A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  Lowering a patient on a litter is generally preferable, in that gravity is the rangers’ friend in rescue scenarios, and they try to use it to their advantage whenever possible. The primary downside to a technical lowering is that it is possible for the rope to dislodge rocks from the mountainside that can crash down on top of the patient.

  Raising techniques are rarely used in rescue work, in that gravity is working against the rescuers. The process requires a device for gaining a mechanical advantage and is practically impossible except on vertical or near-vertical rock where the litter can be held away from the face by one or two rangers. In addition, raising a patient generally requires more manpower and time.

  In this case, however, the rangers would have had to lower Rod as far as 150 to 200 feet. The rangers at the top of the pitch would have then had to rappel down to that location and transport Rod away from the vertical aspect of the Grand to a suitable extraction site. The distance and type of terrain they would have had to cover to find an area with adequate rotor clearance were uncertain. In contrast, Leo knew that once Rod had been raised, the top of the pitch would be an ideal location for extraction, with great clearance and maneuverability for the helicopter. After considering the options, Leo decided that given the relative placement of Rod on the mountainside, about 50 feet down, it would be faster to bring him up to the ledge at the top of Friction Pitch.

  The main problem with raising Rod was a shortage of personnel. Craig needed to be down with Rod guiding the litter, and George was assigned to belay, a full-time job by itself, leaving just Leo and Marty to raise a rescue load—patient, rescuer, and litter—of approximately 450 pounds. The rangers needed to assemble a specialized mechanism to make that possible, and they didn’t have a lot of room to work. In addition, with only the two of them raising, the process was destined to be lengthy, and time was getting away from them, the light starting to fade.

  Leo had earlier radioed Renny asking Laurence to deliver a litter to the top of the pitch. While it was on its way, Leo and Marty constructed a raising system, building additional anchors for the two ropes necessary, the litter main line and the belay line, so that they could drop the litter down to Craig and George. As the terrain was exceptionally rough and entirely vertical, the rangers wanted a separate line attached to a different anchor in the event that the main line failed. They rigged a mechanical advantage system involving pulleys, friction breaks, and a complicated combination of knots.

  The litter arrived soon enough on the end of the short-haul rope, and Laurence carefully set it down on the top of Friction Pitch. Delivered in packaging full of medical gear, the rigid litter weighed about 100 pounds. The rangers at the top of the pitch unpacked and assembled it so that it could move down the mountain intact and ready for a patient to be inserted. There was no ledge for the rangers to rest the litter on when it got down to Rod; the litter was simply fixed on a line and sent down to rangers hanging off ropes for them to load a patient into in midair.

  Just after 7:30 P.M., Leo and Marty began lowering the litter on the main line down the rock face to Craig and George.

  As they worked together in perfect synchronization, both Leo and Marty couldn’t help but consider the potential futility of the operation. Neither of them expressed any doubts aloud at the time, but much later, when they reflected back on the events of that evening, each independently used the same phrase to sum up what his expectations had been for getting Rod off the mountain that night: they had a shot. The color they used around those words made it clear how slim they believed that chance to be—Leo didn’t think it would actually happen, and Marty felt they were likely out of time.

  For his part, George, who was right next to Rod at that point, believed that the timing of his extraction was probably moot. George didn’t understand why Rod wasn’t already dead and gave him at most an hour to live. With the combination of the vastness of his injuries, the level of destruction in his body, and the increased trauma from hanging inverted for so long, George fully expected Rod’s heart to fail at any minute. With no sense of irony, George later referred to Rod’s predicament on the rope as “walking dead.”

  Then again, George was also a big believer in the will to live, and he knew from experience that many people in Rod’s position would have given up and died before the rangers had even arrived. A rescue he conducted in the ’70s always stayed with him, in which two climbers in the same circumstance, lost and frozen in the mountains, huddled together waiting for help to come. George never considered it a coincidence that the married man was the one who survived.

  At one point or another while the litter was being lowered, each of the rangers turned to check on the intricate array of shadows splashed across the surface of the Grand. They knew that when the silhouettes vanished, they were within a shout-out of the time they would be forced to shut down the operation. Leo was intensely aware of what minute Pumpkin Hour would occur, but as he played out the rope to advance the litter down, he couldn’t twist his wrist to get a look at his watch. Instead, he measured the rangers’ remaining time in the pattern of the shadows deepening over the mountains.

  THIRTEEN

  “It will put a damper on the rescue if his head is cut off by the rotor.”

  —

  Dan Burgette, Jenny Lake ranger

  Clint had been airlifted off the mountain at 7:13 P.M., and within one hour and seven minutes of that time, four more climbers had been flown off the mountain to safety. That level of precision did not happen without the coordinated efforts of dozens of people at the Lower Saddle, 1,500 feet below Friction Pitch, as well as at the rescue cache at the base of the mountain in Lupine Meadows.

  The support team beneath the scene unfolding on Friction Pitch consisted of one air ambulance, three ground ambulances, two full interagency helitack crews, several more rangers, a medical unit, almost every member of the Jenny Lake subdistrict staff, and more than 20 assorted park personnel. At one count, 49 people had responded to assist with the rescue in one way or another.

  The fluid and fast turnaround from patients in helicopter 2LM to helicopter 4HP at the Saddle was especially crucial to the orchestration of the rescue. That part of the operation functioned like a high-stakes assembly line, with rangers at the Lower Saddle (including Scott Guenther, one of the four permanent climbing rangers) efficiently unhooking each patient from the long line and extricating each from the screamer suit so that Laurence could fly the suit back up the mountain to extract the next victim.

  A ranger then conducted a rapid trauma assessment of the patient and moved him out of the landing zone to make way for the next incoming patient. At that point, a ranger swiftly transferred each injured climber to 4HP, the second helicopter, so that Rick Harmon could fly the patient (riding on the inside of the aircraft this time) down to Lupine Meadows. Another ranger was onboard 4HP to attend to the patient during flight.

  At Lupine Meadows, medical team members assessed and treated the injured climbers and arranged their transport to various hospitals. Clint, Reagan, and Justin went to St. John’s Medical Center in Jackson via Teton County EMS ambulance, and Jake, who was in more serious condition, was prepared for an air-ambulance flight to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls.

  The Friction Pitch incident officially qualified as the 11th major search-and-rescue (SAR) mission in the park that summer. It was the third fatality, with the first two coincidentally also involving female victims killed in climbing-related accidents. None of the other SAR operations, however, had involved so many members of the ranger team, and rescue personnel in general, working so closely together for such an extended period of time.

  In addition, in the Friction Pitch rescue, the show in the air was a full-blown and unprecedented spectacle. For example, at 6:57 P.M., Rick Harmon in helicopter 4HP delivered a sling-load of rescue equipment and sleeping bags to the upper scene. Six minutes later, Laurence, in 2LM, flew the litter to the upper scene, leaving the mountain within 10 m
inutes with Clint on the end of the short-haul rope. By then, Rick had returned to the Lower Saddle in time to ferry Clint from the Saddle down to Lupine Meadows. And that pattern wove in and out throughout the evening, as the two helicopters soared and dipped through the dusky Teton sky.

  In order to keep Laurence in the air for so long—between inserting the rangers and extracting the injured climbers, he and Renny had already been flying for more than four hours while awaiting word on the status of Rod’s rescue—he had to refuel his helicopter repeatedly. He flew down to the valley to fit in the refuels between trips up to Friction Pitch.

  The official government rules require a pilot to shut off a helicopter when it is being refueled. The pilot then has to wait approximately two minutes for the aircraft to cool down, and once the temperature has stabilized, the helicopter can be filled with fuel. In this case, the rescuers didn’t have two minutes. They needed absolutely every minute they could get, which meant that they also didn’t have the additional three to four minutes it took for a pilot to start a helicopter back up after refueling.

  From the very start of the rescue, Laurence made a determination that he wanted to hot-fuel, meaning that he would keep the rotors running throughout the refueling process. As the rules can be waived in a life-threatening situation, Laurence let Renny know how he wanted to handle it, and, predictably, Renny’s response was “Sure.”

  To implement the process, there was an entire helitack crew on the ground acting as a safety check on the way procedures were followed as well as the pace at which they occurred. During the hot-fuel, everyone cleared away from the helicopter except for Laurence and a fuel guy in a full protective suit that was somehow supposed to protect him in the event of an explosion. As Laurence explains, “It’s just the two of us if anything goes wrong.”

  Between the hot-fuels and the staggering number of people Laurence was short-hauling in and out of the accident scene, Laurence and Renny had simply not taken one minute of downtime during the entire rescue. The helicopter had been running in excess of four hours straight. While he was awaiting word on Rod’s status, Laurence even made a trip up to the lower site with a cargo net suspended from the helicopter and removed the gear and medical equipment that Jack, Jim, Dan, and Chris had used in that part of the rescue.

  Air support was often an integral part of a rescue in Jenny Lake, but for it to be involved in the operation for the entire time, from start to finish, was extremely unusual. Rather than becoming fatigued by the extended air time at altitude, Renny felt as if his powers of observation had been heightened. He could see all of the events unfolding in extreme detail. As he describes the orchestration of the acrobatics in the sky, “It was the most remarkable thing. There was meshing, synchronization that I hadn’t seen in a long time . . . or ever.”

  Laurence’s feeling is that he could make what he did look like magic by holding it together for one day, but in reality, he was in a plastic bubble, a shell, with Renny’s voice coming to him from behind his back while he performed for remote and disjointed people. He sums up his perspective on the day by saying, “That day, I never felt like I was on the edge of reason or the edge of my abilities.” In Renny’s opinion, the standard Laurence set during the Friction Pitch rescue put a nearly insurmountable amount of pressure on future pilots.

  The whirlwind pace of extractions and transfers that the two pilots maintained throughout the evening did not allow the victims much chance to process or even reflect on what was happening. As they were conveyed from helicopter to helicopter at the Lower Saddle, the climbers all continued to appear fairly dazed. Clint seemed particularly stunned, telling rescuers over and over that it was his wife up there who had been hit.

  During his second helicopter ride, Jake overheard something about a party of 13 being struck by lightning, and he realized for the first time that he was involved in a major catastrophe that affected more than just the three members of his rope team. Even as he became a little more cognizant of the scope of the disaster, it was clear that Jake was still in deep shock. His foot was on fire, burned all over, and his socks were crusted with blood and largely melted away. He had bought brand-new hiking socks for the climb, and as the paramedic was cutting away his scorched, tattered clothes, Jake indignantly asked him if he could please just take the socks off and save them instead of ruining them.

  The transfer process proceeded flawlessly for five climbers in a row. Jake, the fifth person to be extracted that evening, was removed from the mountain at 8:20 P.M. and five minutes later had already been loaded into the second helicopter on his way to Lupine Meadows. Once Jake departed from the Lower Saddle, the brisk pace of controlled tension that had been sustained for hours by the rescue personnel finally slowed somewhat.

  Jake arrived at Lupine Meadows at 8:32 P.M., and because of the extent of his injuries, the medical staff determined that he should be flown in an air ambulance to the hospital in Idaho Falls. As the rescuers at Lupine Meadows prepared Jake for a ride in yet a third helicopter, the urgency that had infused that atmosphere since midafternoon gradually began to slacken.

  Twilight descended fully, and then a stunning sunset came and went. As the minutes continued to slip by, rescue operations stalled in both locations while everyone waited to see whether there was another patient coming down off the mountain that night or not.

  FOURTEEN

  “Rod, we’re flying.”

  —

  Craig Holm, Jenny Lake ranger

  For how smoothly they pulled it off, it seemed as if loading a nearly unconscious patient with a probable spinal-cord injury into a litter in midair while hanging from ropes was a rescue maneuver that Craig and George had practiced repeatedly together in training.

  It was a complicated and time-consuming operation, although time seemed to slow down for the rangers as they executed it. After Leo and Marty lowered the litter so that it was alongside Rod, they tied it off and secured it from above to allow the rangers to package Rod into it. Leo sent down a belay line, secured to a separate anchor, which George attached to the litter. Craig and George slid the backboard portion of the litter out into space, then lowered the front end of the litter. George stood on the litter, one leg on each side, grabbed Rod’s legs, brought him up, and heaved him onto the backboard. The two rangers then straightened the litter and shoved the backboard back in.

  Rod was essentially fragile dead weight and could not help with the process. He tried to speak, but he wasn’t making much sense. It was obvious from his grimaces and whimpers that he suffered a tremendous amount of pain when they moved him into the litter.

  After hanging from his harness for more than four hours, Rod’s weight was finally fully supported. With the temperature having dropped into the 30s and his low blood pressure decreasing his peripheral blood flow, it was apparent to the rangers that he was freezing. Craig and George covered him with their jackets to keep him warm, Craig stripping down to just a lightweight fleece. Between the adrenaline of the moment and the pace at which they were working, the rangers were not feeling the cold. Craig piled his Nomex clothes, as well as an extra down jacket he had pulled out of his pack, on top of Rod’s torso. George folded his yellow Nomex jacket over Rod’s legs.

  They then put a red Benham bag around him. Named after the man who designed it, the medium-weight sleeping bag Velcros 360 degrees with no zipper. It allows rescuers to access a patient to reassess him, take his blood pressure, reach his leg, and so on, and it has a hole in the center by the belly button where a patient attachment can come out.

  As the rangers tucked him in, Rod experienced the sensation of his body settling in the litter and moving up the rock. Then, all of a sudden, he couldn’t remember Craig’s name anymore, a realization that made him panic, although he couldn’t communicate his fear to the rangers helping him.

  Once Rod was secured, Craig briefly assessed him again and then, using the litter as a ledge, transferred to the litter and strapped himself into it with Rod. His task
at that point was to keep the litter from catching or bouncing as it was raised. Above him, Leo and Marty began to convert the ropes on which they had lowered the litter to a raising system to bring it back up with Rod in it.

  As they began the technical raising operation, all of the rangers understood that they were pushing up against nightfall, and they began to accept that the four of them were likely not going to be enough to raise Rod as quickly as was necessary. There was no doubt that Rod would not survive the frigid night in the open air if he couldn’t be evacuated. As it was, he had hovered not far from death for several hours.

  George was manning the belay line, feeding the rope through the tension system as a backup in case the hauling line broke. It was a great deal of work for him to be doing all by himself; if Leo had access to unlimited manpower, he would have placed two rangers on rope management. From the top of the pitch, Leo and Marty were pulling the main line. The litter tried to turn and scrape into the face as they hauled it up, and Craig had to stabilize the litter as it ascended the mountain, about half a foot at a time. The litter was between Craig and the mountainside, and it took a tremendous amount of arm strength for Craig to pull the litter to himself continually to keep it from snagging on the rock.

  Their movement was efficient but deliberative. Rod was tied securely into the litter, but 50 feet was a long way to hoist him up in six-inch increments. A variety of catastrophic events could occur between their location and the top of the pitch, including another lightning strike, rockfall, or, especially given the amount of force being expended on the rope, anchor failure.

  While the rangers were raising Rod, Laurence took a quick flight down to Lupine Meadows to hot-fuel.