by Birgit Stutz
The first day of digging drew Dave Jeck (Logan’s dad), Matt Elliott and Stuart MacMaster (Dave’s brother-in-law)—the three stalwarts as I later came to call them for all the time they spent on the mountain—plus Dean Schreiber, who put in almost as many days as the stalwarts, along with Leif Gunster, Logan Jeck, another local man named Anthony Pepper and Toni Jeck. The mood was buoyant in some quarters. Matt, especially, felt confident that with all this help, the horses would be off the mountain by the end of the day.
The eight volunteers chatted about the weather and how they had dressed against the cold—as they would if they were going sledding for the day. They had their avalanche shovels, as they always did, but no other gear. Casting a glance up the mountain, Dave wondered what awaited them and what gear they’d have to bring the next day.
The plan was to make a plan, but only after seeing for themselves the lay of the land. Dave wondered how deep the snow was, whether it would be loose or packed. Maybe there would be no next day. Like Matt, Dave hoped they could just walk the horses out and down the mountain.
The ride up to the horses was long, almost an hour long, in bone-chilling cold. Wind chill from flying along on those snow machines just added more menace to the cold, still air.
When Dave Jeck finally glimpsed those two horses on the mountain, just shy of 11 a.m., his heart went out to them. Wow! he thought. They’re still alive! To see them standing there in all that snow made him angry. If you can’t get horses out and if you can’t put them down yourself, he said to himself, arrange for someone else to do it. No use dwelling on that now.
Belle and Sundance rewarded the eight rescuers for their arduous trek up the mountain with a whinny—accompanied by a beseeching look. This was a muted yet brave greeting. Something to build on.
After each horse was fed a flake of hay from the bale brought up the day before, Dave quickly determined that the first job to be done was to get the front shoes off those horses. Toni had used a hoof pick the day before to clean their feet of snow and ice, but Dave saw that the snow and ice had once more balled up under their shoes, making standing more difficult. So he pulled the shoes off and cleaned the horses’ hooves.
Next, the group built a fire. The horses—thanks to the efforts of diggers the day before—were parked in their new snowy enclosure in the woods and out of the worst of the wind. Four feet away, the fire enabled the melting of snow for water and gave rescuers at least a semblance of warmth.
The volunteers gathered around the fire for a strategy session. Their first thought was that they could simply stamp their feet, pack down the snow as hard as they could and walk down the mountain to the logging road, with the horses following. So the eight rescuers struck a comic pose, driving their boots into the snow—as if in anger. The stompers imagined that they had created the beginnings of a path out, and Dave led one horse, with Toni to follow with another. They would do this, they thought, fifty yards at a time with one destination in mind: the logging road.
A campfire was built each day, to melt snow to water the horses and to warm the hands of rescuers.
But as skinny as they were, the horses still weighed seven to nine hundred pounds each, and the lead horse, the gelding, didn’t make two steps before he was buried up to his shoulders in snow. The mare, following, had a somewhat easier time plowing through the trail he had broken. But the snow was far deeper than the rescuers had imagined, and the cold made compacting the snow almost impossible. Turning the gelding around and getting him back to the snowy enclosure was not too difficult, and the two horses certainly co-operated, doing their best to help. But the rescuers now issued a collective “Uh-oh. So much for that plan.”
Back at the fire, the diggers looked ahead. Cold, they knew, was the enemy, but so was time. What shape would the next day take, and the one after that? How many days of digging were called for? Good questions, and no one had any answers.
It was decided that a reasonable target for leaving the parking lot every day was 10 a.m. The sledders would get to Belle and Sundance shortly before 11 a.m. By 4 p.m., all eight rescuers knew, it started to get dark on the mountain in winter, so they would have to leave the horses by 3 p.m. A four-hour window. No, less. Diggers would have to stop periodically to rest or eat or drink fluids, and a wood fire would have to be built and maintained so hands and feet could be warmed and snow melted for the horses to drink.
After some discussion, the group decided that the only way to get the horses out was to dig a deep trench, almost to the ground, all the way down to the logging road. Once on that wide, groomed road, they figured, they could walk the horses the almost thirty kilometres to the parking lot and, from there, trailer them out.
The trench would have to start a few feet below the horses so they wouldn’t be tempted to exit their snow pen and try to follow the volunteer brigade down the trail after each day of digging. The trench’s dimensions would need to be at least three feet wide and six feet deep. Precise length, to be determined. Precise path and angle down the mountain, to be determined.
Those in the group experienced with horses knew that horses are claustrophobic and that the trench solution was risky. But until and unless some other option presented itself, this, they believed, offered the only way out for Belle and Sundance.
Matt Elliott, one of the core people involved in the rescue effort, spent six days digging what came to be known as “the tunnel to freedom.”
Wearing his snowshoes, Dave set out to find a feasible route from the horses’ present location to the logging road, but he quickly discovered that a direct line down entailed a steep descent and too many gullies. Tomorrow, he thought, I’ll scout for a better route. Meanwhile, the diggers worked in the general direction of the logging road.
After a little experimenting, the shovellers soon developed a simple but efficient system: split up and spread out. The first shovellers dug down in the snow several feet, then moved ahead. The next two took the trail down another foot or two, then moved ahead, and so on. For a time, it looked as if the rescuers were building a set of snow stairs down the mountain, but eventually, the required depth was reached, and on it went. Spreading out also offered a psychological advantage: at the end of the day, each digger felt part of a team that had dug a hundred metres of trench.
Better yet, some team members were old friends. Dave Jeck, Matt Elliott and Stu MacMaster were sledding pals who had journeyed up the mountain together many times and gotten into—and out of—some jams on occasion. The core of Team Belle & Sundance comprised three men who knew, liked and trusted each other, and that bond held true on the mountain.
Dave Jeck quickly emerged as a leader of the team. Dave is a fifty-two-year-old cowboy who looks as though he just stepped off a billboard where he had posed as the Marlboro Man. Tall and slim with greying hair and moustache, Dave is the kind of quietly confident, easygoing man people instinctively trust, and he proved a perfect choice to head up the rescue effort.
“My brother Gord and I started going up in the hills after high school,” he told me. “For twenty-five years, we ran Jeck Brothers Outfitters in the McBride area. We once spent a hundred and twenty days in the Yukon, way back in the mountains, working for an outfitter there.” The brothers sold their business in 2004, but Dave still has eight horses at home.
Dave took a matter-of-fact approach to the idea of getting horses off a mountaintop. He would not classify himself as a horse lover. A pragmatist, more like it. “I had to shoot a crippled horse once,” he told me. “I’ve had horses get old and then they get a stroke and you have to shoot them. I don’t cry over them. I’m more realistic. I like horses and I look after them, but I’m not an extremist. I won’t cry if one dies. People can get radical when it comes to horses.”
Lana, Dave’s wife, is fond of telling people that once Dave sets his mind on something, “he’s like a dog with a bone.” After seeing the horses up on Mount Renshaw, he simply said to himself, “I’m getting those horses out of there. They need he
lp.” Dave Jeck felt certain that he and a few good men could dig those horses out.
As for the cold, he’s almost cavalier. “I log in the winter. You can’t stand around,” he jokes. “You’ll freeze.”
The first thing Dave had done after Logan had told him about the two horses stuck on the mountain was call his brother-in-law, Stu MacMaster. “Of course I’ll come,” Stu had said. Dave later called Lester Blouin, who had worked for ten years as a hunting guide for Jeck Brothers. Lester had been out of town, but when he got back, he said pretty much the same thing. “Count me in.”
Stuart MacMaster and Dave Jeck warm up by the campfire.
A powerfully built man with a weathered face and blue eyes, Lester was born a hundred and fifty years too late. He uses Percherons (he has ten) to seed his one hundred and thirty-five acres in the spring, to cut his hay through summer and fall and to log in the winter. He admits that machines are quicker, but he enjoys walking behind his towering black horses as they work, and he likes being able to grow hay as fuel.
Lester loves horses, but that alone didn’t explain why he signed on in a heartbeat to the Belle and Sundance assignment. In our spectacularly beautiful but isolated community (Vancouver is a nine-hour drive to the southwest, Edmonton is six hours to the east), helping one another is instinctive and natural. “If we see smoke,” Lester once told a visitor from away, “we call and we go there. In the city, it might take them a while to come together. Here you don’t think about it. You just go.”
Stuart MacMaster, like Dave, is accustomed to working in minus-thirty-degree cold. A logger all his life, Stu stays lean and fit, not by visiting the gym or jogging but by labouring over big timber with chainsaws and axes.
So as the crew turned to digging, Stuart relaxed. Although the shovelling was hard work, he was used to that. The hardest part for Stu had been the ride up the mountain and the ride down. An avid sledder, Stuart often drove his red and black Arctic Cat up and down that mountain, and he had all the gear—including black snowmobile pants, a kind of high-bib coverall meant to keep a person warm on a mountain—but that day’s cold was so harsh, the coverall wasn’t doing the job. However, once he got moving and kept moving, kept digging, he was fine. Head down, ass up and shovel snow, Stuart thought as he dug.
In the bowl below Mount Renshaw, near the horses’ snowy prison.
Motivation never posed an issue for Stu. When Dave Jeck described the situation to him, Stuart just signed on. It wasn’t necessarily about horses. It was about helping, about doing what was required because the alternative was intolerable. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s what we do here. Someone had to do something.”
Stu had worked with horses a bit, though he wouldn’t dare call himself a horseman. He has a dog, a heeler-shepherd, and a sensitivity for animals. And besides, he wasn’t working at the time. Case closed.
While the diggers dug, Belle and Sundance ate their hay. At the end of that first day of digging, Stu thought he could see a change in the horses. They looked a tad brighter, a little more interested in things.
Riding down that night, the team endured an hour of blistering cold and cutting wind. But for Stuart MacMaster, it was one more trip through God’s country. As they sped down the mountain, he felt what he often felt up here—a powerful blend of gratitude and awe. Stuart was thinking three things:We live in beauty.
This is the best valley in the world.
And I do not take it for granted.
Chapter 7
“HI GUYS”
On Thursday, December 18, it was my turn, finally, to go up the mountain. I didn’t sleep much the previous night. Nervous and excited, I couldn’t wait to see the horses for myself. By morning, Matt had said the evening before, he would know who was going up the mountain and whether he could take me. He’d told me that if he was forced to choose between me and a big, strong man, he would take the man, who most likely would make the better shoveller.
“No offence,” he’d said.
“I can shovel,” I’d countered. “I shovel every day at home, horse manure and snow.” I was determined to prove myself, given the opportunity.
I phoned Matt at 8.30 a.m. sharp, as he had instructed me. First the line was busy, then there was no answer. I feared he had left without me.
The idea of the horses being up there, stranded in the snow and the cold, was weighing more heavily on me than I had at first thought.
“Don’t get consumed by all this,” my husband, Marc, kept telling me, even though he feels the same compassion for animals that I do. A tall, slim, olive-skinned man, he feels most at home in cowboy boots and a Stetson, with a guitar on his lap and a cowboy song on his lips.
Marc himself was angry about the horses having been abandoned in the mountains. “The owner just walked away. I wouldn’t have done it, and I’m a poor man,” he said later.
I met Marc through a co-worker in Hinton, Alberta, where I wrote for a newspaper. Marc was working in nearby Jasper for Parks Canada’s highways department. We married in 2002 under the birch tree I pass every day en route to our horse pasture. I was born a Capricorn, and people born under that sign are notoriously stubborn and persistent, head-through-the-wall persistent. Marc is a Gemini, a lone wolf with two personalities. The one is very quiet, the other quite social. He and I had just clicked.
Marc had grown up in Parry Sound, in central Ontario, where he experienced an attraction to animals as strong as my own. He would clean box stalls just so he could ride a horse. Marc had come west as a young man and found work tar-roofing in Edmonton and later with the Canadian National Railway. Once he had seen Banff, he was hooked on living in the mountains. Marc is a self-taught rider, but he is also fearless, and most horses under him take comfort in that.
Like many in the Robson Valley, Marc has to go elsewhere for work, commuting back home on weekends and days off. In winter, he drives a snowplow in Jasper National Park. In summer, he drives a truck hauling gravel, fixes roads and signs and, during forest fires, transports chainsaws, hoses and fuel to fire bases. Marc is gone from the ranch four to five days every week, longer if there are fires. He sleeps in a tin-can camper during his workweek, then comes home to unending rounds of farm chores.
I was grateful that he was there on that stressful Thursday morning as I fretted over whether Matt had or had not left for Mount Renshaw without me. Marc suggested I call Tony Parisi, an outfitter and snowmobile guide who lives in Valemount. I reached Tony right away and, after explaining the circumstances, asked him if he could take me up the mountain.
But Tony had blown his sled’s engine, and his truck had broken down, too. “I’m sorry, Birgit,” he said. “But if Matt said he was going to take you, he will.” (Just a note on my name: my Canadian friends pronounce it Ber-geet, while in Europe the stress is on the first syllable, as in Beer-git.)
Tony knows Matt very well, so his words offered me some assurance. Still, I could not make sense of Matt’s line being busy one minute and going unanswered the next. I ended my call with Tony by asking him to spread the word that we needed sledders to help us shovel.
Finally, just before 9 a.m., the phone rang. It was Matt.
“So, do you still want to go?”
“You bet,” I said.
“We’re meeting at the Renshaw parking lot at ten.”
I had had no breakfast yet, but I couldn’t eat anyway. My stomach was in knots.
I raced to get ready. Getting dressed for the mountain is no simple matter. The rule is to dress in layers, starting with several pairs of socks, long underwear, then fleece pants, a turtleneck and two fleece sweaters, a neck warmer, a fleece vest, jogging pants and insulated bib coveralls. Then I gathered up my toque, two balaclavas, several pairs of gloves and mitts, Sorel winter boots, ski goggles and my thick oilskin coat. I also got my snowshoes ready, just in case.
Finally, I double-checked the contents of my backpack: my camera, cellphone, salt and electrolytes for the horses, a syringe to make an elec
trolyte drench (a mix of powdered electrolytes and water), a notebook, a pen and a bottle of water, as well as a lunch, including some of my favourite Christmas cookies. I had finally gotten around to making two kinds.
I’d learned that Tim and Monika were coming as well—a relief since I wasn’t certain that anyone else I knew would be there. Monika asked me to bring some warm gear for her—she didn’t own the heavy-duty winter clothing required for a mountaintop—so I packed another pair of Sorel boots, Marc’s thick, long army coat (which he swears you could sleep in comfortably during forty-below weather), his lined winter overalls and an extra pair of goggles.
From McBride, it’s almost twenty kilometres to the parking lot. Just before the bridge over the Fraser River, I turned off the highway and followed Mountainview Road, which runs parallel to the river before heading northwest alongside the Rocky Mountains for a good long stretch. As I turned into the lot, a few sledders were busy unloading their machines. When I asked if they were here for the horse rescue, they looked amused and shook their heads no.
The cold had bite, and the wind blowing snow across the wide-open field from the east made that bite even fiercer. I walked back to my truck and sat inside. It was too frigid to stand around in that nasty wind.
Finally, someone who was actually part of the horse rescue showed up. Spencer Froese and Joey Rich were the first ones, and I was happy to see their familiar faces. Spencer’s mother, Irene, and his sister Robertta had taken riding lessons from me in the past. They lived just southeast of town on a grain farm and also raised buffalo. Then Lester Blouin arrived, with a borrowed snowmobile and his skimmer—an eight-by-three-foot heavy plastic sled that farmers use to pull newborn calves from the field to shelter. The crew planned to load the skimmer with all the gear needed to get the rescue operation rolling.
