by Birgit Stutz
Adding to our difficulties were the tree wells. The spreading limbs of coniferous trees prevent falling snow from reaching the base of the tree, creating deep and dangerous depressions called tree wells. Many skiers and snowboarders have died falling into them. The tree wells, of course, were lower than the tracks we followed, and it was easy to slide down into them. Parts of the “trail” coursed downhill, so we ended up sliding on our bottoms more than walking. Reaching the groomed snowmobile trail seemed to take forever but in actuality was more like twenty-five minutes.
“The snowshoeing was so exhausting,” Monika said when we finally reached the snowmobile trail. “The idea of shovelling that distance seems impossible.” And we would have to shovel that distance to a depth of six feet and a width of three. Like Monika, I too felt frustrated and disillusioned, and harboured grave doubts that we would ever get this job done.
Monika gets ready to snowshoe from the horses’ snowy pen to the groomed snowmobile trail.
None of the other volunteers had arrived at the trail by the time we had. They were all in the cabin warming up while we waited for them in the cold. Since Monika and I hadn’t wanted to wear our heavy coats on the hike out, we’d left them with the sledders, but now it was getting darker and colder by the minute. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, we heard the drone of multiple engines and saw headlights coming around the bend and down the steep hill.
Monika, Tim and I bundled up and loaded our backpacks onto the sleds. Once we were all set, the convoy of seven snowmobiles headed down the mountain. I couldn’t see a thing, and not just because it was getting dark. With my goggles frozen, I had to put full trust in Matt.
The temperature had dropped considerably since we’d left the horses. “Aren’t you cold?” Matt asked me, warming his bare hands and gloves over the heat of the engine.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just my feet.”
“I guess I’m the wimp today,” he joked. I was grateful for the big mitts Marc had given me that morning.
By 5 p.m., when we finally arrived, pitch dark had descended and an ice-cold wind once more cut across the parking lot. Spencer’s truck wouldn’t start, and we spent a long time getting it going, even with booster cables.
My big old black and red truck, a 1990 Ford F-350 crew cab that I use to haul my horse trailer, whined and howled and complained but eventually came to life. I called Marc from my cellphone to let him know that we were down from the mountain, but the phone’s battery was almost dead from the cold, and I worried that the cell would quit any moment. Marc had already done the chores—one less worry—and was just waiting for my call before heading to his job in Jasper, one hundred and fifty kilometres to the east. I so looked forward to relaxing and warming up at home.
I did get warm, but there was no relaxing. Once home, I started answering emails. A handful of people in the valley who had heard about the rescue attempt asked me for updates on the digging and how they could help. I reported on the horses’ condition and told my correspondents that ten of us had dug that day. “We need help,” I wrote them. “It’s a huge task.”
Many local people, meanwhile, had alerted the SPCA, which was trying to arrange for a veterinarian from Prince George to assess the two horses the following morning. If the vet decided that the horses should be euthanized, then this whole operation would shut down. Some of us, me included, still hoped that airlifting the horses out was an option. But the cost (more than $5,000) would be prohibitive, and the SPCA worried about wind chill and the stress on horses whose health was already compromised by exposure and prolonged malnourishment.
While we had been up on the mountain digging a trench and looking after the horses, Alison Schreiber (Dean’s wife) and Sara Olofsson—unbeknownst to each other—had spent the day on the phone with the local helicopter company and posting updates on the sledders’ forum.
Amazing. A few hundred people in the Robson Valley were now following the story of the horses on Mount Renshaw.
At the end of my first day of digging, I had a real sense of what we would-be rescuers faced. The first hurdle was simply getting up the mountain. Each trip required, first, driving one’s car or truck to McBride from the various points in the valley where the rescuers lived, then a twenty-kilometre drive from the village up winding Mountainview Road to the Renshaw parking lot, then a thirty-kilometre trip on a snowmobile along the logging road and up the mountain in frigid temperatures made worse by wind chill, and then a traverse across the mountain high up in the alpine and a trek down two steep hills before finally reaching the horses.
The second obstacle was the forbidding cold. Sledders couldn’t wear full-face helmets; they would fog up. Instead, they wore motocross helmets (distinguished by their exaggerated chin protectors) with the glass shield removed. The modification that Matt, Stu, Dave and the other drivers came up with was good old duct tape, put over the chin vents to keep out the cold, which seemed especially intense along the river between kilometres five and fifteen. In winter, the river acts as a sink for the cold—in the same way that frost in late fall or fog in summer will settle into low pockets. As Matt had warned on my first day, “The cold along the river will just bite you.”
So there were challenges, forbidding challenges, but at least we had a plan. The team of rescuers would haul up hay every day and blankets for the horses as needed. We would melt snow in pails over campfires to water the horses. And we would do what Canadians do in winter: dig through snow with shovels and toss it high over our heads. The trench as planned would drop at about forty-five degrees and follow a trajectory from the northwest to the southeast, the same compass line that the Robson Valley, the Fraser River, the highway and the railway all followed. We also had a shovelling strategy: all currently available volunteers would continue digging near the top of the mountain. Eventually, another crew would begin digging by the snowmobile trail. If all went well, the trench diggers would meet somewhere in the middle.
On Friday, December 19, Dave, Matt and Stu accompanied two SPCA constables from Kamloops, along with a veterinarian from Prince George, up to Mount Renshaw to assess the horses.
The involvement of the SPCA did not sit well with Dave Jeck. Frustrated that the digging ground to a halt while the vet and the SPCA constables were transported to the horses and back and also feeling that his horsemanship, his judgment and his knowledge—based on a lifetime around horses—wasn’t being trusted, Dave believed wholeheartedly that the team of community volunteers had everything well in hand and had developed a viable plan to get these horses off the mountain. What the SPCA was doing was meddling, he thought, and a waste of precious time.
Veterinarians use a one-to-nine score to grade a horse’s body condition. A score of nine indicates an extremely fat or obese horse; five is considered ideal; and a horse with a score of one is near death. Dr. Jodyne Green, the vet brought up to examine Belle and Sundance, gave the older gelding a score of two, and the younger mare a rating of two to three. A tall, athletic young woman, the vet knew at a glance that these horses had a chance. There would be no “pulling the pin on the whole deal,” as Matt had feared might happen.
All the vet’s checks simply corroborated her first impression: the horses were thin but not in danger. We were to stay the course, keep doing what we were doing. Dr. Green advised against airlifting them out—for all the obvious reasons: wind chill, the added stress, the horses’ poor condition.
But I knew we weren’t out of the woods yet. Predators roaming the mountain might get the horses first. Wind or wind-driven snow could fill in the trench, blocking the path out. Avalanche presented another risk, especially if temperatures began to rise. That winter, twenty-six sledders died in British Columbia and Alberta, all of them buried in cascading snow. A lot could still go wrong on Mount Renshaw.
While the vet was examining the horses up on the mountain, I sat at my computer trying to write stories for the Valley Sentinel, but I couldn’t focus
. I was wrestling with various unhappy scenarios when Marc called me from work and suggested alerting some of the radio stations in Edmonton and Jasper. “See if they’ll put something on the air asking sledders going to McBride for the weekend to help shovel,” he said.
I called CISN Country in Edmonton, which promised to air my plea, and did. I also tried to reach a radio station in Jasper but only left a message. No one returned my call.
Dave Jeck telephoned me that evening, and he wasn’t pleased. “This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion,” he said. He thought the operation was getting too big, with too many volunteers becoming involved. “The story of the rescue mission is all over the Internet,” he complained. “Toni came across it on SnowandMud.com. It would have been better if just the core group of our family and some friends had kept going up there.”
Dave had been giving some thought to adopting the horses himself—should we succeed—but as the attempted rescue of Belle and Sundance moved from a small-scale, family-and-friends operation into something larger, he changed his mind. He worried that adoption would involve the SPCA and a great deal of red tape and public scrutiny, none of which he wanted.
The Robson Valley is, in large part, populated by people who share Dave’s outlook. The area served as a refuge for American draft dodgers and hippies when the Vietnam War raged, and before that, the Mennonites had come, looking to be left alone to their religion and culture. A great many people lived in the valley because they didn’t like governments and bureaucracies nosing around, and here in this distant outpost, they endured less of it—though maybe not little enough to suit Dave Jeck.
I for one didn’t agree with his view on keeping the rescue operation small. The more people toiling away, the quicker the path would be forged and the horses secured in a new home. “I don’t think we will be able to do it by ourselves,” I countered. “It’s too long a trench in too much snow. And one big storm could fill it all in.” I refrained, however, from telling Dave I’d contacted several radio stations with my plea for more volunteers.
In the end, we met halfway, with Dave conceding that perhaps we did need more bodies digging on the mountain. We ended on a good note, agreeing to meet in the Renshaw parking lot in the morning for another day of digging.
Meanwhile, not everyone in the community was enthusiastic about what we were doing on Mount Renshaw. That evening, I read what one member of the sledders’ forum had written about the lost horses: I think the most humane thing to do in the circumstances is to quickly give them a lead injection. Take the $2,000 or $4,000 or whatever it is going to cost to get these horses out of there, and give it to the Salvation Army, Christmas Bureau, etc. to give some kids a chance this Christmas.
Barry Walline countered with this:That would be the easy way of dealing with this situation, but here in McBride we don’t just take the easy way out. . . . This small-town way of thinking has me converted. Someone or something in trouble, we go out of our way to help.
Sara posted a reply as well, but hers had bite:Good idea, let’s just shoot the horses. . . . Perhaps that is what we should do to the next rider that comes in and gets himself or his sled stuck, and a bunch of people donate their time and effort and risk themselves for that endeavour as well. We do the same to rescue a person and even, unbelievably, a machine . . . so why not a horse? . . . We are supposed to be a higher life form.
When Matt heard about the “lead injection” comment, he had one thought: You wouldn’t suggest that if you had seen the horses’ eyes.
Chapter 8
A CHRISTMAS GIFT TO REMEMBER
My alarm roused me at dawn on Saturday, December 20. When I flicked on my bedside light, I glimpsed the first hint of just how cold it was outside—a thick coating of frost lined the inside of my bedroom window. At 6 a.m., the outdoor thermometer registered forty degrees below Celsius.
After bundling up, I headed outside to do my morning chores. I have nineteen animals on my farm (not counting the chickens), and all must be fed and watered at dawn and dusk.
Before going to the barn, I plugged in my truck. To do this, I had to unplug the power cord leading to the two heated water buckets for the horses penned by the barn. Knowing that their water would freeze in this nasty cold, I’d made the decision the night before to keep the buckets plugged in, rather than my truck. My hope was that there would be enough time that morning to warm the truck’s big engine block.
My nine horses were whinnying as I prepared their feed. “You guys have it a lot better than those poor horses on the mountain, and yet you’re still complaining and being impatient!” I scolded them.
When I went to start my truck, nothing happened. Keeping the horses’ water buckets plugged in had been the right decision, but my old truck’s battery had paid the price. I called my neighbour, Dr. Tom Vogel, our local vet, who happened to be heading the same way I was. “Can you give me a lift?” I asked him, and of course he agreed.
When Tom and I got to the Jeck farm shortly after 9 a.m., Dave informed me that he wasn’t going up Mount Renshaw after all. He had an injured mare and wanted to stay home and help Tom tend to her.
“Stu is going, though,” said Dave. “He can take you.”
Dave then showed me the feed schedule the vet had given him the day before and asked me to ensure the horses were fed accordingly. The schedule offered mainly common sense advice—increase feed gradually, space out feedings, administer small and frequent meals if possible—and warnings that days three to seven were the most critical. That is when a starving horse being nursed back to health faces the greatest risk of dying; the right balance has to be struck between offering too little food and too much. Beyond that period, the horses could be fed grain on days eight to ten, and within ten days to two weeks, Belle and Sundance could be put on an all-you-can-eat diet.
I fashioned two cardboard signs that we intended to place next to the groomed snowmobile trail, where the trench would emerge. The signs read:Horse Rescue. Follow trail. Please help us dig.
Soon after, Stu arrived at Dave’s and we took off. Stu had filled the box of his pickup truck with square bales of hay, some of which we would take up the mountain; the rest we’d leave in the parking lot. The attendant selling sled trail passes had agreed to ask sledders to transport hay up to the Renshaw cabin. Once it was there, we could easily get the bales to the horses.
Dave wanted to store as many bales as possible up by the horses in case a storm cut off snowmobile access to Belle and Sundance. Dave figured that no matter the conditions, he would be able to sled to the bottom of the steep hill and then snowshoe up to the horses to feed them. I was surprised at his optimism, though not by his determination. Weather in the mountains is always the unknown, and storm conditions would confound Dave’s plan at a time when the horses would be most desperate for food.
While we were unloading Stu’s snowmobile and securing two bales to it, along came the two B.C. SPCA constables who’d visited the horses the day before. Kent Kokoska, a senior animal protection officer, asked me to put a sign up by the horses asking people not to feed them. I didn’t have any more cardboard, so he handed me his clipboard. I made a temporary sign, which read:Please DO NOT FEED horses! They are being looked after and fed according to the vet’s feed schedule. Too much feed will kill them! However, we do need help digging! Your efforts are appreciated. For more info, call Spin Drift.
“Thank you so much for what you guys are doing for these horses,” said special provincial constable Jamie Wiltse.
A sign to let people know the horses were being fed according to a vet’s prescribed schedule.
The two constables didn’t stay long (they were here on their vacation time) but did say that an SPCA constable from Prince George would be back on Monday with a snowmobile.
Monika then arrived in her truck. She had picked up a few more shovels donated by the local hardware store. Even though she couldn’t get a ride to the horses that day, she was bent on recruitment and planned t
o talk to sledders in the parking lot about the horse rescue and ask them to help shovel.
Dean Schreiber and his thirteen-year-old son, Sam, had planned to come this day as well, but they hadn’t been able to get their truck started either. Stu and I, it turned out, were the only diggers.
The ride up to the horses was witheringly cold that day, but at least my head stayed fairly warm since Stu had loaned me a helmet. Only my toes complained on this, the harshest day of the digging so far.
December’s average temperature in this part of the valley is minus ten degrees. On December 1, the McKale weather station was reporting a high of plus one, but starting on December 13, just two days before the horses were first spotted, the temperature had turned dangerously cold, as low as minus thirty-six degrees at the weather station and four degrees colder than that at our Falling Star Ranch.
But seen another way, the cold was a blessing. I sometimes ached from the work of shovelling, but Matt, Stu and Dave never did. As shovelling went, Matt observed, this was good shovelling. Owing to the cold, the snow stayed light and powdery; anyone who has ever shovelled wet snow or slush would appreciate the difference.
