is a 12-step program for grief, he went through the first eight steps of it in those three frigid hours up on the mountain.

  Clint’s ride out was exactly at the point of twilight over the Tetons. The flight circled around the mountain range, displaying the view and the setting sun in a way that Clint had never seen before. His thoughts were on his children and what the events of that day signified for him as a father, what it would mean for the kids to grow up without their mother. As he flew, he took in the enormity of the dazzling orange and backlit horizon, looking forward rather than back.

  ELEVEN

  “Hooked and ready.”

  —

  Jim Springer, Jenny Lake ranger

  When Jim Springer arrived on the tiny ledge on which Justin, Jake, and Reagan were crouched and asked, “How’s everybody doing?” he viewed it as an encouraging sign that all three of the climbers answered him.

  Jim knew only that three members of the climbing party had fallen in the Jern Crack area below Friction Pitch and that at least one of them was busted up, but he had no sense of the specifics of their predicament or their medical condition. He was relieved at least to discover that none of them was unresponsive.

  The lightning bolt had ricocheted down the mountain, knocking the three climbers off their stances at the base of Friction Pitch and sending them somersaulting down 100 feet of rock face. Two young men were crumpled up back in a tiny corner, one of them with bloody legs sitting on the lap of the other one, with rope looped around them everywhere. Another guy was clinging to a knob, directly above the abyss. He looked as if he was just about ready to flip of
f the pitch. They lay tossed upon the rocks and ledges where they had happened to land, not moving.

  Sometimes when a climber falls, his ropes will tangle and slow his fall. In this case, the ropes had not only snarled but also virtually tied themselves together. Since they had been anchored at the bottom of Friction Pitch when the lightning hit, the climbers should have been swinging in the air off the side of the mountain, suspended from their ropes like Rod, dead or dying.

  As they were hurtling 100 feet down through space, however, bashing against the rocky cliffside as they fell, the climbers’ ropes had entwined themselves around some pointy rock horns and jammed into cracks, providing a counterweight and stopping their descent. The event was totally random, a one-in-a-million shot. Their survival was sheer blind luck.

  These climbers were not in any way hanging from their ropes or harnesses but had simply collapsed, pinned on top of a steep sweep of rock. They had hardly moved at all since. Either none of them knew what to do to try to help himself, or they were hurt too badly to attempt to better their positions.

  While some of the other rangers were trying to reach the Folded Man, Dan Burgette, Chris Harder, Jack McConnell, and Jim Springer—two medics and two ski patrolmen—were all at the lower scene evaluating the condition of the three climbers trapped there. Dan had arrived from above just after Jim and Jack climbed on-scene from below, and shortly after Dan reached the site, Chris also rapped down from the top of Friction Pitch to help out.

  Before his ranger career, which began in 1990, Chris had migrated from Wisconsin to Montana to work on oil rigs. In 2003, he was a full-time ranger in Gros Ventre, another subdistrict of the park (he has since become a Jenny Lake climbing ranger). He was off duty on July 26th but heard the call from home and volunteered to come in.

  The rangers assumed that the climbers’ ropes were still anchored to the mountain, but they couldn’t figure out where or why all of the various ropes went. The cord was wedged in among the rock fixtures and the climbers’ bodies and legs, a twisted mess of coils. It was chaotic rope, a junk show. The rangers didn’t know what lines to trust, and they felt that if they waited to sort out the ropes, the climbers might lurch off the mountain. As the rangers said afterward, these climbers wouldn’t have had to look too far for a disaster. Their lives at that point were utterly in the hands of the rangers.