Rescue in Eldo last night

Heard about this on the evening news: a couple of climbers had to call SAR to get off Swanson last night (after starting late and getting lost on the descent apparently):
9news.com/story/news/local/…

The question that crosses my mind when I hear about something like this and inevitably wonder how I would handle a similar situation is: when to call for help vs. getting through the night and finishing the descent in the morning. I suppose that depends, obviously, on the weather and also if I brought any extra clothes. I usually bring a Rab Xenon jacket on multi-pitch climbs, which is a light, compact, synthetic jacket that I hope could get me through a 40-degree night like last night.

Props to the SAR team for helping fellow climbers in the middle of the night!

Calling SAR to get you off a climb that you started too late seems pretty humiliating to me. I think I'd seriously contemplate leaving gear behind as rap anchors before calling SAR to get me and my gear down. I suppose if it was truly dark with no flashlight of any kind, calling for help would be the way to go. But as the article stated (and I'm paraphrasing) have some sort of a shadow of a plan!!

I take my cell phone when climbing or hiking, but as for it being "essential", that's for the sheople. It's easy to get over your head when you can just call for help I suppose. Now is that encouraging outdoors/wilderness activities in people who otherwise wouldn't be brave enough to step so far off the beaten path? I'd say yes. But then I've seen people 5 miles back on hiking trails in shorts and T-shirts carrying empty water bottles and nothing else. And there's no point having a phone if your plan doesn't give you coverage.

J Marsella wrote:"It's one of many tools RMRG said are essential for being outdoors."

That must be the case as the last time I saw a rescue, the thirty or so SAR folk sitting about the base of the climb who weren't rescuing were all on theirs.

Swanson's can be a b*tch to get off if you aren't familiar with the descent. Finding the raps, not getting the rope stuck or a long low class scramble off the slabs.

I don't know if I call for help (stubborn ie. stupid) but I could see why they might want to. That being said I make sure I have backup gear etc. in the bag. I usually try to prepare for a night out at anytime, albeit a very uncomfortable one.

Pathetic. Upstanding individuals would not have put rescuers at risk since their lives were not at risk. They should have spooned and shivered till morning since they clearly were at fault and not in danger

If they really did start their climb at dusk they had better be cutting RMR a big fat check.

If your safety is really in question, do call for help. It's easier for everyone when you are still healthy, uninjured, and able to move about.

If you can make it through the night and the peak of your suffering is going to be no hot meal- I too would wait.

If it's freezing and you are already starting to get hypothermia, or if it's dark and you are liable to fall off some cliff or break your ankle, don't play it macho.

A few years ago right after the Butt Face (the easiest route up the squamish chief) got put up there was this party of two that were climbing behind some friends of ours

Basically these guys didnt know how to do multi quickly and efficiently, they were learning how to so it on a 14 pitch climb, a common occurence in squamish ... I believe they took well over 12 hours for a climb that competent parties do in 6 or so

By the time they got to the top it was dark and they couldnt find their way down ... I dont know if they just disnt have headlamps or if they were just lost, but the trail is exceptionally well marked with staircases, chains, etc ...

So so they called SAR around midnight or so ... It was a warm summer night

Well those SAR folks couldnt get anyone up to them till dawn anyways ... So they had to spend the night anyways

Now if you NEED help call SAR ... But realize that You need to be able to spend the night regardless ... Short of a very dire situation they may wait till daylight, for safety and because it may take time to mobolize

But alot of this could be avoided by having the proper gear and knowledge in the first place

If the nights are cold, bring a puffy or a blizzard bag .. Have a good headlamp ... And know the beta of the route yr doing, print it out .. If theres wood bring a firestarted ... An UL rain jacket doubles as a windbreaker

It really doesnt weight that much

And practice those basic skills over and over again

Go out an do some night climbing at the crag, make sure you can re-ascend the rope if you miss a rap, know the munter and biner brakes, go do some night hiking to get used to trails at night, bivy on yr front porch to know what it will feel like, etc ...

Sadly i keep on seeing folks who place more emphasis on having nice shinny gear or being tough guys on plastic than being proficient at such skills

Again if you NEED help call for it ... But its a good idea to have the gear and skills to prevent that from happening in the first place

;)

Hmmm...
After a few seconds of reading my reaction was relief that nobody was injured.
Slow day in the news, I guess.

Considering they might not have had headlamps, they could have used their cell phones flashlight apps to see if they set up their rappels correctly. So yes, a cell phone is still an essential tool to have on a climb. You just need something to affix it to your helmet for this headlamp capacity, like duct tape.

Patrick Shyvers wrote:If your safety is really in question, do call for help. It's easier for everyone when you are still healthy, uninjured, and able to move about. If you can make it through the night and the peak of your suffering is going to be no hot meal- I too would wait. If it's freezing and you are already starting to get hypothermia, or if it's dark and you are liable to fall off some cliff or break your ankle, don't play it macho.

I agree with this. However it behooves them not to be stupid to begin with. Shivering at the top should have been expected (and as punishment) for leaving at dusk, and not being prepared. If they were healthy they should have waited it out, or gone down the east slabs. Preparation is key.

And honestly I don't EVER go on a hike, climb, bike ride etc. WITHOUT A HEADLAMP (for emphasis). You get caught out 1-2x on a "3 hour tour" you learn that you never know what's gonna happen. Flat tire 20 miles out? Broken ankle? etc etc.

Rescuee here. The news brief obviously doesn't capture the full story. We made a lot of mistakes throughout the day that lead to our situation. I don't mean to defend ourselves. We deserve all the insults and ridicule, so have at it. Just want to give my account of the day. Maybe someone else can learn from it.

Left my car at the Eldo parking lot before 10 am. I stupidly left my headlamp since it was so early in the day, but my partner did bring his. This was the first mistake. We got to the base of West Chimney around 10-10:30 am. There were parties ahead of us so we had to wait. Got on the route by 12:30. Took a break to let a free soloist pass through. Took our time to eat lunch on the Red Ledge because it was still early in the day.

We're both newer trad leaders so the pitches didn't fly by. I lead P1 of Swanson's and tried to extend the pitch to the ledge 20 feet above the tree as mentioned in MP or the guidebook, but I got stuck at the wide crack just below it for a while because I couldn't figure out a sequence I was confident in. Downclimbed back to the tree and built an anchor. This was a big time suck.

By the time my partner was starting pitch 2 of Swanson's it was about 4. At this point we should've realized we were taking too long and bailed, but the thought didn't occur to us. This was one of the biggest mistakes of the day. Instead we tried to make up time on the latter half of the route. We've both climbed other 5.5s in Eldo, and we both agreed that Swanson's felt much harder (particularly the final pitch) so everything went slower than we expected. We did make it to the top without any significant issues, but by then it was after 7. The sun was beginning to breach the mountains.

We had planned to descend down the chockstone/vertigo rappels, but since it was getting dark we were skeptical about finding it easily. Our backup was the Dirty Deeds rappels to Red Ledge, then rapping down West Chimney. The MP comments had psyched us out about this a little bit and to make matters worse we'd heard other parties get ropes stuck on the Dirty Deeds raps earlier in the day. We didn't want to deal with that in the dark, so we thought the longer-but-safer option would be to head for the East Slabs and belay each other down.

We proceeded to rap off some slings/rings just below the summit of Lumpe Tower into the notch between the two towers. We continued down a gully off the back following the path of least resistance and belaying anything that looked remotely questionable. My partner had done the East Slabs before and we thought we were traveling alongside them. We figured we could follow the gully for a bit then hop on the slabs when we had to. Instead, and this was a clear mistake, we kept following the gully. By now it was dark, but the moon was pretty bright, and we did have one headlamp and two very bright iphone lights, so light wasn't much of an issue.

We kept making downward progress, and even encountered three different cairns, so we thought we were on a proper descent. That is until the cairns stopped appearing and we got to a steep section we weren't sure we could navigate easily. We were trying to be extremely cautious at this point because it was dark and even by headlamp light we could only see so much. Of course we could've set up rappels from any point, but we didn't want to get stuck dangling in the air if a single 60m rope wasn't long enough for any given cliff. We hiked back up to the chockstones and explored other directions. It looked like cliffs on both sides, but one of them had a rappel station with a bunch of webbing around a constriction. There was a rap ring and a locker, so it looked promising. I was worried about starting a mystery rappel without knowing the length, but it looked like it did reach the ground so we gave it a shot. If anyone has an idea what the usual use for this rap spot is, I'd love to know.

That rap put us into another gully. We continued down until the terrain became questionable again, then went to our left around a corner to see if we could make further progress. We continued heading down again. Up to this point we still thought we were fine, because we were traveling down hill. Slow, but steady. Soon we hit a nearly impenetrable wall of branches with questionable terrain on the other side, For all we could tell, it may have dropped off 10 feet away from where we were standing. Not worth the risk. We headed back up. There was another possible path if we headed to the top of the gully and did some scrambling. I'd been checking where we were with a gps/topo app on my phone. I could see where the Wind Tower trail was and it looked like it was in that direction, but at this point we had to admit that we didn't know where we were and we didn't know where we needed to go. I worried that we would make more trouble for ourselves if we continued to push off in any direction that looked possible and I made the decision to call for rescue.

Calling for rescue was not an easy decision. We still thought we might only be 10 feet away from a real trail that we just couldn't see, or that we might be able to find another rap station if we looked harder. It was very embarrassing to be in this situation after beginning what we thought would be an easy day. It wasn't cold. We had jackets. We were on comfortable ground. We had water. We weren't in immediate danger. On the other hand, my phone only had 18% battery life left, and my partner's phone only had 30%. We could've waited out the night, but there was no guarantee we'd we'd find our way out in daylight, and by then our phones could be dead (yes, we could've turned them off, but iPhones are finicky and sometimes magically lose charge while turned off in my experience). One thing that did work in our favor was that we had walkie talkies, and once SAR were on the scene we were able to communicate with them without worrying about battery life.

When we began to descend with SAR, we found that we were so much more lost than we'd thought. We were in the middle of nowhere. SAR called it a no-man's land section of the park. Calling for rescue was the correct decision because I do not know that we would've been able to navigate out on our own in daylight, and returning back up probably was not an option after our rappel. The GPS coordinates we gave to SAR put us roughly here:: google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B055'56.0%22N+105%C2%B017'06.0%22W/@39.9329087,-105.2851197,486m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0

The SAR route down had us bushwhack through the massive branch wall, hike down a bit, lower down a short tricky slab, do a full 60m single strand rappel, then more hiking,then a short rap, then we were on the Wind Tower trail.

SAR's work was extremely impressive. They were in the park almost immediately after getting the call and found us quickly. They got us out like a well-oiled machine. And they were even friendly, even though we'd made them come out in the middle of the night. I am forever grateful for their help on Sunday, and I will be making a hefty donation to them soon. I made a point to thank them and apologize about a thousand times as we made our way out. They insisted it was no big deal and they'd take a night like ours over a body recovery any day,

The whole experience was humbling and embarrassing. We had plenty of time to analyze our mistakes while we were waiting for SAR to arrive, and I know that I will plan better and make wiser decisions in the future because of it. I have learned to properly respect the mountains. It's unfortunate that we had to bring out SAR for that to happen and I'm very ashamed of the whole situation.

Sounds like a humble assessment of your experience. Glad you made it down OK and don't worry about the insults. You sound like the type of person that will learn from this and do better next time.

after reading your account, this isnt really a 'rescue'. You were lost, plain and simple. People also get lost in broad daylight. Lost, in hazardous, terrain, at night. Call for help. Glad everyone is ok

Sounds like you learned a lot. Hopefully others can learn from reading your account as well.

Looks like you were on the east slabs descent (if you're gps coordinate is correct). The normal way to get down would be to down-solo several hundred feet of 4th class slabs, which would be quite harrowing if you didn't know where you were going and it was dark out.

Thanks for sharing your experience, I appreciated it :) and glad you guys got home safe.

Don't mean to bash you here. I would have sat it out till daybreak. You missed out on a proper knighting here. Scary, but a genuine opportunity.

Two of my friends got in a similar spot on our first day in Red Rocks, I was down with food poisoning. They got caught in the dark, one light, and just sat it out on a small ledge. I believe that experience instilled more confidence and a sense of independence in all of us. I didn't live it directly, but I was waiting down on the deck all night suppressing my urge to panic. Later on that trip, up much longer routes, we all came better prepared, and comfortable with the idea of an improvised bivy, that stigma was broken.

My polite suggestion here, would have been to call a capable friend before you get SAR involved. Give this friend details about your predicament. Explain that you will shut off the phones and bivy till daybreak. Next morning either finish the descent or fire up the phones and call for help. Set a time for your friend to call in the cavalry if you haven't checked in.

For me, SAR only get called if someone's bleeding, broken, or sick to the point of incapacitation. Not that everyone should push it that far, but a dead cell phone battery is seriously weak. Good trip report. I think your honesty here will serve to help other avoid your mistakes.

Craig Childre wrote:Don't mean to bash you here. I would have sat it out till daybreak. You missed out on a proper knighting here. Scary, but a genuine opportunity. Two of my friends got in a similar spot on our first day in Red Rocks, I was down with food poisoning. They got caught in the dark, one light, and just sat it out on a small ledge. I believe that experience instilled more confidence and a sense of independence in all of us. I didn't live it directly, but I was waiting down on the deck all night suppressing my urge to panic. Later on that trip, up much longer routes, we all came better prepared, and comfortable with the idea of an improvised bivy, that stigma was broken. My polite suggestion here, would have been to call a capable friend before you get SAR involved. Give this friend details about your predicament. Explain that you will shut off the phones and bivy till daybreak. Next morning either finish the descent or fire up the phones and call for help. Set a time for your friend to call in the cavalry if you haven't checked in. For me, SAR only get called if someone's bleeding, broken, or sick to the point of incapacitation. Not that everyone should push it that far, but a dead cell phone battery is seriously weak. Good trip report. I think your honesty here will serve to help other avoid your mistakes.

Great comment.

Greg D wrote:Pathetic. Upstanding individuals would not have put rescuers at risk since their lives were not at risk. They should have spooned and shivered till morning since they clearly were at fault and not in danger

This sounds right to me. After reading the first hand report, I don't know what to think. Start at 10 am, wait 2 hours for other parties, wait for soloist, stop for lunch. Is this a troll? Is anyone really this ridiculous?

I see all the Monday morning quarterbacks are coming out.