A Bolt from the Blue Page 5
At that point, Brandon asked about the victim who had been described on the 911 call as hanging upside-down from a rope. He was concerned about the condition of the rope following both a lightning strike and a fall of unknown distance. He feared that the rope might shred, plunging the man to his death before they even had a chance to try to save him.
Brandon asked Bob point-blank whether he or anyone on-scene had the ability to rappel down to that victim, attach another rope with a different anchor, and then ascend the rope after rappelling. Without hesitation, Bob replied in the negative. Brandon did not ask follow-up questions. He did not know if the issue was that the climbers did not have the ability to tie in another rope, or they lacked the proper equipment, or they were too severely injured from the lightning strike to climb, or they were simply too emotionally exhausted from the entire situation. In any case, Brandon appreciated the honesty, and he was relieved to know that there would be no further injuries from the climbers attempting a maneuver that was too risky for them given the circumstances.
By that point in the conversation, Brandon had arrived at the rescue cache in Lupine Meadows. He told Bob that he had to hang up so that he could brief the rescue team and get the operation moving. By the time Brandon called him back, less than 10 minutes later, Bob’s cell phone was out of batteries.
A little shy of the four years expected to master the incident commander role fully, this was just Brandon’s second year as a permanent employee in Grand Teton National Park. Born in western Washington, he had grown up climbing in the Cascades. He first came to Jenny Lake as a seasonal in 2000, then worked in Olympia and Lake Powell before returning to the Tetons as a permanent employee in 2002. Young, brash, and just a bit haughty, Brandon had a logistically oriented bent that was a perfect fit for the organizational challenge of this operation.
In response to the high-level Jenny Lake page, essentially an alert tone, that Brandon had sent out before he even reached the rescue headquarters, the rangers began streaming into the rescue cache. Several of them happened to be close by, hanging out in the adjacent park-assigned cabins that the seasonals lived in all summer.
Veteran Jim Springer, age 48, a tall, mustached, exceptionally relaxed native of Washington, was in his cabin at the time, grateful for the far-off thunder he heard. The sound signaled another afternoon rainstorm that would cool down the valley from the sweltering midday heat. Within seconds of hearing the page, Jim ran down to the rescue cache to check in, then hurried back to his cabin to pack.
Dan Burgette, a steady and grandfatherly ranger just a few days away from his 56th birthday, was nearby in the fire cache in Moose finishing up an 8:00-to-4:30 P.M. shift when the call went out. Dan, who grew up in Indiana, received both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in conservation at Purdue. Within two years of receiving his graduate degree, Dan became a Jenny Lake seasonal climbing ranger in 1977. He knew right away that he wanted a permanent ranger position, so he went to a park in Indiana for three years and was then able to transfer back in the fall of 1981 as a permanent member of the staff.
Some of the rangers, seemingly affectionately, referred to Dan as Breakaway Dan as a result of a ride he took in a rescue litter (a foldable supportive cot) at a spring snow rescue training one year. Sled riding had been a recreational activity at snow SAR training for years but was almost exclusively conducted in areas where there was a smooth, flat runout to stop the litter. At the time, Dan was acting as the patient in the sled, and when the instruction wound up, Dan and the ranger hauling him on the sled rope were in steep terrain with a fairly gentle slope below. Dan asked the ranger to release the rope so he could go sledding, and the ranger obliged. As it turned out, the slope smoothed out up to a small rise, beyond which was a sheer vertical slope. Unfortunately for Dan, he wasn’t riding in the battered old litter with the rough bottom he thought he was in but in a new litter with a smooth underside. Somewhere in the course of his rapidly accelerating pace, he realized that his momentum would take him over the hill ahead and then off to the valley. He shoved his feet over the sides to slow himself as much as possible, then, when he hit the rise, grabbed a rock sticking out of the snow. Despite bruising an arm with the rock, he was able to save himself (and the sled) by successfully executing a crash landing.
Dan’s trip to the rescue headquarters was as streamlined as it gets. As one of the rangers with a law-enforcement commission, he immediately flipped on his overhead lights to breeze through the park entrance station, heading straight for Lupine Meadows. Once he arrived, he called his wife to bring his camera and some cookies up to the rescue cache.
Even when off duty, the rangers tended to remain in fairly close proximity to the rescue headquarters. On their days off or when on a backcountry patrol, they were notorious for lying about their location in relation to the SAR headquarters when responding to a page. Unlike a dynamic that might occur in other jobs, the rangers weren’t being deceptive to get out of work but, rather, fabricating their whereabouts in order to get in on the rescue.
The moment a ranger was paged and asked where he was, he generally turned around and started jogging toward the rescue cache. Instead of revealing his actual location, the ranger began doing math in his head to figure out how quickly he could make it back to Lupine Meadows. If, for example, a ranger was hiking about an hour away from the headquarters, he would calculate the time it would take him to return at a full-on run, then radio in his position as a half-hour away and begin sprinting toward the rescue cache. There were plenty of rescues to go around in a season, but none of the rangers wanted to be left out of any one of them if he could help it. They often deluded themselves that half the reason they stayed as fit as they did was because they didn’t want to pass up anything.
In addition to the rangers’ physical conditioning, the Jenny Lake ranger training schedule is notoriously grueling. The rangers themselves control the level of safety and come up with tests for pilots. As head of the Jenny Lake rangers, Renny was in charge of training and scheduling both rangers and pilots. Two or three times a year, Renny led scenario-based training. He made it as realistic as possible, starting from the initial call, making himself the patient, requiring the rangers to perform a reconnaissance mission.
For the seasonal rangers in the Jenny Lake subdistrict, most of the training happened during three weeks and three days in May. There was emergency medical training for all rangers, including a three-day basic refresher, and advanced training for two or three wilderness medics. Day one was payroll and review systems day, half of which was spent outdoors, followed by four days of search-and-rescue training in the field. In addition, there were snow training, scenario days, and eight short-haul training protocols run by Renny throughout the summer, including a peer review of the short-haul program from representatives of visiting parks. Five of the climbing rangers also had a mandatory 40-hour law-enforcement refresher course.
Beyond the standard training, Renny also liked to deconstruct every accident, whether he was on the scene or not, in an attempt to learn how to avoid or escape from a similar incident in the future. Each summer week, he gathered his staff to review past rescues, pore over pictures, scrutinize rock angles.
The rangers debated each operation after the fact and obviously analyzed rescue plans before they acted, but in the thick of the action, once the missions unfolded, they had learned to move in sync with very little need for discussion. The only way this worked was for every ranger to complete the individual job he had been assigned while also adapting to the changing situation, seeing needs and filling them, having one another’s back in a very extreme sense.
As a consequence of the intensive training program, the rangers were able to evaluate the relative urgency of a call with ease, and it was obvious to all of them right from the start that this rescue was going to be immense. Leo and ranger Craig Holm happened to be inside the rescue cache writing reports when the call came in. Chilled by the audio, Craig referred to it as a show stopper.
Given the location of the accident, nearly at the top of the highest peak in the park, with difficult access, it was bound to be a massive undertaking even if it had involved only one injured climber. In this case, combining the elements of multiple patients and stormy weather, it was a rescue that no one wanted to miss.
Before receiving the dispatch, Brandon had been on the phone with a mother who had lost her 12-year-old son in the park. After years as a rescuer, Brandon had developed a familiarity with the flow and tempo of emergencies, and while he was treating this one with the utmost seriousness, he knew that these situations virtually always resolved themselves within a few minutes. Missing-child cases in the park were often solved as simply as a ranger, with the straightest of faces, asking the parent, “Have you checked the car?” In addition, Brandon had a strong suspicion based on the facts that this child had not strayed far from the family. He was straining to get off the phone to focus his attention on what was happening with the Friction Pitch rescue. He was just about to assign Marty Vidak, 45, a ranger whose eager-to-please attitude and boyish good looks caused him to appear about 10 years younger, to search for the boy. Fortunately, a member of the local fire crew who had been monitoring the frequency offered to handle the situation to free up all possible rangers for the accident on the Grand. (The situation with the lost boy was quickly settled—he had ducked into the woods near String Lake to pee—and mother and son were safely reunited.)
Relieved that he would be able to take part in a rare multivictim rescue after all, Marty headed straight to the rescue cache. While MCIs (mass casualty incidents) occasionally occur in Grand Teton National Park, they almost always involve a motor-vehicle accident, a boating or rafting accident, or a horse-drawn hayride gone terribly wrong. When MCIs do happen in the mountains, they are inevitably weather-related. The significance of this fact is that in the most complex, resource-draining rescues, the rangers’ response is also complicated by weather—wet rock, a continuing lightning storm, and so on.
After confirming that all available rangers were heading in, the first action Brandon took at the rescue cache was to tear outside and look up. The weather appeared to be rapidly deteriorating. The sky was pelting rain, there was a swirling mass of clouds and winds, and the Grand was nearly obscured. “We’re screwed,” he thought to himself, then muttered other, more colorful obscenities under his breath.
Brandon believed, correctly, that this rescue was hugely weather-contingent, and he knew, also correctly, that under the current weather conditions, there was no way for rangers to be short-hauled to the scene. Running a hand over his face to clear away the raindrops, he headed back into the building to discuss rescue strategies and hand out assignments.
Brandon would spend every minute of the next six hours coordinating air support, medical help, ambulances, and all other outside support necessary for the rescue to succeed. Throughout the night, his voice on the phone (held to his ear with one hand) and the radio (cradled in his other hand) would be calm, steady, and authoritative. Only those in the rescue cache with him that night would glimpse any of the tension he was feeling. His inner anxiety would be released only through his body language—in the midst of juggling those calls, he would be running his hands through his cropped blond hair, rubbing his hands over his chin, raising his eyebrows to the sky, sticking his tongue out in relief.
When the distress call first came in, the vast majority of rescue resources were at the Lupine Meadows rescue cache on the valley floor at 6,700 feet. The priority was to get the rescuers and the gear to at least the Lower Saddle, which has an elevation of 11,600 feet, if not directly to the stranded climbers at 13,000 feet. To save the climbers, the rangers needed to fly.
The conditions at that point, however, were hardly flyable. If the storm cells remained suspended over the Tetons, the rangers would not even be able to land helicopters at the Lower Saddle, much less at Friction Pitch. The Lower Saddle is a broad area formed where the Middle Teton meets the Grand Teton. At several thousand feet above timberline, the area is cold and windswept. The landscape consists of several climbers’ campsites protected by stone walls, two Exum guide huts, an outdoor toilet on the west side of the ridge, and part of Middle Teton Glacier (the running glacier melt to the left of the trail is the last reliable water source before the summit). The view to the west is into Idaho and the south fork of Cascade Canyon, a popular hiking route with a developed trail, and the southern view is dominated by the Middle Teton. To the north, the trail proceeds up in a northeastern direction to the crest of the wide ridge toward the mass of the Grand Teton.
The rangers maintained a rudimentary helipad on the Lower Saddle, which they could theoretically use as a base to fly rangers to higher elevations. Short-hauling rangers up to the scene on Friction Pitch, however, would require near-perfect flying conditions and, even so, would be incredibly dangerous given the extreme altitude. Still, weather patterns in the Tetons were infamous for changing scary fast, moving in a matter of hours, even minutes, from sunbathing conditions to a wild winter storm and back again. Brandon chose to act on the chance that the weather could clear.
In most national parks or recreational areas in the United States, there is no helicopter available to swoop in and rescue victims on a moment’s notice. The Grand Teton National Park is unusual in this respect. During the summer of 2003, the park shared an exclusive-use contract for two helicopters with the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The helicopters were based out of Jackson Hole Airport near Lupine Meadows, and each of them came with a five-person helitack crew. The contract existed as a result of the need for helicopters to spot and fight fires across the millions of acres of national forest in the area, and during most days, at least one of the helicopters was away on a fire-suppression job. The two pilots worked on a rotation to determine who was “up” for the rangers’ use on each day.
It was clear from the beginning that both helicopters were going to be required for the Friction Pitch rescue, but helicopters and pilots were much less likely than the rangers to be nearby and available. Like the weather, this was an area of the rescue over which the rangers had no control. If one or both of the helicopters were out on other far-flung missions, it could have delayed the rescue for so many hours that executing it before nightfall would have been impossible. As it turned out, on July 26, 2003, both helicopters just happened to be working close to home.
At 3:46, Laurence Perry was shuttling equipment in helicopter 2LM to the East Table fire in Hoback Junction, about 10 miles south of Jackson, when he heard that there was “some big flap up on the mountain.” He didn’t ask for the specifics of the rescue call until he arrived. The information could be wrong or confusing, and he wanted to wait and hear the details directly from one of the rangers. He responded instantaneously, firing up the helicopter and flying toward Lupine Meadows, but there was so much lightning in the air that flying regulations forced him to land en route.
Laurence waited on the ground in a large open field for, in his opinion, a fairly arbitrary 15 minutes before continuing in the storm to the rescue cache. The sky was still full of electricity when he took off—“big clouds here, lightning over there”—compelling him to rely on “the hairy-eyeball method of weather predicting.” He arrived at the rescue cache less than 45 minutes after the initial call for help.
The other helicopter, N604HP, piloted by Rick Harmon, was on a firefighting assignment for the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office in the Wind River Range east of the Tetons. That helicopter cleared its operation and responded to Lupine Meadows within two hours. There was also a third helicopter used in the rescue: Air Idaho Rescue, an Agusta A 109-K2 air ambulance based at the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, responded to wait on standby. The aircraft had been handling another emergency but arrived within 90 minutes of being called. As the trauma center was a two-hour drive or a 25-minute flight away, Brandon’s intent was to cut down on that time by having the air ambulance ready to fly pa
tients directly there if necessary.
Brandon raced through a mental checklist over and over again, anticipating every possible rescue requirement, ordering resources to meet those needs, delegating responsibilities, safely managing the helicopter base. From an outsider’s perspective, it likely resembled some sort of manic beehive with people moving about in all directions, but for those on the inside, the preparations were actually quite deliberative. Brandon’s plan was to make the Lower Saddle a second staging area for the rescue if at all possible. Ideally, he wanted to use Laurence to insert rangers from the Saddle directly onto Friction Pitch as well as to transfer the injured climbers from Friction Pitch back to the Saddle. Then he intended to use the second helicopter to shuttle the patients down from the Saddle to the main rescue base in Lupine Meadows.
In leading the rescue, Brandon had to evaluate his pile of tools methodically, in this case meaning which rangers were available and what abilities they possessed, and tailor the operation based on that set of variables. He decided that rather than trying to insert a ranger into the scene right away, the first priority was to conduct a fly-by to assess the situation on the mountain and determine what, and who, would be needed for the rescue. He assigned Leo Larson as operations chief for the on-scene matters and Dan Burgette as spotter in the helicopter on the recon flight.
The very instant Laurence landed, the rangers began hot-loading helicopter 2LM. This is an extremely rare maneuver, only used in aircrafts fitted with the specialized ability to keep the rotors running while passengers board the aircraft. Laurence lifted off with Leo and Dan onboard at 4:31, less than three minutes after his arrival in the meadow.
Meanwhile, in the event that short-hauling would be an option following the fly-by, the other rangers began changing into their helicopter clothes. Renny, who had arrived earlier, changed from his shorts and T-shirt into green Nomex pants and a couple of outer layers, including a yellow and black Flamestop fleece pullover. Cotton, worthless in the event of a fire, had long been replaced by Nomex, fire-retardant and fire-resistant clothing required on helicopters to protect the rangers in the event of a crash. The fabric was designed to protect the skin for a short period of time. There were two options for the rangers to wear. The first choice was a two-piece Nomex outfit: a jean-weight pair of olive-drab pants and a yellow button-down shirt (the wardrobe of choice for wildland firefighters). The other was a one-piece Nomex flight suit, in olive or international orange, also worn by the pilots.