One thing that you absolutely must do without delay is to visit the Desert Mountaineers website and check out the companion story to this one. It’s a two piece article entitled Mt Rogers, so be sure to read both of them in order. I think that you might find it an interesting perspective and overlap of the same event from two different angles.
It was late afternoon when Colin and I made our way back to the Illecillewaet campground after getting down from the NW arête of Mt Sir Donald. All we had to do now was to wait for our buddies to pick us up. The five of them had dropped us off the day before and were going off to climb Mt Rogers on the other side of the valley. We had agreed to meet them here after we had concluded our climbing, and since they had the vehicles all we could do was sit tight.
The hours passed and eventually we began to wonder out loud about that. We were pretty seasoned climbers by this time in our careers so we knew that all sorts of things eat up time on a climb and it was far too early to be actually concerned. They could quite well be in the lodge bar knocking back cocktails for all we knew. But at the same time we were also seasoned enough to know that there are equal if not more things less benign that could befall people in the mountains.
More time passed. Eventually, and I’m thinking this is getting to be around 1800 or so, (but this differs a bit with the other story so who knows) a pickup truck pulled into the campground and stops by us. Out of the truck got a young park ranger who started talking to us. One thing that you need to appreciate is that Canada is a bilingual country and especially so in the government. A common occurrence is to have francophone employees stationed across the country for various reasons. As it so happened this guy was just such a person. Colin’s and my conversational French was weak to say the least. The Rangers English was not too much better. He was able to get across that he was looking for two guys with our names. Once we had established that, he told us that we needed to accompany him back to the ranger station. But that was about all we could get out of him.
It’s only five kilometres or so to the station so we made it there in pretty quick time, but as you can probably imagine we were as anxious as all get-out to find out what the hell was going on. We were ushered inside and up to the office where we were greeted by Phil, who was one of our friends. He looked pretty ashen and haggard. “Sonja’s fallen in a crevasse” What? Did we hear that right? Eventually between Phil’s accounting and what the rangers could tell us we start piecing stuff together. You will need to read this part of the story at Desert Mountaineer to hear about what happened that day on the other side of the valley.
All we knew was that she was hanging in a crevasse pretty high up on the glacier and that she was alive when Phil had left the scene many hours ago; also that the others were unharmed at that time. As well, we were informed that a helicopter rescue was in progress and that the aircraft had flown from in all the way from Revelstoke and was up on the mountain as we spoke. We went downstairs and outside to wait in the gathering darkness. After some time we could see and hear the chopper coming down. We were unsure of what the outcome was going to be. Our relief was palpable as the machine landed and we saw Sonja get out on her own steam. She was okay. Her one hand was pretty badly swollen and we weren’t sure if it might be broken or not.
The chopper guys were not done however. There were more still up there. Uninjured mind you but we gathered that maybe they were a bit freaked out. It had been decided that in everyone’s best interest that the chopper crew should go back up there and pick them up as well. It was deep twilight when they lifted off and was pretty much dark when that had landed up there and made the extraction. My hat sure went off to those guys.
Everyone got down safe which was the main thing. There was another wrinkle however. There were three tents and five peoples gear still up in the meadows. Colin and I were in pretty decent shape as we mostly were back in those days. Phil looked as if he had recovered from his earlier travails. And he was a pretty tough customer back in the day as well. So I posed the following idea… If Phil thought he could navigate us up the trail and overland through the meadows in the dark to their camp then this idea just might work. We would head up there now in the pitch black, nothing but the t-shirts on our backs and some head torches. With one water bottle for the three of us, we could be up there in no time. It’s a pretty short approach with only about 800m or so of elevation gain. We got moving immediately and only slowed down once we had to leave the trail. We were motoring but still took the time to enjoy a most brilliant and unseasonal display of the northern lights; unfortunately the last time I have seen them. In well under two hours we found the tents and crawled into their sleeping bags. We planned to break camp in early morning.
In true Rogers Pass fashion the weather had changed dramatically overnight and we woke up to heavily overcast skies and a constant rain. I can’t remember how we arranged it but we managed to pack down five overnight packs, three tents, five sleeping bags, foam pads and all the rest. I do recall that we were pretty soggy and beat by the time we hit the Trans-Canada Highway.