A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  The rangers were not yet able to pinpoint the exact locations of all 13 climbers. It still wasn’t completely clear from the recon flight where the three climbers who fell off the bottom of Friction Pitch had ended up. The rangers had spied three climbers above the Golden Staircase at the base of the Jern Crack, but the Idaho group was a large climbing party, the numbers seemed confusing, and it was possible that other climbers in their contingent had fallen and landed someplace else entirely. Either way, these three climbers were in dire need of rescuing.

  The Jern Crack is a slit that goes up a vertical face of rock, named after Ken Jern, an Exum guide, after he fell from it. It ranges from just wide enough for a climber to grasp with fingertips to expansive enough to jam in a foot. It is considered a relatively easy section of the route because climbers can generally find some sort of a handhold or foothold there. The Jern Crack is a nasty place to fall, as the climber either lands on pointy rocks that stop his descent, or he doesn’t and bounces down another 70 feet until reaching a shelf. Jern had slipped on verglas (a thin coating of ice that is very difficult to see) and tumbled down to the pitch below him, breaking several ribs.

  From the air, it had appeared that the three climbers near the Jern Crack—presumably the three missing climbers—were still tied together, about 100 feet below their original location. Two of them were stacked in a split in the rock face, and the third had landed on a tiny ledge. Inexplicably, in the process of hurtling off the Grand Teton to their deaths, their ropes appeared to have somehow wrapped around rock horns and bunched up in cracks, snagging them on the side of the mountain. They were quite definitively trapped where they had landed, tenuously clinging to the side of the mountain with no way to move.

  As helpful as the photos were, the next step was to get a ranger on-scene to evaluate the situation firsthand. The storm cells seemed to have shifted away from the Grand a bit, enough that Brandon determined that they should attempt a short-haul insertion. The rangers began rigging helicopter 2LM for short-haul operations, putting their rigging-for-rescue training to work, popping the doors off the Bell and hooking a 100-foot short-haul rope to its belly.

  Given the 200-foot distance separating the top of Friction Pitch and the area where the three fallen climbers had landed, Brandon decided to split the rescue into two distinct sites: an upper scene (which included the Folded Man) and a lower scene. He assigned Jim Springer to be in charge of the lower scene.

  The rangers rolled with this shift in plans, quickly sifting through their gear and dividing it into separate packs for the two scenes. The rescue cache was stocked with a bunch of prepackaged rescue kits, known as blitz kits, that enabled the rangers efficiently to grab whatever combinations of specialized bags they needed. There were several climbing-gear kits that included supplies to build anchors, plus EMS kits containing oxygen and airway-maintenance equipment. Another series of bags held a set of specific tools needed to raise and lower litters.

  Knowing from experience that the victims would be wet from the rain and already hypothermic, several of the rangers also packed warm clothes and sleeping bags to transport to them. With the uncertain weather conditions, the late hour of the day, the large number of patients, and the extreme elevation involved in the rescue, it seemed apparent that emergency medical care and rescue operations would extend into the night, with evacuations continuing the following morning. The rangers conveyed this information to Bob on the cell phone, explaining that the convergence of these factors might force the climbers to spend the night on the mountain.

  As Brandon scrawled on a scratch pad, reworking the logistics, crossing things out, he was becoming increasingly frustrated trying to keep the various bits of information straight. In sorting out where everyone was, he knew that if the climbers who fell off the mountain out of sight were not the three men stuck in the area of the Jern Crack, the mission would entail a search in addition to a rescue. Plus, the innovative decision to treat the mission as two separate rescue scenes added an extra layer of complexity. The rangers’ use of labels such as “the three patients at the lower scene” or “Victims 1 and 2” to describe various groupings of the Idaho climbers was not helping matters. In response to nearly overwhelming confusion about who was where in the multiple sites, Brandon finally expressed his mounting tension in a terse demand for the victims’ actual names.

  Names were quickly provided. The 25-year-old mother of two at the top of Friction Pitch next to her husband, the woman who was struck by a lightning bolt that entered the top of her head and exited her right thigh, was Erica Summers. Erica took the brunt of the strike for her husband, Clint, age 27, who was sitting to her right on the ledge. Voltage smashed into Clint’s left leg and knocked him unconscious, then snaked down his belay rope to strike four other members of the climbing party: Rod, Jake, Justin, and Reagan.

  The name of the Folded Man was Rodrigo Liberal. Clint had been belaying Rod up Friction Pitch when the shock knocked Clint unconscious. Clint dropped the rope, and Rod was blasted off the granite. He had been in free fall for dozens of feet before his rope snapped taut, discarding his twisted body at the end of his belay line, where he swung like a pendulum, motionless in his harness.

  Below Rod, the three climbers waiting their turn to ascend Friction Pitch were Jake, Justin, and Reagan. It would soon become clear to the rangers that they were, in fact, the three men who had fallen out of sight below Friction Pitch, cartwheeling 100 feet down the cliff until their ropes snarled in the rocks. There were later, somewhat jumbled cell-phone reports from Bob about the potential severity of their injuries—one or more of them shocked into unconsciousness, one initially blinded and made deaf by the electrical charge with his limbs temporarily paralyzed, another bleeding severely from his leg.

  As the rangers readied themselves for short-haul insertions, there was a delicate balance at play to determine the exact number of them, and which ones, who could be short-hauled given the extreme altitude of the accident. In order for the helicopter to achieve momentum and lift in the storm, there was a strict weight limit. A load manifest had to be completed at takeoff time that took into account the weight of the aircraft, fuel and oil (which could be 400 pounds by itself, although Laurence never filled it up completely), cargo and baggage, passengers and crew members and, after factoring in a variety of mission-specific calculations, computed the maximum allowable weight.

  In determining the passenger manifest, it was an obvious principle that 400 to 500 pounds of people would eat up the maximum amount of fuel. Laurence had to fill out a form specifying the weight of the passengers and the weight of the fuel at a particular altitude, and he had an abundance of charts, books, and graphs to aid him in balancing precise weight and altitude factors. After calculating the amount of weight at the specific altitude of a rescue, Laurence could ascertain the amount of time his helicopter would be cleared to fly. The calculations never considered absolute maximum performance; 200 pounds was always subtracted as a built-in fail-safe. Depending on passenger weight, a helicopter can fly for two and a half hours if filled with gas, but Laurence always flew with partial loads of gas to conserve weight (in this situation, he settled on 275 pounds of fuel). Given the weight of the passengers and the extensive amount of gear in this situation, Laurence was looking at approximately 30 to 40 minutes of flying time before he would need to refuel.

  On top of these computations, Laurence also used mathematical formulas and performance charts to establish load capacity at 13,000 feet and 83 degrees. The rule of thumb to consider in these situations is high, hot, and heavy. Temperature was not a consideration in this circumstance, but the high was just about as high as possible in the Teton range. The pressure at that extreme altitude is a factor, and the lower the temperature, the thinner the air, so the higher a pilot flies, the less he can lift. Laurence also had to take into account the amount of fuel that would be burned off during the flight, allowing the helicopter to take on more cargo weight—here, injured parties.

>   The bottom line was that Laurence would give Brandon a number that would allow him to choose exactly which rangers could be short-hauled and in what order. Even accounting for a cushion, the calculations were sensitive enough to make the individual body weight of every ranger relevant. To aid in the decision, each ranger in the rescue cache began slapping up his flight weight—body weight plus gear—onto the white board.

  FIVE

  “For a ranger to be really needed, a visitor has to have a bad day.”

  —

  Leo Larson, Jenny Lake ranger

  As soon as the short-haul rope was rigged, Leo Larson clipped himself into the 100-foot line attached to 2LM and began the 1,400-foot journey from the lee side of the Lower Saddle to the top of Friction Pitch. Clouds continued to blow in and cover the ridge, but enough of them seemed to be gusting by to create visibility at the top of the peak. Laurence Perry lifted off at 5:21, about an hour and a half after the lightning strike, and headed for the highest summit in Grand Teton National Park.

  * * *

  In northwestern Wyoming, only 10 miles south of Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park receives more than 3.5 million visitors a year. The park consists of approximately 310,000 acres, including the Teton range, about 40 miles long by seven to nine miles wide, as well as most of the northern sections of the valley known as Jackson Hole (technically, the name Jackson Hole refers to the valley, but it is often used interchangeably with Jackson to refer to the town). The Tetons, which began forming between 6 million and 9 million years ago from a fault block that rose up from the ground as a result of massive earthquakes, are the youngest mountain range in the Rocky Mountains.

  The town of Jackson at the foot of the mountains was bustling in the fur trade days of the early 1800s, then remained mostly unpopulated until the 20th century, when Indians used it as a summer camping ground. In the 1860s, an Englishman named Richard Leigh settled in the region with his Shoshone wife, Jenny, where he made his living trapping and guiding. He brought Jenny along when he led the Hayden Geological Surveys of 1871 and 1872. F. V. Hayden explored Yellowstone (established as the country’s first national park in 1872), while a smaller group under James Stevenson conducted a scientific exploration of the Teton area and took the first photographs of the mountain range. The expedition is credited with naming several of the mountains and lakes in the region, including Jenny Lake after Leigh’s wife.

  Jenny Lake, approximately 260 feet deep at its deepest point, is in the heart of Grand Teton National Park, nestled at the base of Teewinot Mountain. Mount Moran is a bit more than six miles north of the lake, and Buck Mountain is more than six miles to the south. The lake, along with the five main canyons in the park—Moran, Leigh, Cascade, Avalanche, and Death—was formed by melting glaciers about 60,000 years ago. Jenny Lake is the starting point for some of the most popular hikes in the park, including Inspiration Point and Hidden Falls, and it is ringed by an incredibly scenic trail, almost seven miles long, that winds around the entire lake. A shuttle boat travels across the lake to the Cascade Canyon trailhead.

  South of Jenny Lake, between the base of Teewinot Mountain and Cottonwood Creek, is a large open field known as Lupine Meadows, named for the tall, spiky, purple flowers that proliferate in the area every summer. The log cabins where the seasonal Jenny Lake rangers live in the summer are in a grove of trees between the creek and the meadow.

  The park is obviously named after the Grand Teton, the tallest mountain in the range and the centerpiece of the Teton skyline. Early on, the Grand and its neighboring Middle and South Tetons were referred to as “Hoary Headed Fathers” by Shoshone tribal members. By 1931, the name Grand Teton Peak was used so frequently that it was recognized by the USGS Board on Geographic Names, and another usage shift led the board to shorten the name on maps to Grand Teton in 1970.

  The origin of the current name is somewhat divisive. Some historians claim that the mountain received its designation from the Teton Sioux tribe, but the most common explanation is that the peak is named after a part of the female anatomy, a translation of “large teat” in French, coined by either French-Canadian or Iroquois adventurers. Many early explorers failed to see a resemblance, but the moniker is more descriptive from the Idaho side, where the mountains appear more gently rounded. Viewed from Wyoming, the distinctive way that the Grand juts straight up to the sky from a relatively flat valley makes it appear very much like the prototypical upturned V that schoolchildren produce when drawing a mountain.

  There is a bit of controversy surrounding the first person to summit the iconic Grand. James Stevenson and Nathaniel Langford claim to have reached the top on July 29, 1872, but were later essentially discredited when it appeared that their description and sketches matched the summit of the Enclosure, a side peak of the Grand Teton. It is generally held that the first ascent was in 1898 by William Owen, Franklin Spalding, Frank Petersen, and John Shive. In the next 26 years, the Grand was summited on only eight more occasions, including four times by Paul Petzoldt in 1924.

  Well into the 1940s, only 325 people had reached the top of the Grand. The mountains in the Teton range have since become some of the most visited in the world. The Grand alone receives approximately 4,000 summit attempts every year, with about 50 percent of the climbers making it to the top.

  Approximately half of the climbers attempting to summit the Grand use a guide. The top guiding companies in Jackson use a ratio of three clients to every guide. Two to three guides will escort a group of up to seven people; climbing parties larger than that are generally considered unwieldy. The climbing guides and their clients all camp close together in huts the night before their summit bid. The guides wake their charges up early, meaning the middle of the night, and leave the Lower Saddle by 4:00 in the morning. Under way long before first light, the guides assure that a high percentage of clients summit by 9:00 or 9:30 A.M.

  About half of the people climbing the Grand—unfortunately, not necessarily the same group as the guided half—are beginning climbers. Longtime climbers have a term for inexperienced climbers whose primary motivation in climbing the Grand is to be able to say that they have climbed the Grand: trophy hunters going on safari.

  Despite their profound familiarity with all of the Teton nooks and crannies, until relatively recently, it may have taken the rangers days to rescue even one person (trophy hunter or otherwise) injured on the Grand or elsewhere in the mountain range. Just a little more than two decades before the Friction Pitch accident, when Leo Larson broke his femur in the Black Ice Couloir, it took 36 hours after he radioed for help for him to reach the hospital.

  In the summer of 1979, during his second year as a Jenny Lake ranger, Leo and two other climbing rangers were on an extended mountain patrol on the backside of the Grand. The Black Ice Couloir is a remote, spooky place that melts out into a pile of rubble. The rangers began the preparations for their climb at 3:00 A.M., but they hadn’t gotten far when they reached a base of ice at around 7:00 A.M. After a short discussion about whether they needed to rope up, they opted for the cautious approach.

  Leo, age 23 at the time, and likely also the other rangers, wouldn’t have lived through the climb if they had made the other choice. At that early stage of his climbing career, Leo believed that if he ever got into trouble in the mountains, he would be able to wiggle out of it on his own. By turning that assumption inside out, the events of that morning forever changed him, humbled him.

  Leo heard the rocks plummeting down the cliff before he felt them pound his body. The rangers were just beginning their ascent of the couloir (a steep, narrow mountain gully usually filled with snow and ice) when a truckload of boulders poured down from above. At that point, Leo’s left foot, along with a crampon (a metal framework with spikes attached to the bottoms of boots to increase safety on snow and ice), happened to be awkwardly pointed in the wrong direction as he climbed. He was caught on a 15-foot-wide gully of ice with no room to wander. He tried his best to bury hims
elf into the ice as debris crashed around him. In the end, the rocks smashed Leo’s femur, as well as the patella of one of the other rangers, leaving them stranded in one of the most isolated sections of the Teton range.

  Tom Kimbrough, another longtime Jenny Lake climbing ranger, was running the Grand that day, valley floor to valley floor, and he knew that Leo and the other rangers were climbing the couloir. While Leo was hanging from his rope, his leg shattered, he heard Tom, out of sight and far away on the other side of the ridge, chanting, “Leo, Leo.” Having no idea that Leo and the other rangers were hurt, Tom just meant to call out a greeting. In his pain and delirium, Leo thought the voice was the Lord calling his name and sought confirmation by asking one of his climbing partners if he had heard it.

  The rangers were unable to communicate with Tom, but Leo had a radio with him since he was on duty. His nearly instantaneous ability to communicate his location definitively ended up saving his life. In response to his call for help, fellow rangers Renny, George Montopoli, and six others were flown to the Saddle. They traversed around the mountain on foot to reach Leo. He was lying on a ledge, still roped up, when they arrived.

  This was before the short-haul era, but the rangers were able to locate a military CH-47 Chinook helicopter with a winch system to pluck their colleague off the mountain. The rangers managed to lower Leo several hundred feet down Valhalla Canyon to a ledge at the base of the Enclosure buttress before nightfall, but to their disbelief, the military pilot was unable—or, more precisely, unwilling—to extract him. The rangers knew that there was enough clearance for a landing, but it was getting dusky enough that someone was lighting off flares, and the pilot had never seen a high alpine cirque like that before. As soon as he came up Cascade Canyon into Valhalla and saw their location, he did an abrupt 180-degree turn in the air. Intimidated by the enormous rock walls surrounding him, he refused even to attempt a landing.