A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  Reagan was the easiest patient for the rangers to extract since he was on a bit of a pedestal. He was surprisingly calm and uncomplaining and the most coherent of the three climbers. Jim radioed Renny requesting a screamer suit for him. Laurence had already short-hauled Clint from the top of Friction Pitch to the Lower Saddle, and as soon as Clint was removed from the screamer suit on the Saddle, Laurence flew it back to Jim at the lower site. When it arrived, Jim and Jack got Reagan ready to go.

  As they packed him in the suit, the rangers referred to it as a giant deep diaper. The rangers did their best to use humor to lighten up the show. They pointed out the helicopter, telling the climbers that it would be the greatest ride of their life, the best ride in the park, better than the roller coaster when they were six.

  The injured climbers seemed amenable to the idea of the suits. They realized that they were getting out of there, and they were very accepting of all that the rangers were doing toward that end. They were obedient and cooperative, ready for anything, anxious to get off the mountain. They didn’t ask a lot of questions.

  As he was being strapped into the harness, Reagan did ask Jack why the rangers called it a screamer suit. Jack’s answer: “Because you can scream if you want to.”

  The rangers explained what was going to happen—“You are going to dangle”—so as not to surprise their patients. They made it clear that it was a snug harness and that all of the connections were doubled up, so there was no way for a patient to fall out of it during flight. The general attitude of the rangers at an accident site was that they wouldn’t need to be there if the victim(s) had done the right thing, and they tended to approach the extractions from that perspective.

  As taught by Renny, the two points for a ranger to emphasize to a victim on-scene were (1) I know what I’m doing, and (2) I’m going to get you out of here. Crammed together on the side of the mountain, the rangers took complete charge of the situation, and the wounded climbers responded by compliantly doing what they were told.

  In his shock and resulting skewed perspective of reality, however, Jake was making light of the situation, in no way appreciating the gravity of their circumstances. He seemed to have no concept that he, or anyone else, was in danger. He was, as he later said, in “La-La Land.” He was in good spirits, laughing and joking around, and he seemed vaguely offended that no one seemed particularly amused by him. He quoted a line from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar—“You’re all doing a wonderful job”—but to his disappointment, the rangers didn’t seem to get, or at least acknowledge, the reference.

  When Laurence came to pick up Reagan, Jake was nearly giddy to see a helicopter flying overhead. Justin and Reagan had been frustrated earlier when the helicopter kept coming and going and leaving them. To Jake, for whom time was malleable, it seemed as if the aircraft had arrived simultaneously with the accident.

  Short-hauling the patients off that location was definitely a risk, especially given the altitude. The air was thinner, and the helicopter didn’t have as much reserve lift. The area had little protection from the wind, and the currents wrapping around the peaks in that location could be both strong and squirrelly. During the time of the extractions of the climbers at that lower site, however, the weather happened to be as clear, and the air as relatively still, as ever could have been expected.

  In order to hook a patient up to the short-haul line, the ranger has to reconnect with the rope hanging from the helicopter, but at that precipitous location on the mountain, there was no place for Laurence to set down the 10-pound weight bag. That eliminated the ranger’s wiggle room should there have been a badly timed gust of wind, but they couldn’t take a chance of the bag catching on anything. As it wasn’t an option for Laurence simply to drop the bag somewhere at the scene, Jim had no choice but to grab the rope as it swung under the helicopter. While clinging to the side of a cliff, however, he obviously couldn’t reach out very far to snatch it.

  With Renny coordinating from the helicopter, just as he had done earlier on the top of Friction Pitch, Laurence sustained a hover and maneuvered the line directly over the ranger ready to receive it. Laurence was moving so slowly that Jim later described it as “almost annoying perfect.” Caught up in the deliberate pace of Laurence’s motion, Jim was concerned that Laurence was being so careful, so absolute, that he was almost taking too much time. And then Laurence deposited the orange weight bag precisely and softly into Jim’s outstretched hand.

  Laurence flew Reagan off the mountain at 7:24 P.M., deposited him at the Lower Saddle, then immediately returned for another victim.

  The next-easiest person for the rangers to get off the mountain was Bob Thomas. It was obvious to the rangers that they would have to help Bob get off the mountain one way or another. With him hanging out nearby in the chimney, they didn’t know what he was going to do or where he was going to end up.

  Bob had been immensely helpful to the injured climbers earlier, warming Justin as best he could and making sure that Jake stayed awake. When Reagan had first seen Bob appear, he declared in his delirium that he saw Christ and knew he was going to be saved.

  Jake had experienced a soothing feeling of wanting to go to sleep, to drift off and not worry, but Bob tried to keep him alert and talking. In one exchange, Jake acted confused and frantic about how Bob could possibly know his middle name was Wade, even though Jake himself had just told it to Bob two seconds before. Jake later credited Bob’s efforts at preventing him from slipping into unconsciousness in the time before the rangers arrived as likely saving his life. Looking back, he feels that if he had lapsed into sleep, he would never have awakened.

  At that point, however, from the rangers’ perspective, Bob was a loose cannon, and they needed him out of their responsibility. Since they were at the lower site more than 200 feet below Friction Pitch, Bob would have had to reclimb the Jern Crack and Friction Pitch before he could rejoin the other uninjured members of his party. That wasn’t going to happen in time for him to meet up with the others. It wouldn’t have been safe for him to climb down the mountain by himself, necessitating the dedicated time and energy of a ranger to lead him. Since they didn’t have any rangers to spare and Bob, being uninjured, was low-priority, a ranger wouldn’t be available to guide him down until all of the injured parties were helped first. By that time, it would likely be after dark, which would make the climbing dangerous and slow and might take more than one ranger to get the job done.

  In addition, Bob was physically and emotionally exhausted. When Jim asked him if he thought he could climb up out of the lower scene, he first replied that he wasn’t sure, then said that he couldn’t. The rangers decided that they just needed to get him off the mountain, that it was time for him to go. It was such a clear-cut way to proceed that Jim made the decision to “stick him in a suit” in about three seconds. Bob was flown off the mountain in an evacuation harness at 7:52 P.M. In essence, it was triage by short-haul.

  That left only Justin and Jake at the lower site. Justin was in a lot of pain when he tried to move, and the rangers requested an order of morphine from the park’s medical advisor, who was at the rescue cache during the mission. Morphine is one of the drugs that the rangers carried in their drug kits, but before it could be administered, the ranger had to get permission from the medical control doctor at St. John’s Hospital in Jackson or the park’s medical advisor. The rangers received the order, but Justin ended up declining the injection. He felt that he could deal with the pain, and he wanted to be lucid for the flight out.

  The rangers had a tough time maneuvering Justin into the screamer suit, since Chris wasn’t able to cut his Camelback water pack totally off of him. Given the tight space, it was awkward for them to slash his clothes away and very difficult to get the crotch strap under him.

  When he was finally in the suit, the rangers cut free every rope leading to Justin. An extracted patient must obviously be unclipped from all anchors before being hooked into the helicopter’s long line. As a sig
n of how messy the scene was, the rangers told Laurence, in a less than confidence-inspiring way, that they couldn’t isolate where all of the ropes were anchored but that they were pretty sure they had the patient cut loose. While they thought they had gotten all of the ropes, they weren’t certain, and they were afraid of ripping someone else off the rock or tying the helicopter to the mountain. Their solution was to ask Laurence to lift Justin off extra-slowly while they held knives at the ready. It turned out that they had, in fact, cleanly sliced through all of the ropes, and, untethered, Laurence flew Justin away to the Lower Saddle.

  With only one extraction left to go, Jack’s attention was drawn to the top of Friction Pitch. Craig, Leo, George, and Jim had set up a raising system in an attempt to save the Folded Man, but without enough rescuers to pull on the ropes, their progress was excruciatingly slow. Jack saw a need, and every mountain instinct he relied on compelled him to fill it. He looked at Jim, and Jim knew intuitively what he was thinking.

  “Go,” Jim said.

  That was all the encouragement Jack needed. He free-solo-climbed up the mountain to reach the top of Friction Pitch to provide extra manpower, an act that was to become ultimately pivotal in the rescue. There was a gully off to the right of Friction Pitch that was slightly less exposed, and he scrambled up that route. Having made the climb a thousand times before, Jack did not pause to rope himself up.

  Following Jack’s quick departure, the three remaining rangers were alone with Jake on the mountainside. As time passed, his thought processes improved somewhat. He was able to remember Chris’s name, and he started to retain information about where he was. His chief complaint was of severe pain in a section of ribs high on his back.

  Jake had watched Reagan, Bob, and Justin taking off one at a time under the helicopter, and the process had seemed to him “pretty hairy.” When it was his turn, he had a hard time sitting up as the rangers hooked him into the harness, and he kept repeating that he was concerned about his ability to hold on to the reins. The rangers told Jake that if he was spinning, he should stick his arm out to balance himself. Jake responded by asking the rangers to take his picture as he was flown off (which they did).

  Then Laurence gently lifted him off, and within seconds, he was flying thousands of feet above the ground. He was not frightened, as he had expected to be, but tranquil and then happy. As he flew away, he turned and looked back and saw the rangers in the place where he had just been. From that angle, it seemed to him like so small an area, such a little ledge. When he was stuffed in there, he hadn’t realized how incredibly steep that part of the face was, hadn’t thought of the spot as being treacherous. He was surprised that he had felt secure in the space, and his last thought as he left the mountain was that he couldn’t imagine how they had all fit.

  As Dan, Chris, and Jim cleaned up the area where the climbers had clung to the mountain face, they finally solved the mystery of where the various ropes went. To their shock, they discovered that none of the climbers’ lines had, in fact, been anchored.

  Upon further investigation, it became clear that the anchor that had held the climbers to the mountain face at the base of Friction Pitch had failed, blown out of the wall by the force of the lightning strike. It turned out that every bit of rope draped over the rocks at the lower scene was loose, not tied to the mountain, not connected to anything at all.

  As they plunged 100 feet, the climbers’ falls had been arrested merely by the dumb and nearly miraculous luck that their rope looped around some spiky rock protrusions on their way down. In addition, as the rangers inspected the rope, they could not find any evidence of melting. The cord had been hit by lightning and flew free of the mountain, but it had kept the three climbers all tied together. Despite the electric current that had flowed through it, the rope remained strong enough to snag on some cracks as the climbers free-fell as well as support their weight until help could arrive. Their survival was secured by an unbounded rope, a true lifeline that prevented the three climbers from taking, as the rangers said afterward, “a big ride.”

  A trick rope had conjured the shimmering illusion of safety, performing a sleight of hand in which, while attached to three men plummeting to certain death, it abruptly unfurled itself at the precise moment necessary first to catch and then inexplicably to coil itself in tangles around a series of unremarkable rock spurs peppering the sheer mountain face. It was the fantasy of desperate men grasping at wishes and engaging in wild flights of imagination as they lay dying at the rocky base of the Grand. But in the end, the rope stunt turned out not to have been a chimera at all; it was the straight story, the unvarnished reality of what had actually happened to those climbers, and whether it was in fact a magic rope or faith in a higher power or the spirit of the mountains wielding its force to balance tragedy, the only unassailable truth is that Jake, Justin, and Reagan were not destined to die at that time, in that lonely place.

  TWELVE

  “Pumpkin Hour is 9:23.”

  —

  Laurence Perry, helicopter pilot

  The 30 minutes before official sunrise and after sunset are subject to long-standing visual flight rules enforced by the Federal Aviation Administration for aircraft under government contract. It is not safe for a pilot to fly, and it is especially not safe for a pilot to land, a helicopter in the dark. The makeshift heliports at mountain rescue headquarters do not have the lighting required to ensure a successful landing at night.

  On July 26, 2003, the National Weather Service indicated that sunset would be at 8:53 P.M., making 9:23 P.M. the drop-dead time beyond which a pilot was forbidden to fly. The rangers refer to this mandatory cut-off time as Pumpkin Hour.

  Jake had been screamer-suited off the lower scene to safety by 8:20 P.M., leaving only the Folded Man (and Erica’s body) to be evacuated from the mountain.

  Earlier in the evening, Craig had rappelled down mid-rock face to Rod, reaching him at 6:54 P.M. By that time, Rod had spent more than three hours dangling on his rope, exposed to the elements as he hung upside-down from his seat harness. When the lightning bolt blasted him off Friction Pitch, he dropped a dozen feet or so, and falling even that far with a dynamic rope severely jolted him. He was barely alive. His pulse was so weak that Craig could detect only a faint beat from his carotid artery.

  As an EMT-1, an intermediate emergency medical technician, Craig had been assigned to assess Rod. Along with Dan and Chris, he was one of the rangers with a higher degree of medical interest and training (for which the park paid). Craig was able to dispense medication and was qualified to do the same things a paramedic could do, although the classes he took mainly focused on an advanced level of backcountry medicine.

  Craig obtained extensive experience with patient care and trauma in the mid-’90s, working at the Eldora Mountain Resort outside Boulder, where he treated about 50 skiers every season. At that time in his life, Craig was based in Boulder without a career plan. When he showed up in Jackson in February one year, all of the good jobs had already been taken. Despite having studied biology, ecology, environmental science, and geology at college in Santa Barbara, Craig took a job as a dishwasher. His mom was worried, but Craig viewed the cheap lodging and free ski pass as a means to an end. He didn’t yet know what it would be, but he understood that he was searching for a job he was positive about, work that would have depth and meaning. It turns out that he found the purpose he had been seeking at Jenny Lake.

  As a practical matter, Craig was not often required to give an immense amount of medical care to patients in the mountains. His main goal at an accident site was to assess the seriousness of the injuries and then set the pace required to get the wounded party to definitive care (a hospital or a doctor). The questions he was generally tasked with answering on-scene were “How bad is he?” and “How fast do we need to move him?” Occasionally, Craig was called on to buy time, to give fluids or whatever else was necessary keep a victim alive until rangers could get him off the mountain.

  In
this case, having surveyed his patient on his short-haul ride in, Craig was not anticipating a need to do much of any medical treatment. As it appeared clear to Craig that, in EMT-1 parlance, Rod “was not in a position consistent with life,” he basically wrote the Folded Man off.

  After viewing the photos from the recon flight of Rod suspended from his rope, the rangers had essentially been in agreement that no one could survive that situation, yet suddenly, Craig was faced with a viable patient. Rod was most certainly dying, but he wasn’t dead yet.

  It seemed almost certain that Rod’s rope had been seriously compromised after lightning traveled through it. While suspended from his own line, Craig secured Rod with a fresh rope and new anchors. He then began a medical assessment, checking Rod’s vital signs and slipping an oxygen mask over his face. As best he could, he tried to support Rod’s torso to ease his breathing and take some of the weight from his harness.

  Rod’s clothing was melted to his wrists. The back of his rain pants was burned and partially dissolved. He had gashes from the lightning and other trauma sliced across his body and on his head. Craig determined that he didn’t have feeling in his legs.

  Craig had never seen a patient in that position before, jack-knifed in his harness, bent backward in two. Craig tied himself off on his rope so he could have his hands free. Then he did the only thing he could think to do in the situation: he propped Rod up and unfolded him.

  Craig put his knees against the wall facing the mountain and came up underneath Rod. He built a platform with his body, Rod’s torso on Craig’s knees, his back and head on Craig’s thighs.