Friday afternoon finally made it and we were able to get out of the water, dried off, clothes changed and head home. Several of the participants stopped at our house for some of Stacey’s famous white chicken chili (the same stuff that a helicopter landed at our house for the crew to eat once). After everyone had bid farewell and headed back to their homes, we settled in for the evening. I was truly exhausted and ready to just hang out, go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep.
Well, “to bed early” is a relative term I guess and we finally made it between 10:30 and 11:00 PM. Not too bad, but I was SO ready to sleep for hours and hours. My body really needed it. So, finally asleep by 11:00, and I mean sleeping good!
At 11:26 PM, my first responder pager goes off. The pager is one of those things that makes you suddenly sit upright in bed and you are instantly wide-awake. It was a call that wasn’t really an emergency, although someone did need help. I almost didn’t go, as there was already also an ambulance enroute an they would be able to easily handle the simple call without my help. The only problem was that the house was in a pretty remote area just outside of the National Park and was very hard to find. I had been there on several occasions and the ambulance crews usually had a hard time finding it. So, I went mainly to help them get there. Even with my knowledge of where it is, it actually takes me just over a half hour to get there due to the location and the roads.
We made it there with no problems, completed the assist and was just finishing up with I heard traffic on the radio. We were so far back in the woods and kind of “in a hole” with hills, surrounding us, that my pager wouldn’t even receive a signal, but I could pick up the broken radio traffic. They were calling for our First Responders to go to one of the Park Service trailheads to assist with a Search and Rescue. The trailhead was well out of our district, so I knew it might be pretty serious and involved. With my association with the volunteer Search and Rescue for the park, they had called our department early to get me on the way.
I arrived at the Compton Trailhead for the trail to Hemmed-in-Hollow around 12:30 AM. Folks were beginning to gather and devise plans to get to the victim. At that point, we knew we had a young man (early 20’s) that had fallen about 70 feet (that 7 stories!) and was severely injured. One team of 6 people had already started down the trail to try and locate the victim to start giving aid. Among them were Park Rangers, Paramedics with Air-Evac and some Compton First Responders.
If you are not familiar with Hemmed-in-Hollow, it is one of the highlights of the area. There is a 211 foot tall waterfall there that is the tallest falls between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains. It is truly a spectacular area.
The flipside of the coin is that the trail into it is one of the most difficult in the area. It is steep and rugged and just a long way in. It’s easy to get hurt there and very hard to get a hurt person out.
OK, back to the story. We began to gather around the Incident Command Post to get our plan together. We were speaking with the person that had run out for help and talking via radio to the team going in. We were consulting maps and waiting for more rescuers to arrive.
More and more folks arrived, gathered gear, food and water, helmets, lights, ropes, packs and more and soon headed in. It was a long hike in, and we were well down the trail before the first group actually made contact with the victim. They began the task of assessing his injuries, starting IV’s, packaging him on a backboard and putting him in a contraption called a “Stokes litter” or “Stokes basket” to begin transport.
If you aren’t familiar, a Stokes is a large metal basket about 6 ½ feet long and two feet wide that you can load a patient in, secure him using straps and other devices and get him out of the situation he is in. You see them in use on TV when they are rescuing someone off a mountain, or out of the woods and they are similar to what you see the Coast Guard lifting folks into helicopters in. They are a little heavy and a lot unwieldy by themselves. Put a 200-pound patient in them and it gets worse. Below is an image of a Stokes Basket.
The Stokes can be mounted on a wheel to aid in getting it out of the woods. That really helps, but it is still a difficult and slow task for the rescuers and an uncomfortable ride for the patient if he is conscious (ours was).
Our group met up with the other folks the victim had been camping with and staged there until we heard from the first group. They began the arduous task of bringing him out and a few of us started toward them to assist. We met them along the trail and relieved some of the rescuers and began a larger team effort.
We learned that the accident that had injured the guy had occurred around 10:00 PM and it was well after 1:30 AM, before the first rescuers had gotten to him. And now he had several more hours to go before he would make it “out of the woods” both a literally and figuratively.
The next few hours were tough on us and had to have been hell for him, but it was a stellar example of teamwork among 21 folks. We needed all 21 most of the time and more than that part of the time. There were a few folks there who had been on many rescues like this and some even more technical. But everyone would later agree that this was one of the toughest we had been on.
Our patient was obviously in a great deal of pain, but seemed to handle it pretty well. We continued to carry/roll/belay him out in the stokes, trying to make it to one of two Landing Zones (LZ) where an Air-Evac chopper could get him out of there. We had decided to go downhill instead of trying to get him back up to the trailhead up top. While this sounds like common sense, it’s not always the best way to go.
We were working on the plan that when we got to the first possible LZ, we would assess it to see if it was safe enough and big enough to land the chopper. We knew we wanted to wait until daylight to try and do that for safety reasons and figured we would be that long getting to a practical LZ anyway.
Sure enough it was after daylight when we reached the first possible LZ (The Granny Henderson cabin). A quick look around told us that due to some ice damage and brush; this was not a viable option. So, we rested a bit and headed off to the next LZ, which a couple of the Park Rangers had described as looking like a department store parking lot.
We wound down an old road across a creek for the second or third time and soon stepped out onto a slab of relatively flat rock that did, indeed, resemble a parking lot. There was a small creek running along one side, but most of it was pretty much dry. The large slab, known as Rocky Bottom, had to have been 150 yards long and 75 yards wide. It was one of the best “natural” wilderness LZ’s I have ever seen.
The Air-Evac pilot landed safely and his two Paramedics left us and made their way to the chopper to get it ready. They soon came back and briefed us on how the pilot wanted us to approach the chopper and other needed information before we on-loaded the patient. Then a few of us took him out of the Stokes basket (he was still secured to a backboard) and carried him to the waiting chopper. He was loaded, we all got clear of the chopper and in a few minutes, they were on their way. It was around 7:30 AM, or about 9 ½ hours after he had been severely injured. Undoubtedly, this was the worst night of his life.
The rest of us began the long hike out and arrived back at the trailhead around 11:00 AM, nearly 12 hours after we had arrived. I later learned that, according to one of the Park Ranger’s GPS units, we had traveled about 9 miles. A good part of that in very rugged terrain and carrying well over 200 pounds of patient and liter, not to mention our packs. We had been up hills and down, waded knee deep cold water, and much more. All this after several of us had spent a good part of the day in the cold water of the Buffalo River learning swiftwater rescue techniques, which is pretty physically demanding.
By the time I got home, I was exhausted. My WONDERFUL wife, Stacey, had bacon and eggs just about ready when I got home and changed clothes. I literally fell asleep while sitting in a dining chair and eating bacon! What a couple of days it had been! But, we’re all ready to do it again if the need arises. BUT, if you’re out and about in the woods or on the water, BE CAREFUL!
The following images are courtesy of April Wood, thanks April! That is me in the red jacket and yellow helmet at the end of the backboard….
Copyright April Wood