Competitor Blog - Team Tango, February 27, 2006
Posted on 02/27/06 5:14 AM| by Will
February 27, 2006
By Anna DeBattiste
Have you ever seen the Darwin Awards? You know, those tongue-in-cheek internet write-ups about the stupidest adventure feats to naturally select a human being for extinction in any given year? Well, welcome to my world. I get to see more than just internet write-ups, and on a fairly regular basis, too.
When I first volunteered for my local search and rescue team, my main motivation was all the free training I would get for my adventure racing pursuits. Over the past few years, I’ve been trained and certified in Rigging for Rescue, Outdoor Emergency Care (OEC), and avalanche safety. I’ve had weekly training and refresher sessions on wilderness survival, compass and GPS navigation, rope skills, snowmobile and ATV operation, and tracking & search. Sometimes I even get a cardio workout while on a SAR mission.
That’s still a motivation for me. But it’s been slowly supplanted by another one: the entertainment value of witnessing the staggering hubris and utter stupidity of humankind.
Take the snowboarders in Summit County this year, for example. Now, I have nothing against snowboarders, personally. I even dated one last season. But the fact is, it hasn’t been the skiers calling us out this year. It’s just been the snowboarders. They keep ducking ropes in the ski areas, which is illegal to start with, and getting hopelessly lost and/or injured as a result. Even after one of them was missing for three days and we found him a stone’s throw from the ski area boundary with an unexplained gun and badly frostbitten toes, the excessive media coverage the incident got did not seem to deter other snowboarders. A few weeks later, another one did it and was lost overnight. Again it made the papers, and again the warning was ignored.
Last Saturday at about 4:30 in the afternoon I was getting ready to go out to dinner at a high-end restaurant in Breckenridge with my friends when the pager went off. If the dispatcher had said, “Report to the staging area to evacuate a snowboarder who ducked a rope at Breckenridge ski area,” I would undoubtedly have blown off the mission and headed to dinner. That wasn’t the message I got, however. The pager said, “Report to the Nordic Center for the evacuation of an injured party.” Poor innocent Nordic skier, I thought. Must have been a bad fall.
When I arrived at the Nordic Center parking lot, Dan, our mission coordinator, gave me a quick briefing. “Pack lightly,” he said. “You’ll need to snowshoe a little ways off the cross-country ski trail to get to him, but he can’t be in there too far. The Nordic Center staff heard him screaming from here.”
“Anybody else in yet?” I asked.
“Joe Ben and Warren are already on site doing medical. I’m sending you in with the vacuum splint, they need it right away. Glen can run you part of the way on a snowmobile.”
I hopped on the back of Glen’s sled and we sped off on a wide, groomed trail following a guide from the Nordic Center staff. Ten minutes later, Glen stopped beside a set of snowshoe tracks plunging steeply off the side of the trail into a ravine.
“Take a hypo bag as well as the vacuum splint,” he told me. “They’re in a hurry, so get moving.” I’m known on my team as one of the people who responds well when ordered to get moving.
I ran down the hill, tripping over my snowshoes and toppling into the deep snow several times. When I reached the scene, Joe Ben and Warren were standing in a small clearing of packed-down snow, and at their feet, a snowboarder sat leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette. He had long dark hair and several silver studs through his eyebrows.
“I’m sure you’ve already been told, but that won’t help,” I said, referring to the cigarette. The snowboarder nodded, clearly uninterested in my opinion.
“What’s the situation?” I asked Joe Ben, our Group Leader and an EMT.
“Somehow, he got here from Peak 8 in Breck,” Joe Ben said, shaking his head. “He crossed the parking lot at the Nordic Center and kept going. Then he hit a tree.”
“I realized I had gone the wrong way, and I was trying to get back up from here,” the snowboarder defended himself. “I kept sliding back down every time I tried.”
“Anyway, he’s got rigidity in his lower left quadrant and a possible coccyx fracture, and we need to get him out of here and into an ambulance as soon as possible.”
“I told you, I’m not going to the hospital!” the snowboarder shouted. “I’ll walk out of here if I have to!”
I’d seen it many times before. He didn’t have medical insurance.
“We can’t force you to go to the hospital,” Joe Ben said. “But it would be a very bad idea not to.”
Warren knelt beside the patient and tried the gentler approach. “I don’t mean to scare you, but understand what that rigidity in your abdomen means. Your body is trying to protect something that’s damaged inside of you. It could be internal bleeding, it could be a ruptured organ. We just don’t know for sure, and frankly, you could die.”
“Risking your life isn’t worth avoiding a few medical bills,” I added, trying to sound concerned. In reality, I didn’t give a rat’s you-know-what whether the patient refused ambulance transport or not. I missed my damn dinner for another rope-ducking snowboarder. As if he sensed my indifference, the renegade rope-ducker didn’t answer. He glared up at us and continued smoking.
Joe Ben sent me back up the hill to help Glen with the rigging. While the distance from the accident to the Nordic trail couldn’t have been more than half a mile, it was steep, and we needed an up-haul system to get our patient’s litter to a waiting snowmobile toboggan. We tried hauling him on a straight rope-and-pulley system using sheer manpower, but it was too difficult, so we built a five-to-one mechanical advantage system. That worked, but took a long time. We still had only six or seven search and rescue members on scene, so we enlisted everyone else we could find: three Nordic Center employees and the two helpful women on snowshoes who had originally discovered and reported the injured snowboarder. Chatting with them, I found out they were adventure racers from Ohio. Whenever you need help, seek out an adventure racer and you shall get help! We worked past sunset and into darkness. Finally, the litter reached the top of the ravine.
I strolled over from the up-haul system station to get a look at our patient. He wasn’t shouting defiantly anymore. Wrapped in the hypo bag and vacuum splint, only his ashen face was visible. His eyes were closed. I glanced at Joe Ben.
“He’s willing to go to the hospital now,” Joe Ben said.
It was 8:00 pm when the patient was finally loaded in the ambulance and we were free to go home. No chance of making my dinner anymore. Driving home, I thought about the snowboarder and how he would stack up against my other personally-selected candidates for the Darwin award over the past three years. Certainly he wasn’t at the top of the list. There were the two young guys who got high and climbed up the Sky Chutes near Copper Mountain one early spring evening, finally getting themselves cliffed-out and spending two nights on a ledge in freezing temperatures. It took nine hours and two six-hundred-foot ropes for us to reach them, and when we did, they demanded to know what took us so long. One of them was wearing a cape, as if he had climbed up there to fly off the cliff, Batman-style.
Then there was the drunk guy on Mount Royal, who called to say that he had hurt his knee and had ants crawling all over him. One already-broken arm was in a cast, and he had drugs in his system as well as an unbelievable amount of alcohol. It took us a while to find him because as we came up the trail, he spotted Joel, our Sheriff’s Office deputy, and crawled off the trail to hide. Later we found out he had outstanding warrants for his arrest.
Then there have been all the bodies we’ve dug out of avalanches, some of them snowmobilers with a penchant for “high-marking”, a stupid sport that involves driving your machine as high up a wall of snow as you can get before it runs out of power and forces you back down.
The list goes on. When I tell so-called “normal” people about my passion for adventure racing, they like to comment that they think I’m crazy. I tell them, trust me, you ain’t seen nothing.
