Jtree "rescue"?

I think I would have gotten queazy watching the OP in this situation. He was guessing as to how to proceed and had the life of another person in his hands. Luckily it went well, but it could just as easily have not.

A broken ankle is not worth risking a fatality over, especially when it would be less than an hour before someone experienced in high angle rescue arrived.

This was an ankle injury and not a head injury, right? Probably not the best rescue attempt in history, but the guy could have easily refused the rescue.

Nice of you to help this guy. Sounds like your original plan was to give him the tools to get himself down if he was as knowledgable as you. May have re- thought that plan after he failed the harness test. I'm surprised no one mentioned water and a candy bar are usually welcomed by those stuck on a ledge waiting for professional rescue.

Some of these lawyers here have been harsh on you. Bummer..( I know what they say next "But what if the victim has an allergy to chocolate")

Dan S wrote:I'm surprised no one mentioned water and a candy bar are usually welcomed by those stuck on a ledge waiting for professional rescue. Some of these lawyers here have been harsh on you. Bummer..( I know what they say next "But what if the victim has an allergy to chocolate")

If the patient might need surgery soon, all things being equal, it's a better idea not to eat or drink anything.

Make mine dark chocolate. please.

mediocre wrote:This was an ankle injury and not a head injury, right? Probably not the best rescue attempt in history, but the guy could have easily refused the rescue.

No one saw him fall, how do you know he didn't hit his head?

Sure he's only complaining about his ankle, but he could have easily also hit his head.

Anyone who has taken any WFA/WFR class will know about a fall over a certain height (I think I remember 10 or 15 ft) as being an MOI for spine injury and that a broken ankle could be a distracting injury. The "rescuer" did nothing to assess for potential head or spine injuries.

Also as far as refusing rescues, people with head injuries are often very out of it, confused, combative, irrational etc. and do strange things. A guy uclipped himself and downsoloed several pitches on the Nose with a serious head injury after his partner left him to go get help.

did the guy get the injured party down without further injuring him? It appears so, but that doesn't mean that was the best thing to do given the circumstances. He definitely did not follow what is typically taught in Wilderness First Aid classes.

You can't just judge things like this based solely on the outcome. If you could, then someone could just camp out under a huge hanging serac in the Himalayas and say it was a good decision simply because they survived.

Lots of good advice here, but it was distracting when posters discussed the OP’s motivation. A man’s motives are best left to his analyst or confessor—just talk about his actions.

When the OP wrote. “I… told him to throw the sling I gave him around said feature put a locker on it“, a twinge of fear came across me. When I first started climbing, a prominent, young climber, the son of one of my colleagues, was climbing in Rocky Mt. NP. He set up a rappel with the rope slung around a projecting cone of rock. After his two partners reached the ground, he asked them to check if the rope would pull. It didn’t. So he moved it further up on the cone and proceeded to rappel. The rope rolled off the cone and he died. I almost quit climbing at that point.

I was involved in a rescue experience that had aspects similar to the OP’s . It was at Cochise Stronghold. My partner and I had hiked in a mile or so early in the morning when we heard cries for help. Following the sound, we came to two climbers about 40 feet up a cliff. At the base of the cliff there was a deep cleft containing their partner at its bottom. He had one rope coming out of his rappel device and another rope coiled on his back. In addition, he was dead. The climbers on the cliff had been there all night (which was warm, fortunately for them, as they were wearing shorts and t-shirts). The two climbers on the cliff had rappelled to that spot. When the third member of the party started his rappel, he suddenly started falling rapidly ending in the slot with both ropes.

After a short discussion, my partner Andy and I thought we could climb up to them. I got to within 20 feet of them and could not safely go farther. Andy and I decided at that point that they could lower us a carabineer on girth-hitched slings and we could send them up a rope. They had trouble understanding what we meant so Andy showed them how to girth hitch slings together. They did this, but the line was a foot or two short of reaching me. So Andy (who was on the ground) showed them how to attach some stoppers. The carabineer now reached me and I attached a rope to it (I was climbing with half ropes). One of the guys started pulling the rope up. When it got to about 5 feet from the top he dropped the girthed slings, which fell carrying the end of the rope to the ground along with slings and stoppers.

At this point, Andy and I had to figure out what to do. Climbing directly up to them was not feasible as we felt the protection would be inadequate. Also, I was concerned about their mental state because of the dropped slings and the odd way they spoke. About a decade earlier, I had been climbing the Bastille Crack in Eldorado, when a berserk climber who had soloed past us had to be rescued from Outer Space. The rescuers literally had to put him in a straitjacket to get him off the cliff. A bit farfetched, but the two guys reminded me of him. The other option was for us to go to the other side of the cliff and climb an easy 2-3 pitch slab route to the top and then rappel to them. We decided against this as we had never been on this cliff and getting off route can easily turn easy slab routes into hard slab routes. So we decided to seek help. I stayed talking to the climbers, while Andy went to telephone for help. A couple of hours later an SAR group and a sheriff arrived. By this time, a cold rain was falling. An involved rescue including a helicopter ensued. The climbers were plucked from their perch and lowered to us on the ground. It was after midnight when all of us got to camping area. The body was recovered the next day.

About a year later I saw a report on this incident in Accidents in North American Mountaineering. It bore little resemblance to what actually happened.

Rob.calm

That's quite a tragic story. I'm having trouble understanding how that rescue was similar to the OP though. Sounds like you did your best to reach them without putting anyone in danger, and when you couldn't move on that way, you went for professional help. Am I missing something? Explaining how to girth-hitch slings and stoppers in a non-lethal situation isn't exactly the same as blindly advising someone on slinging a feature to get lowered off of a knot around their waist.

Rusty Finkelstein wrote:That's quite a tragic story. I'm having trouble understanding how that rescue was similar to the OP though. Sounds like you did your best to reach them without putting anyone in danger, and when you couldn't move on that way, you went for professional help. Am I missing something? Explaining how to girth-hitch slings and stoppers in a non-lethal situation isn't exactly the same as blindly advising someone on slinging a feature to get lowered off of a knot around their waist.

It struck me as similar in that there were climber(s) stuck on a cliff face about 40 feet above us and that there was no way for us to safely get to them and that there were questions about their competence.

I think the differences are this. The two climbers had gear with them and were not total novices. They had already climbed a multi-pitch route and had successfully rappelled to the stance they were at. It appeared to us that the rappelling accident had occurred because the rope ends were not even when the third person rappelled or that he had only one side of the rope going through his rappel device. This type of accident has occurred to competent climbers so, at this point, there was no reason for us to question the ability of the two stranded climbers to safely rappel once they had a rope. Thus, getting a rope up to them so that they could rappel seemed like the best course of action. We started to have doubts when they didn’t automatically go into tying the slings together. Until they dropped the slings, however, we had no reason to question their mental status.

Rob.calm

Medic741 when you have a wreck in a remote area, no 911 available, you're wounded, someone stops to help, they should read this and know that you and your family will sue them for helping. Then they should wave and drive off. You are why New Yorkers are hated worldwide. Never climbing with them. Bring my out of state partner to the Gunks then rope all the routes for the day.

Medic741 wrote:Seems like there's some thinking that really should have happened before you played hero. If the ledge was big enough for him to shatter his ankle on but not fall further I would imagine it would have been big enough for him to comfortably sit on and safely wait for professional rescue. If it weren't big enough for this hucking a rope with a carabiner on it at him is not a good idea... at all. What you did here was extraordinarily dangerous The safest way to go about this is obviously to wait for rescue, but I can understand wanting to help. So... if you wanted to help here's a safe way to do it. Either walk around to gain access from above, set anchor and rap, or lead a neighboring route and gain access above him, set a redundant anchor above the injured climber and either lower down from the anchor to the injured climber or rappel from the anchor you built. It's safer to transition from belay to rappel here once you've built the anchor so you can control your own descent and communication issues with your belayer won't cause injury to yourself/the injured party. Rap/lower down to the injured climber and immediately connect yourself to the injured party if you're worried about the party falling from the position. From here, once you've accessed the climber you should build an anchor and secure the injured climber to that redundant anchor with a releasable hitch (munter mule overhand). Now you're at 'baseline' and your injured party is SAFE and you are safe as well. Once they're safe you can do an assessment/stop bleeding/calm and comfort the injured party. So let's say you HAVE to move down (it sounds like you didn't have to). Learn how to do a counterbalance rappel and tandem rappel and assess which is the appropriate way to go. Take your time through this whole process and think everything through - at any point your injured party should be in a redundant system that is releasable under load. From your post it reads that you did something that was grossly negligent and put this injured person at enormous risk because you wanted to play hero. Didn't know how to put on a harness but you let him 'build and anchor' with a sling?! Seriously?! Seems like reckless endangerment ESPECIALLY if you identify yourself as a 'rescuer' and he trusts you to know how to get him down safely, which you didn't do - at all! You've been 'studying rescue' but you broke every rule in the book. Have a guide show you how to perform a rescue like this if you really want to learn, but next time leave it to the professionals because plain and simple you got lucky. This really isn't a 'good for you' scenario - the negligence you displayed here is borderline criminal, and if he had been injured and his family pressed charges you would have had no defense.

other wrote:Medic741 when you have a wreck in a remote area, no 911 available, you're wounded, someone stops to help, they should read this and know that you and your family will sue them for helping. Then they should wave and drive off. You are why New Yorkers are hated worldwide.

hahah +1

+++1 ^^^

haha so good..