A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  It seemed impossible that the climbers had fallen down that kind of terrain on the mountain and weren’t crushed to death in the process. If one of the climbers’ heads had bounced against the mountainside on the way down, if they had not stuck their landings, they would certainly have been killed.

  As it was, they were all bleeding from blunt-force trauma injuries from their 100-foot plunge down the mountainside and their sudden stop on hard, sharp rock. They had a collection of broken bones, ripped tendons, and severe burns. Here and there, lightning had run on the surfaces of their bodies, blistering some of their skin.

  All of the climbers were in various stages of paralysis and had a questionable mental status, whether because of hypothermia or the effects of the lightning strike. Each of them was in somewhat of a trance, almost as if they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and, given the circumstances, were a little too casual in response to their rescuers.

  The first action the rangers took was to anchor the climbers to the ledge where they were located. Jack set an equalizing anchor above Justin and Jake, while the other rangers seamlessly split up the medical assessments. A focal point to keep them all connected to the mountain together seemed immediately to give the climbers something to trust, a step toward feeling safe. The rangers clipped into the new anchor as well.

  When Dan had rappelled down to the lower scene, he had had to downclimb a bit of rock to reach the victims. The first person he encountered was Bob Thomas, the dad who had rappelled down to his son, Justin, and the two other injured climbers. He told Dan that he wasn’t hurt and identified himself as the father of the man with the bleeding legs. Bob admitted that he wasn’t an experienced climber but that he had done what he had to do to try to save his son.

  Dan took off Bob’s pack and told him to stay on a ledge in a small area known as a chimney, a rock cleft with mostly parallel vertical sides, that was large enough to fit his body. When climbing such a structure, a climber uses his head, back, and feet to apply opposite pressure on the vertical walls. While Dan was getting medical gear out of his pack and talking to Bob, Chris climbed over to do an initial evaluation of the two men sitting on top of each other in the corner, Justin (Bob’s son), age 29, and Jake Bancroft, age 27.

  The climbers had landed in an incredibly awkward location on the mountain, and it was obvious that there was no place for a ranger to stand to work on the lower two. Chris had to stem across in front of them, meaning that he simultaneously assumed two widely spaced footholds and supported his body by using the opposition created when he pressed his feet outward in opposite directions. Chris’s left foot just smeared with friction on the steep rock, and his right foot found a hold on a small ledge a few inches wide. There was clearly no room for a second ranger. Chris asked Dan to stay where he was and write down the information he called down from the assessments of Justin and Jake.

  The predicament of Justin and Jake can be illustrated with a large book standing open on a table, with the pages riffling slightly and a muffin crumb dropped into the crack between the pages to represent a rock. Justin would be sitting on Jake, both of them atop the crumb. Then the book would need to be tipped backward at about a 70-degree angle.

  In order to reach the patients trapped at that angle, after Chris had stemmed the crack with one foot on the left rock face and one on the right rock face, using counterpressure to hold himself in place, he then had to bend over at the waist to assess and treat the patients.

  Upon initial exam, Chris determined that while Justin had bled a great deal from his legs, the source was a series of deep lacerations on his lower legs and knees rather than his thighs. The bleeding had nearly stopped. Jake, on the other hand, was extremely disoriented. He barely seemed to be able even to recall his own name, and he didn’t know where he was or what had happened.

  Meanwhile, Jim assessed Reagan Lembke, age 25, the man on the small ledge above Justin and Jake. Their ropes appeared to run up into the rock leading to Reagan, but it was impossible to decipher the progression of the lines. Jim conveyed the details of Reagan’s condition down to Dan. After checking him out, Jim felt that Reagan was stable and not hurt too badly, given the situation. He was significantly burned on his upper body and one leg, and he had a large laceration on his shin. His main complaint was that his backside ached from landing violently on a knob on the chimney.

  All three climbers were becoming severely hypothermic in the cold mountain air, and the rangers quickly covered them with sleeping bags. When one of the rangers put a sleeping bag around Jake, it seemed to him like the warmest, most comfortable thing he had ever felt. He hadn’t realized until that moment how cold he was and how much he was shaking. As the rangers started warming and reassuring the patients, the mental status of each of them began to improve, making it easier for the rescuers to evaluate their injuries.

  As they worked, the rangers radioed the information about the severity of the injuries down to Brandon in the rescue cache. While Jack later stated that the rangers at the lower scene were “well within what we were doing,” he also admitted that the situation was “pretty wild.” There was a lot of helicopter action above them, beneath them, around them. The noise was extremely loud and very distracting, and the abrupt appearance and disappearance of the helicopter dashing around so close to them jangled their nerves and added to the general chaos of the scene. In addition, it looked as if another storm might be brewing off to the west, so the rangers had to keep looking over their shoulders to see if they were going to be struck by more lightning.

  Chris initially felt that Justin was the top priority at the lower scene and that he would need to be extracted from the mountain in a litter. Jake was very cold, and his mental deficiency was his most pressing visible symptom. His position was problematic because he was tucked into a corner behind a flake of rock (a thin slab of rock detached from the main face) and was partially covered by Justin. Chris felt that Jake would also require a litter.

  As Chris completed his secondary evaluation, it became evident that Justin wasn’t as bad as he first appeared. He had initially feared that Justin had fractured both legs and his back, but after checking more closely, Chris determined that his legs were not broken after all. He was in a lot of pain from his upper back, but he probably could move a little. Chris examined his spine as best he could in the cramped space and deemed it likely clear of fractures.

  Justin had been beaten up terribly from the fall, shattering his shoulder blade by bashing it against the mountain, with the bones essentially in chunks. His face was obliterated—he had chipped a tooth and broken his nose, and there was a deep grove running through his helmet and indenting his face. He had cheese-gratered his legs and injured the ACL on his left leg. There was blood all over him, and he was still partially paralyzed. He had had trekking poles in his backpack like his brother Rob, and his whole body had been shocked by the lightning. He kept offering to do what he could to help, even though he could barely move, but despite that behavioral quirk, he did not appear to have lasting neurological deficits.

  Jake had been knocked unconscious following the lightning strike. When he regained consciousness, he was paralyzed. He had smashed his head brutally and repeatedly on the rocks, and he had a stupid smile on his face and a lot of blood on his socks. He was making a funny kind of exaggerated looking-around motion, repeatedly saying things like “Well, where are we? Sure is a nice view.”

  Jake had left his wife and baby girl at home in Rigby, Idaho, to climb the Grand. He had grown up camping, backpacking, and hiking in Utah, but this was only his first climbing trip. A self-described computer geek, Jake knew Rod from work, and they clicked when they discovered a shared love of hockey. Jake had never climbed before, but Rod had been talking about the trip, and Jake felt he was in decent enough shape to come along. When Rob took him sport climbing on a bolted route on a cliff a few weeks earlier, it was the first time Jake had ever been roped up. Rob led Jake’s climb up a 70-foot wall, and Jake fou
nd it thrilling, but, as he says, “it turns out that sport climbing and mountaineering are two different things,” and he admits that he didn’t know what he was getting into by joining the Grand trip.

  While Jake was waiting at the base of Friction Pitch tied together with Justin and Reagan, watching Rod climb, it had started to sprinkle. He heard one thunderstrike in the distance, and then it began to rain harder. All three members of the fourth rope team were sitting down, and Jake had his hands in his lap. Suddenly, the hair on his left arm stood straight up, a strange and tingly sensation, and when he looked down at his arm, he heard the sound of an explosion. It was an insanely loud crack, and it occurred right on top of them.

  Jake was instantly rendered blind and deaf and experienced an immediate desire to get away from something very painful. He had time to wonder if he had been hit by lightning, then he realized that he was no longer sitting but was standing up, and then, just before he blacked out, he had the overwhelming feeling of falling forward. He became conscious long enough to register an eerily painless impression of bouncing and rolling down the rocks out of control before he slipped into blackness again.

  Jake was lying down when he woke up. His limbs were sluggish and seemed frozen in place, but he was able to manipulate his body into a half-upright sitting position before he sank back into unconsciousness. Reagan was above Jake, and Jake could hear him, but he had a hard time seeing him. Jake and Justin were mashed together, and one of the times Jake woke up, he saw Justin’s lower face and mouth bloodied and broken. He realized at that point that a big thing had happened, and he tried to stand up, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have any sense of what was going on with Erica or Rod, and he assumed that the three of them were the only ones affected.

  Despite having worn a helmet during the fall, Jake had suffered a serious concussion. He kept replaying the same scenario—he would come to, ask Justin and Reagan what had happened, be told that they all had been hit by lightning, then pass out. A few moments later, he would wake up again and, as if he had never posed the question, ask Justin and Reagan what had happened. This pattern occurred over and over, with his friends’ answers getting progressively shorter, until finally they told him they had had enough and to give it a break.

  Jake knew he was coming out of his stupor when he was able to process the thought that he had been hit by lightning and that these guys were being rude to him. Even then, he kept fading in and out of consciousness. He threw up at one point and later, in the midst of the rangers’ lifesaving heroics at the scene, made a point to tell them to be careful not to step in it.

  After approximately an hour, Jake could move his arm, although he was still numb and had no fine motor skills. He could hear voices on the radio in his pocket but could only paw at the zipper. His body was splotchy, and he had burn holes from the lightning coming down the rope. The bolt seemed to travel a path beginning at his wrist (where the hair had stood up on his arm) and then coursed through the rest of his body—arm, waist, leg—until it surged out through his toes, leaving black, charred skin.

  Jake and Reagan had essentially ridden Justin’s body down the mountain when they fell. Justin and Reagan were aware of what had happened, and they were fighting the fall, trying helplessly to prevent it somehow. Jake, like a drunk or a baby, was limp and relaxed and tumbled down the mountain with no resistance. As a result, he had rolled through the experience with the least bloodshed. He was hurting in places he couldn’t see, and he had deep bruising in the area of his ribs that would only show up days later.

  Chris was still trying to appraise Jake’s injuries, but Justin was sitting on his lower body, making it hard to access him. Chris spread his legs wider, stretching over to Jake, trying his best to evaluate him on the steep section of rock where he was jammed. It was, as Chris says, “a delicate kind of situation.” After a few minutes, Chris was able to feel Jake’s spine well enough to be reasonably sure that he had not broken his back.

  Dan was worried about Jake given how spacey and bewildered he was acting. In addition, Dan was cognizant of the fact that a massive electrical-shock injury could have residual problems, and he was concerned about spending the night with Jake on the mountain given the limited cardiac medical capabilities they had. Chris reversed himself regarding the severity of Jake’s injuries compared with Justin’s, and the other rangers agreed that Jake was the top-priority patient.

  A problem existed in that Jake was wedged into the ledge and blocked by Justin, and the rangers couldn’t extract Jake until they had removed Justin from his position. Treating the trapped patients in the remote and hazardous terrain was frustrating for the rangers—the most serious patient was the most difficult to reach and therefore had to be the last to be extricated. That wasn’t by the books or the EMT manuals of how to triage—those hurt the worst are supposed to be the first to get help. In this case, however, they had to be pragmatic, and their goal was to get people off the mountain.

  The rangers needed to gain access to the more seriously injured climbers and also create more room to work. It was essential for them to remove as many people as quickly as possible in order to simplify the problems they were dealing with in the confined space. They were concerned about risk and exposure, weather and rockfall, not only for the patients but for themselves as well. Therefore, the rangers did not fly the climbers off in the order of injury severity but rather got to whom they could when they could.

  The rangers were faced at that point with a potentially life-or-death decision. The mechanism of their injuries suggested full spinal immobilization for all three patients. If a climber fell farther than one and a half times his body height, the rule of thumb was to evacuate him on a backboard. In this case, of course, the patients had fallen more than 16 or 17 times their height. The choice was to extract them on a litter, a considerably more time-consuming rescue, versus putting them in screamer suits and flying them off the mountain more quickly.

  Despite the length of his fall, Reagan appeared to have only isolated extremity injuries, and the rangers determined that a sitting position in an evacuation harness would be an appropriate way to transport him.

  The options with regard to Justin and Jake were more complicated. The primary concern was that one or both of them had a back injury that would result in permanent injury or paralysis if they were not spread out flat in a stretcher. Chris was fairly certain that the backs of both men were clear. He had run his hands down their spines. There was no numbness or tenderness, no point tenderness, no distracting injury or pulling pain. There was a lot of blood but no bones sticking through their skin.

  If the rangers erred on the side of caution and attempted to fly the patients out on a litter, given the time of day, the danger was that only one or neither of them would be able to get off the mountain at all that night. If the rangers were not able to fly them out of there before the morning, there was an enormous risk of cardiac issues and hypothermia complications. There was also the possibility of another storm brewing, and the rangers were very aware of the need to move people away from the area before the next thunderstorm rolled in.

  The rangers weighed patient care against conveying the climbers out that night and to a hospital as soon as possible, measuring the pros and cons, leaning toward rapid extrication with the patients flown unattended in full body harnesses. There was a consensus among the rangers that if there were fewer victims and/or more daylight, they would have packed the victims into litters for removal from the mountain. In this case, however, there were only so many minutes before darkness set in, and every one of those minutes was essential. Looking around the corner from their vantage point, the rangers could see Rod’s rescue playing out. Although those rescuers were working feverishly, their efforts to maneuver a litter on the steep mountainside didn’t seem to be happening as fast as the four rangers at the lower site thought it needed to given the dwindling daylight.

  Jim, who had a vast history of quickly assessing victims based on his extensive exp
erience as a ski patrolman, was insistent from the start that in order to save their patients, they had to stabilize and transport them as fast as possible.

  “We don’t have time. We gotta scream these guys,” he said to the other rangers at least 10 times. “We’re getting this done, we’re running shuttles. We’re gonna clean our scene up.”

  In the end, it came down to a decision by the rangers that if they opted for a litter extraction, the patients would never get off the mountain that evening, and the chances of them surviving the night were too slim.

  Once the choice was made, it was made. The rangers all realized what the game was and they knew that some compromises had taken place. After reaching their decision, the next step was for them to justify it by successfully executing their plan. They flipped into action, instantaneously focusing on the individual tasks they needed to accomplish to short-haul the climbers out. Time seemed to be sprawling out before them, the minutes ticking away. They were constantly checking the level of daylight, but the rangers all considered themselves skillful mountain people. They knew that if they could just get their patients off, they could always handle themselves, could speed out of the scene and find their way off the mountain in the dark if need be.

  The rangers thought of the rescue in terms of lots of small steps, just like climbing, and they did not let themselves get overwhelmed by the big picture. With the limited time and the group of patients they had, there was little room left over for problems. There was so much to do that the rangers mainly dealt with their own discrete jobs, but an equally vital aspect of streamlining the process was their willingness to jump in and pick up loose ends for one another, to see something that needed to be done and unselfishly move in to complete it.