A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  On the evening of July 26, 2003, the short-haul maneuver was used a total of 13 times—to extract seven patients and to insert six rescuers.

  The Jenny Lake climbing rangers are real-life rescue heroes, men whose office supplies are stashes of ropes, ice axes, and helmets. They are team members of the most elite and experienced climbing search-and-rescue team in the country, trained not just in technical climbing but also in altitude rescue—emergency medical care, setting anchors, raising systems, patient packaging, and high-risk helicopter operations.

  The rangers certainly don’t receive much monetary compensation, and the seasonals receive no benefits in the traditional sense of that word. There is hazard pay and holiday pay and overtime, but the permanent rangers fall into the GS 7–9 levels of the government pay scale, with base yearly compensation just north of $30,000 a year. Seasonal employees work only from the end of May until September, and pay at a GS 5 level, where many park employees start out, is $12 an hour. Park garbage collectors, compensated according to a different pay schedule, are paid more.

  In any event, the climbing rangers know that they are ultimately paid not so much for what they do as for what they have the potential of having to do.

  The commonality of experience keeps the rangers intensely linked—to the mountains, to the job, to one another. The solidarity is also secured with the shared bonds of confronting trauma together on a near-daily basis. In terms of physical gore, it doesn’t get much more revolting. All of the rangers have had to collect body parts strewn about the mountain and wrap them up together as neatly as possible.

  Many rangers have been faced with the daunting task of scraping brain matter off the mountain and, if unable to push the material back into the skull, packing it separately (in sandwich bags in the early days) rather than tossing it loose into the body bag. In the scope of emotional trauma, the dead victims whom the rangers are forced to package are almost never sick or old. The fatalities are overwhelmingly vibrant and athletic individuals—hikers struck down while on vacation, climbers killed while pursuing their passion.

  Despite the cost to them psychologically, the rangers always do what they can for the victims, small, respectful acts of kindness and compassion, to try to facilitate the healing for those left behind. On one occasion, rangers loading the body of a married man into a bag realized that his wife would need to see him one last time, would want to hold his hand again. On the side of the mountain, they removed saline, gauze, and paper towels from their packs and painstakingly washed the blood off his fingers.

  Every ranger copes with the trauma differently. Some abuse alcohol, some turn inward, a few quit. But there is extremely low turnover among the Jenny Lake rangers, leading to a level of experience and maturity virtually unparalleled in other search-and-rescue teams.

  Returning seasonal rangers are fairly rare in other national parks. There is more upheaval, for example, at Denali and Mount Rainier. It is extremely draining—on finances, on relationships—for most rescue personnel to maintain long-term summer employment. As the job only provides income for five months, the seasonals have to find other work to support themselves for the rest of the year, and structuring a career that accommodates an extended summer break every year is generally not an option. By necessity, the rangers end up taking any job that enables them to protect their Jenny Lake schedule. They are forever crashing with friends or living in their cars during the shoulder seasons between summer ranger duties and whatever job—frequently ski patrol—they can find to pay the bills that winter.

  Longevity at Jenny Lake comes from loyalty, history, knowledge. There is a place, a community, a sense of belonging to a collection that is greater than its separate components, its individual rangers. Their link is immune to divergent backgrounds, personalities, education, social class, age, or geographic roots. These tough mountain men are sensitive, compassionate, and occasionally moved to tears when describing what it means to them to be Jenny Lake climbing rangers.

  The rangers throw the word “brotherhood” around frequently but not casually. It is spoken with reverence. Central to their outlook is their core belief that at Jenny Lake, they are truly accepted for who they are and respected for what they do. Their various skills and strengths are appreciated, their weaknesses acknowledged. All points of view are entertained. Everyone has a voice, and each of them knows that he is heard.

  Just as in the pursuit they worship, the climbing rangers need not be connected by a thick rope. Their lives revolve around, and depend upon, a thin strand of triumph and tragedy. Very few people in their adult lives have experienced a bond like that, but these men have seen it, felt it. The reason all of these alpha dogs are able to work cooperatively is that they are all climbers at heart, sharing a love of any label containing the word “vertical,” participants in a vertical ballet, players in the same vertical chess game. Some are cockier than others, and they are all relatively antiestablishment, but for the most part, they defy the type A assertive stereotype and instead just sort of keep to themselves.

  If lone-wolf climbers can ever be described as a team, it is during lifesaving mode in the midst of chaos. Aside from the danger—and the rangers have to compartmentalize the danger—a rescue is an endeavor involving practically all of their climbing buddies. They get to hang out with their friends, try out the coolest toys. They have a ton of fun, but they never lose sight of the reality that it is a very serious game they are playing. In the end, as much as they all love to climb, they do what they do to save lives. The personalities just more or less sort themselves out.

  These are men who understand each other implicitly, who know that their shared passion for the job flows well beyond the traditionally recognized and socially ordained “acceptance of risk” to something much more profound: the seeking of risk.

  In 2003, the team hadn’t had any turnover for three years, with most rangers averaging 10 to 15 years on the job. Several rangers involved in the Friction Pitch rescue—Renny, Leo, Dan—had been working together for more than a quarter-century.

  The physical conditioning, plus the stress, involved in the duties of a climbing ranger would seem to make it a young man’s game, but that wasn’t necessarily the case with the 2003 Jenny Lake rangers. Many of them were in their 40s and 50s, and although stories of climbers sharing girlfriends are legendary within the climbing community, most of these guys had long settled down with wives and children. All of the rangers’ children tended to be pretty amazing climbers and skiers, whether they wanted to be or not. Jim Springer took his kids on canyon patrols; Dan Burgette brought his kids along on certain rescues.

  By 2003, decades of training and executing hundreds of rescues side-by-side unquestionably provoked the rangers’ seamless execution, their highly polished, nearly choreographed moves. They often finished one another’s sentences, both literally and in a figurative sense. When one of them required a certain tool, another ranger often already had it out and was handing it over. They didn’t all socialize after working hours, and there were definitely cliques within the team. To say that a few of them didn’t like one another outside of the job was certainly an understatement, yet, interpersonal dynamics aside, they all quite readily trusted one another with their lives.

  Although Catherine’s life has ultimately revolved around Renny’s work as a ranger, often a source of frustration if not outright fear for her, she has never forgotten what drew her to him in the first place. “He’s very funny, you know? So funny, that’s what got me, totally worked on me. He made me laugh until I was rolling on the ground. I always remember the quality I had to marry him for.” While she didn’t dwell on the danger Renny faced with each rescue, pleas for help came at all hours, and she was not unaffected by Renny’s need to drop plans in his personal life for the sake of his job.

  When the call came in about the accident on Friction Pitch, Renny was home watching Jane while Catherine was working a 12-hour shift as a labor-and-delivery nurse. Ironically, not realizing th
e enormity of the incident, it was a rare time that Catherine not only didn’t bail Renny out, but she didn’t even have sympathy for his predicament. She was furious at him for having to respond to a rescue on, as she says, “the one day” he was supposed to be watching Jane. When Renny called her, she hung up on him. “You figure it out,” she said. “I’m at work.”

  Renny called in a favor with a neighbor who agreed to look after Jane, threw some chocolate bars and Mountain Dew into a pack, dropped Jane off, and headed to work. The drive from his home in Kelly to the rescue cache in Lupine Meadows takes 25 minutes. He made it there—flashing lights and sirens in his police vehicle—in 12 minutes flat.

  THREE

  “When lightning hits a Pecky Cypress, it continues to live, but it no longer grows.”

  —

  Nolan Trosclair, tour guide, Honey Island Swamp, Louisiana

  “Lightning strike on the Grand.”

  —

  Heather Voster, dispatch operator

  After the alert tone cleared, every ranger could hear the tension in Heather Voster’s normally steady voice. At 3:45 P.M. on July 26, 2003, the Teton Interagency Dispatch Center received a 911 cell-phone call from a frantic climber on the Grand Teton and immediately forwarded the call to the ranger station. By 3:46, Heather had disseminated the message to ranger Brandon Torres via the radio.

  The full message she conveyed was: “431, Teton Dispatch, respond to a report of a lightning strike on the Grand Teton. Five people down. I’m trying to get a better location for you. . . . The party appears to be on Friction Pitch on the Grand. One person not breathing, one person hanging upside-down and not breathing, three people missing and not responding to verbal.”

  * * *

  While it conjures up images as comic as jagged yellow bolts and as innocent as a little kid counting the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder, in reality, lightning is weather’s version of an absolute sucker punch. Synonymous with a random strike with virtually no warning, electricity from the sky is one of the least understood and most unpredictable forces of nature. Unlike other forms of weather, this powerful and mysterious spectacle genuinely conducts its devastation before those it hits know what struck them. Also, unlike other extreme weather occurrences, lightning seems somehow purposeful, pointed, aimed, almost designed to pick off distinct individuals.

  Lightning is an extremely lethal phenomenon and yet also an exceptionally rare one in terms of how few deaths it causes given how frequently it strikes. In the last decade, thousands of Americans have been injured by lightning and hundreds have been killed. It is the second-leading cause of fatalities in the United States related to violent weather, responsible for more deaths than earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Only floods kill more people. According to the National Weather Service, lightning kills an average of 58 people in the United States every year, although scientists suspect that the reported number is likely much lower than the actual number, as some lightning deaths are not recorded as such.

  Still, this is an incredibly small number of victims given the intense amount of lightning activity. Approximately 20 million cloud-to-ground flashes are detected every year in the United States, and since about half of all flashes strike the ground at more than one place, that means that lightning hits the ground about 30 million times each year in the country. Nearly 8 million lightning flashes occur every day worldwide, which translates to a flash somewhere on the planet about 100 times every second. Lightning is a phenomenon that extends well beyond the planet, also occurring on Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.

  Despite the incredible number of lightning strikes in the United States each year, the odds of lightning striking a person (as opposed to the ground, a tree, etc.) are only about one in 750,000. The chances of a lightning strike actually killing a person are significantly smaller than that—strikes are only fatal about 10 percent of the time.

  Contrary to images in cartoons, it is not true that a person who is struck will burst into flames or be instantaneously reduced to ashes. While most people assume that death from a lightning strike results from burns, in fact, the only cause of immediate death is cardiac arrest.

  In cloud-to-ground lightning, the energy seeks the shortest route to earth, which could be through a person’s shoulder, down the side of the body, through the leg, and to the ground. If the lightning does not pass through the heart or the spinal column, the victim will often survive. Lightning current can pass through tissue and not cause harm, as long as it is tracking an uninterrupted route and doesn’t get slowed down. If a bolt gets caught inside a body and spends time there, however, it can burn and cook from the inside out.

  While lightning is generally thought of as descending and hitting one target, it can actually jump around. The degree of lightning injury may vary considerably with the mechanism of injury—direct strike, side flash (also known as a splash), or ground current. Cloud-to-ground lightning can kill or injure people by direct or indirect means. Objects that are directly struck may result in an explosion, a burn, or total destruction. When a person is directly hit, the current ripping through the nervous system can kill the victim instantly by shutting down the heart.

  Direct strikes cause maximum injury, as the entire charge of lightning passes through or over the victim’s body. Since the duration of contact during a lightning strike is so short, there is often not enough voltage transferred to break the insulating effect of the skin. In these cases, the charge simply passes along the surface of the body in a process known as flashover. When lightning flashes over the outside of a victim’s body, less damage occurs, but it may vaporize moisture on the skin and blast apart clothes and shoes, leaving the victim nearly naked.

  Direct current—the DC in AC/DC—is similar to the charge in a defibrillator, but as lightning strikes are usually more diffuse than that of high-voltage electrical currents, the injuries present differently. Lightning usually does not cause significant tissue destruction along the path of the grounding of the current; instead, blunt physical injury can occasionally occur as a result of a lightning strike.

  Side flashes occur when lightning hits an object and then travels partly down that object before a portion jumps from the primary strike area to a nearby victim. They can also take place from person to person, if, for example, people are standing close together.

  A ground strike occurs when the charge hits the ground in close proximity to a victim or travels through the ground after connecting with a nearby tree or other tall object. Being struck by a flow of conductive current from the ground is unlikely to result in death, although multiple victims are not uncommon in this situation. The extent of injury depends on a number of variables, including amperage, voltage, current pathway, length of contact, and the resistance of the body to discharging electrical fields.

  The brutality of a lightning strike is as capricious as its location, varying based on the character of the strike, the severity of the dose, the duration of the strike, even the split-second timing of the bolt, whether, for example, it strikes a victim during a more vulnerable part of the cardiac cycle. While 90 percent of lightning-strike victims survive, even a partial strike often renders a victim temporarily unconscious, and survivors can suffer devastating internal injuries. Serious lightning injuries can result in cardiac and neurological damage. Since the injuries resulting from lightning strikes are so variable, most medical personnel characterize them as severe, moderate, or mild.

  Severe lightning injury usually presents as cardiopulmonary arrest, caused by sudden cardiac dysrhythmia, meaning abnormal electrical activity in the heart. The situation is often complicated if there is a prolonged period in which the victim does not receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Sudden death is common, with or without CPR, and survival is rare with this level of injury.

  Neurological complications can range from severe to mild, depending on whether the current passes directly to the brain stem. They include comas, seizures, intraventricular hemor
rhage (bleeding into the brain), permanent paralysis, aphasia (a language disorder caused by brain damage), retrograde amnesia, loss of consciousness, and confusion.

  Moderate lightning injury can cause seizures, respiratory arrest, or cardiac standstill, all of which may spontaneously resolve with the resumption of normal cardiac activity. Keraunoparalysis, the specific name for temporary lightning-induced paralysis, can occur as a result of a discharge of calcium in the musculature. If paralysis of the extremities is prolonged, it can indicate a spinal-cord injury.

  Mild lightning injury is associated with loss of consciousness, amnesia, confusion, tingling, and numerous other nonspecific symptoms.

  Lightning-strike victims at all levels of injury will commonly have burns, both those that appear initially and ones that are delayed. Lichtenberg figures, also known as ferning patterns or lightning flowers, frequently remain on the skin of victims for hours or even days afterward. This diffuse skin mottling looks almost like reddish feathers. It is caused by the rupture of small capillaries under the skin and the inflammation of lymphatic muscles caused by the passage of the lightning current flashing over the skin. The condition is so specific to lightning strikes that its appearance is often used by medical examiners when determining cause of death. A lightning bolt can also create large Lichtenberg figures in the grass surrounding the strike; these have been located on golf courses and grassy meadows.

  When lightning strikes a person’s body, a portion of the current usually enters cranial orifices—eyes, ears, nose, mouth—resulting in numerous problems. The most common of these injuries is the rupture of the tympanic membranes. Temporary hearing loss can be caused by the shock wave created by the accompanying thunder. Eye injuries and cataract formation resulting from lightning injury can occur within days of the strike, but victims have also reported these symptoms appearing as long as two years later.