A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  Despite all of the training the Jenny Lake climbing rangers endure, Craig had never trained for this particular situation, had not learned what to do when he encountered a man doubled over upside-down. He had never conducted an assessment and administered medical care while hanging from a rope.

  He didn’t even know if unfolding Rod was necessarily the right thing to do, but given the damage to his airway when he was bent, it seemed worth the risk to Craig. When Craig lifted him up onto himself and straightened him out, Rod’s breathing seemed to improve slightly. His feet were still hanging down, but Craig was able to support his torso and neck. As he sat there with, as he said later, “a lapful of Rod,” Craig was committed to staying underneath him, providing him with the least possible amount of movement.

  When Craig first reached him, Rod was barely conscious, and even when Craig talked extremely loudly and squeezed him a little, Rod’s only response had been to moan. The agony Rod experienced when Craig first moved him, however, increased his level of consciousness by creating pain. Craig hadn’t hurt him on purpose to elicit a response, but it was a positive, if small, indication of Rod’s condition. The brain recedes backward with head injuries, and responsiveness to pain is the most primitive reaction. A better sign would have been for Rod to be able to respond to verbal commands involving person, place, and event.

  Craig asked Rod his name, and Rod was able to come up with it. Rod didn’t say much else during the course of his rescue, other than to plead weakly with Craig to get him out of there because he had a three-month-old son.

  That piece of news was particularly disturbing to the ranger attempting to save his life, in that it instantly made the situation, and Rod, real in a way he would rather not have confronted. All things being equal, Craig had no interest in getting to know a victim’s family. He was upfront about his queasiness and resulting lack of interest in humanizing his patients, feeling that it jeopardized his objectivity. Nevertheless, for the rest of the day, Craig latched onto the information about Rod’s son as a wedge upon which to pin his survival. He asked Rod what his son’s name was, and the last clear word that Rod uttered on the mountainside was “Kai.”

  Craig was responsible for continually assessing Rod’s status, which was deteriorating rapidly. His blood pressure was extremely low. The pulse in his radial artery in his wrist was so weak that Craig couldn’t even feel it, and he was compelled to monitor Rod’s pulse from his femoral and carotid arteries. When Craig wasn’t directly interacting with Rod, Rod’s eyes remained closed. It helped Craig considerably if his patient was conscious while he evaluated him, so he tried his best to keep Rod focused on staying awake. Once Rod regressed to mumbling as his only form of communication, Craig kept up a patter of one-sided conversation. He told Rod that as a relatively new ranger, he himself was nervous about the rescue. He explained that he had never seen a lightning strike or electrical injury before but that the purple spidering on the skin surrounding Rod’s bruises was a classic symptom. The lightning appeared to have entered his torso on the left side, then exited out his right leg.

  One topic Craig did not talk about with Rod was his medical condition. Unlike many rescuers who believe in rotely assuring a patient that he was going to be OK, Craig was not interested in giving Rod false hope. Craig felt that Rod would probably get off the mountain alive but would die in transit before he could reach the hospital, and Craig couldn’t live with himself if he lied to Rod while he was dying.

  Craig’s alternative strategy was to give Rod a reason to go the distance, to put the burden on him to fight. To that end, rather than mislead him with platitudes, Craig took a brutally honest approach. He told Rod that the odds of him getting out of the situation were slim but there was still a possibility. He said that all of the rangers were doing the best they could, that Rod would be off the mountain in another couple of hours and he needed to stay awake in the meantime. For the remainder of the time Craig worked on Rod that evening, whenever he felt Rod slipping away, he murmured, “Think of Kai,” to him for motivation, over and over again.

  Rod was born in Brazil in the fall of 1975. He came to the United States with his mom when he was 15, and his sister followed them three and a half years later. He first settled in Florida, then lived briefly in New York, then moved to Boston for high school. Through contacts in her tight-knit community in Brazil, Rod’s mom had a friend in Boston, and Rod lived with him while he attended school. As part of his upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Rod traveled to California for Mormon missionary work and to Utah for training.

  It was when Rod was back in Florida to be with his mom that he met Jody, a friend of a friend of his mom’s. He first saw her on an ice-skating rink, while she was skating and he was playing hockey. She was a small-town girl from Michigan who had been living in Florida since she was seven. Rod had a crush on her for a year before he did anything about it. Finally, when she was 16 and he was 18, he asked her out. They were married five years later, in South Pembroke Pines near Fort Lauderdale.

  A year before their wedding, Rod and Jody had visited the Tetons for a couple of weeks. They loved everything about the place—the focus on the outdoors, the slower pace, the snow-boarding. Jody cried on the plane home to Florida because she didn’t want to leave.

  During part of a cycle in which the couple moved 12 times in 10 years, they relocated to Salt Lake City for Rod’s job as a software developer. In the year they lived in Utah, they bought their first house and Jody got pregnant, all before Rod got laid off. Jody was on bed rest during her last trimester, while Rod commuted to the only job he could find, in Idaho Falls, where he rented an apartment. In May 2003, Rod found a new position in the IT department of Melaleuca as a software developer, and he and Jody—and baby Kai—moved to Idaho Falls.

  Billing itself as the Wellness Company, Melaleuca develops, manufactures, and sells, according to its marketing, effective, safe, and natural products, including cleaning products. Melaleuca advertises that its products are both good for the environment and cost-effective for its customers. Rod made friends quickly at the company, hanging out with Reagan Lembke and Jake Bancroft, who he initially thought was a bit of a jerk but who turned out to be what Rod deemed the “nicest redneck.”

  He also got to know Clint Summers and Rob Thomas. Rod had taken some classes and done some sport climbing in Utah on bolted routes, but he hadn’t climbed anything extreme or technical. Rob had been planning and training for the late-July 2003 trip to the Grand for the past year with his family, but he supported the late addition of new climbers to the venture once he saw them on a practice climb, two weeks prior to the trip, on Guide’s Wall in the Teton range.

  Despite the success of that outing, Rod was busy working and taking classes in computer science at the University of Idaho. He initially tried to opt out of the Grand climb, but Reagan and Jake ultimately persuaded him to come along. While Rod was climbing the Grand, Jody, who was afraid of heights, drove down to Salt Lake City with Kai and a friend visiting from Florida. She was riding the carousel with her three-month-old son just about the time Rod was ascending Friction Pitch.

  When Rod first regained consciousness after the lightning strike wrenched him from the mountain, he tried to replay the previous few minutes. He remembered falling, and then everything turned pitch black. In his head, he kept repeating, This is it, I’m going to die right now.

  Then he felt a sandy, gritty feeling in his mouth. As he ran his tongue over the rough edge of his front tooth, he figured that if he was aware that he had chipped a tooth, he couldn’t be dead. He had fallen about 10 or 15 feet until his rope jerked him to a stop, and he recalled bashing his face into hard rock on the way down.

  He opened his eyes, and all he saw was sky and his feet. Then he noticed a rope going straight up. He was swinging in his harness, face-up, hundreds of feet of open air below him. He was aware of his belly-up position, yet he felt oddly detached from his body.

  His lower b
ack felt as if it was breaking, and given the sharp pain, he figured he had snapped it. He couldn’t move his right leg or his left arm at all. He attempted to right himself, but he couldn’t. It was hard enough just trying to breathe.

  He screamed for help, but it turned out that he was only screaming in his mind. It was nearly impossible for him to make any sound with his voice; what he thought were screams came out only as moans.

  Every part of his body was hurting, and in an attempt to ease the pain, he unclipped his backpack and shrugged it off his shoulders. Just like that, it was gone, crashing to the ground hundreds of feet below, along with the food and water in it. Earlier in the day, Rod had snapped several photos on his Fuji digital camera—a sunrise bathing the entire valley in pink, a view of the Idaho side of the park from the Lower Saddle, two climbers in his group perched at the base of Wall Street. The camera was lost along with his pack, although the rangers were later able to recover it.

  He had no sense of time; he couldn’t see anybody, and his sense of hearing seemed to come and go. He did catch snatches of radio communication, of Bob Thomas calling for help, relaying that the group had been hit by lightning. He didn’t know where anyone was. He also heard some of the climbers trying to talk to Justin, but he did not hear Justin respond.

  As Rod swam in and out of consciousness, he was aware of Bob’s voice on the phone, referring to one dead, maybe two. He didn’t understand if he was being included in the body count.

  As time went by, daylight began to fade, and the temperature dropped dramatically. Rod knew with utter clarity that he would not survive the night. He began to see visions of his baby boy. His eyesight blacked out entirely, and he frantically tried to resist the urge to go to sleep. Even though Rod, like his friend Jake, recognized that if he fell asleep, he might not wake up, that knowledge was still not enough to keep him fully awake.

  He was feeling weaker by the minute, and he kept hearing the blades of the helicopter so close and so loud, deafening, overwhelming, directly on top of him. In response, he tried to scream and flail to let the rescuers know where he was, to assure them that he was still alive. He thought the aircraft was coming to save him, but it went away, again and again, and while the sound he was hearing was actually the rangers being short-hauled in to rescue him, the effect of the rotors repeatedly fading into the distance escalated his desperation, nearly causing him to give up hope.

  Then, in the darkness, he heard Craig’s voice. He still couldn’t see anything, and the noise was mostly coming out as a blur, but as the ranger identified himself Rod heard the word “Craig” repeatedly, and he understood that the rescuer was encouraging him to battle.

  At that point, Rod no longer had any negative thoughts. He simply felt relief. The sound of Craig’s voice was a release from panic for him, an unassailable conviction that he was going to get out of there. He felt the distant sensation of his body jerking a little, gently scraping against rock.

  When Craig was inserted at the top of Friction Pitch and constructed an anchor for the rangers to rappel down, he had fallen right back into his training. There was so much going on around him, but at another level, he was just working on his assigned piece of pie. That dynamic seemed to have completely reversed itself once he reached Rod. He had not been taught how to set up shop on the end of a rope, and the on-the-job training made him feel as if he was flying by the seat of his pants. Even the process of putting Rod on oxygen was treatment that a ranger would normally perform on a ledge, not in the air.

  Craig was concerned about keeping his movements to a minimum so as not to jostle Rod, but even more so, he was intensely focused on trying not to drop anything. If a piece of equipment accidentally slipped out of his hand, it could potentially collide with any of the seven people (three victims and four rangers) below him. An oxygen bottle released from his location could have killed someone at the lower scene. Very little of the equipment that he carried in his medical kit—an IV, for example—was capable of being clipped off onto a rope.

  In addition, the tools he needed access to weren’t necessarily on the top of his kit, and he couldn’t unpack it because he had nowhere to set the items he was recovering. He found himself holding more things than he could balance or attach to the ropes. The whole situation was incredibly awkward, and in response, Craig briefly walked himself into a silent stream of consciousness about how some training in this aspect of a rescue would have been nice.

  He radioed to the top of the pitch asking George Montopoli to rappel down and help him by providing more hands to hold things. George, who had a photographic memory and could remember the distribution of pins he had placed on a mountainside 20 years earlier, came down to Craig’s location immediately to assist.

  The weather had cleared for the most part, but the air was freezing, and George’s yellow Nomex flight jacket provided only limited warmth and protection from the wind. George viewed the whole rescue mission as one huge improvisational experience. It involved a set of circumstances that the rangers could never have specifically trained for because they wouldn’t ever have thought of it, but without the techniques developed in practice, they would have had no chance of pulling it off. In most operations, including many facets of this one, the rangers knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it, and they just got to it. In this case, however, the rescue also showcased the rangers’ highly developed ability to adapt, to shift seamlessly as a team into components of a situation they had never encountered before. To that end, George focused on his role, which was to help Craig. At one point, he held an oxygen bottle between his legs.

  George, age 54, grew up in Corning, New York, and moved out west at age 17 after high school. He worked for the Air Force Academy for 10 months before he resigned. He then moved to Boulder and met a climber who invited him out to Wyoming. To that point, he had done some scrambling back on the East Coast, including Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains, the highest peak in New York, but had not performed any technical rock climbing until he arrived in the Tetons. As he says, “It kinda grows on you . . . it kinda grew on me.”

  He held jobs as diverse as car mechanic, fruit picker—pears, cherries, apples—and carpenter. He can build a house from the ground up, including cutting down the trees for the wood. George did whatever was required to feed his climbing habit, working and traveling from Wyoming to Washington to Colorado, even heading to South America after reading an article in the American Alpine Journal about climbing in Colombia.

  What appeals most to George about climbing is the adrenaline rush, the endorphin high that kicks in on the rocks. For him, it is about overcoming fear, controlling fear, surviving. He has had a few extremely close calls and as a result has learned to trust his instincts unfalteringly.

  In the ’70s, he worked as a climbing guide, a job he detested because of the pressure to get clients to the top. He was guiding a slow-moving party up Mount Rainier at the base of Gibraltar Rock when he had an overwhelming sensation that they needed to get off the section of the mountain they were climbing that instant. He cleared his climbers off (by yelling, “Jump, or I’m gonna push you!” at them), then shouted down to the party below that they had better not come up. Everyone vacated the area moments before a tremor shook the mountain and tons of rock descended in the place George and his group had just been climbing.

  After determining that guiding involved too much responsibility and risk in connection with elements that he had no control over, such as clients who proceeded too leisurely up the mountain, George instead became a climbing ranger. He first came to Jenny Lake in 1977 and remained there for several seasons. In 1980, while pushing his limits on the Rock of Ages (a fine granite wall in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado), he had a serious accident solo-climbing a thousand-foot cliff. When a ledge pulled out, he fell inward and was pushed into the rock, rotating his calf and blowing out his fibula.

  After being laid up, he traveled to Chile to work in the Peace Corps for a couple of years,
then headed to Ecuador for a couple more. He lived at the end of a road on an ocean, totally isolated. He built water systems, constructed schools, and climbed 10,000-foot walls. He got married in Chile, brought his wife back to the United States, had a daughter. In 1984, he returned to Jenny Lake and has essentially not left since.

  In the midst of his climbing career, George managed to fit in an extensive formal education from the University of Wyoming, receiving his undergraduate degree in applied mathematics, then going on to get both a master’s in math with an emphasis in statistics and a PhD in statistics with an emphasis in math. He has been a professor of statistics and math in Yuma, Arizona, at both Arizona Western College and North Arizona University.

  Still, George believes that being a climbing ranger is the best job in the world, and in his prime, he went on 30 to 40 climbs a summer in between supporting operations and running rescues. When he slowed down on the frequency of the climbing a little, he started spending his days off running a research study on bald eagles in the Tetons, studying mercury poisoning and possible sources of contamination.

  Even with George on-scene to help him with Rod, Craig was still forced to consider whether the absence of certain care was going to kill Rod and weigh that belief against the danger of clumsily maneuvering the equipment. He decided that the administration of IV fluids and the bandaging of Rod’s burns could wait. In any event, the priority was to get Rod off the mountain before nightfall, and that process was in the works above him.

  When Craig had first conveyed to Leo that Rod was still breathing, Leo quickly conducted a risk analysis concerning how best to extract Rod from the mountain. A few aspects of the rescue were clear: first, he was much too seriously injured to be transported in anything but a litter, and second, before Laurence could hook the short-haul line into a litter, it had to be on a ledge where it wasn’t attached to the mountain. Therefore, Leo needed to make the critical decision about whether it was better to raise or lower Rod on the mountainside to reach a flat area for extraction.