The Rescue of Belle and Sundance

by Birgit Stutz

  When Marc and I arrived at the Renshaw parking lot, we found Monika there with boxes full of sandwiches and trail mix, all donated by the McBride Trading Co. Moving about quickly in that minus-thirty cold, we handed out the goodies to volunteers and stuffed as much food as possible into our backpacks and coat pockets, certain we’d need those rations later.

  Many locals had returned home from jobs in Alberta or up north. Former residents were likewise coming back to celebrate Christmas with family and friends. That meant we had a lot of bodies, and I was thrilled to see them. Twenty-four volunteers made the long snowmobile ride to the bottom of the trench that day to help dig from the groomed snowmobile trail up toward the horses.

  It was the worst ride in yet for me. The helmet Stu had loaned me—the same one I’d used twice before—kept sliding up on my head, so most of the time I couldn’t see the trail ahead. The cause, most likely, was the bumpy ride: the trail hadn’t been groomed for several days, so the whole way up the mountain, I had to hold on to Stu more than usual—especially since there were no hay bales behind me this time to wedge me in. Tired from all the shovelling and hanging on, I turned and twisted my arms, trying to use different muscle groups to grip. No use. I couldn’t wait for the ride to be over.

  Marc’s ride in with Lester Blouin was just as miserable. Putting his hands forward to hang on to Lester exposed his wrists to the cold wind, but if he didn’t hang on, he risked falling off the sled. His solution was to let his arms dangle at his sides and always to watch ahead for dips and rises. “It was like riding a horse,” he told me later when he could laugh about it. “I was posting and trotting—on a snowmobile.”

  Stu and I stopped briefly where the trench emerged onto the groomed snowmobile trail, but nobody else had arrived yet. We then continued up to the horses’ pen. After we fed Belle and Sundance, a group of us started digging from the top down.

  Digging from the bottom were Monika, Tim and Justin; Marc; Dave and his brother Gord; Lester; Wes Phillips; Dean, Sam and Alison Schreiber; Joey Rich and his dad, Joe; Carla Trask; Carolina and Jason Beniuk; Byron Murin; Jeff Zyda; and Matt Villmure. The last five mentioned live in Alberta, but all have a connection to McBride. Two groups of Alberta sledders also stopped to help with the digging effort. With this many people, the stair method worked to perfection.

  Later on, Rod Whelpton—he owns Adrenaline Tours, a company that rents out snowmobiles and offers snowmobile tours—and Barry came walking down the trench from the direction of the horses’ pen. Rod and Barry had agreed to bring a two-man TV crew up the mountain, but a few kilometres after they had left the parking lot, the engine on Barry’s sled blew. When another sledder happened along and was told the circumstances, he agreed to join Rod in ferrying the TV crew members to the bottom of the trench, from where Matt Elliott took them the rest of the way. Barry, meanwhile, started walking back toward the parking lot by himself. He’d walked about four kilometres when another local sledder on his way up the mountain chanced by. He readily offered Barry a ride back to the parking lot. Two good Samaritans in a row.

  Tim and Monika Brown turned the rescue effort into a family affair.

  At the parking lot, Barry unloaded one of the spare machines they had brought along for just such an emergency and rode back up the mountain. Told of Barry’s trek, the Global TV crew seemed astonished. Perhaps they had never walked four kilometres in their lives.

  Meanwhile, the reporter and cameraman, one of them mumbling something about the mountain air being thin, seemed anxious to leave. Maybe they feared we would try to shame them into helping.

  “How do you dig with that?” Dean Schreiber had joked, pointing at the reporter’s microphone, and everybody had laughed.

  One volunteer worried aloud about all the media attention. What if something happened to the horses while they were being led out? How would that make us look?

  “How can we look bad?” answered Marc. “We’d only look bad if we’d quit on them. You don’t look bad for trying.”

  I agreed with Marc’s sentiment, though I did still worry that the horses might balk at entering the trench. They had readily walked down a short steep trench to their new pad a week beforehand, but this new trench was far longer, with no end in sight.

  Belle and Sundance had worked a little magic, even on people with no interest in horses—such as Barry. The avid snowmobiler and volunteer with the local search and rescue unit dug on the mountain for two days, though he later conceded with irreverent humour, “I’m not a horse person. Horses hate me. The tamest one will try to bite me. I could not believe we were doing this nonsense. I was very negative about all this in the beginning. I thought the digging was stupid, but one look at the horses . . .”

  Matt had said the same thing. To see Belle and Sundance in the flesh was to sign on to the rescue team.

  All over the Robson Valley, horse-mad wives were putting pressure on husbands to help. The men were often reluctant at first, then keen. Sara had convinced Matt to help by giving him what she called “the look.” She said Matt wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other—though I think she put it less delicately than that. Judy Fraser had deployed a different tactic on her partner, Barry Walline. She used pure, simple logic: if the horses were suffering, he had to help. As Barry put it, “We were goaded into it.”

  Barry calls himself “a wuss,” even though he’ll go out in the small hours in a blizzard in minus-thirty temperatures—but only because he has to, he insists. As a recreational snowmobiler, he ducks cold weather. But when a sledder is reported missing, Barry will—along with his rescue unit cohorts—go to the highest point of the mountain and look or smell for a warming fire or try to catch the flash of a camera. He will yell to be heard or listen for yelling. Invariably, the lost are found.

  On the morning of December 23, Matt hiked from the shovelled end of the bottom trench up to the shovelled end of the top one to gauge how much digging was left to do. Climbing a rugged mountain in heavy boots and sledder suit was tiring enough, but all those days of digging had taken a toll on him. Once he reached us, he let himself fall back into the snow. It was the kind of freefall that kids do just before making a snow angel.

  “I am not going to do that again,” he said, supremely exhausted, his eyes closed. He meant the walk up the hill.

  “How far is it still?” I asked.

  “It seems quite a way,” he answered, “but then again, I was walking uphill.”

  We had started digging around 11 a.m., and shortly after noon I could hear voices. One of them was Justin’s.

  “Hey Birgit, we’re here,” he shouted.

  “You’d better have a shovel and not just be walking up here to see how far we still have to go!” I yelled.

  “We’re shovelling,” he yelled back.

  Marc Lavigne and Justin Brown take a breather, just before the trench is finally finished. Digging behind them is Wes Phillips.

  Yeah, right, I thought to myself, but then I saw snow flying.

  “Is that where the trench is?” I called again.

  “Yes, we’re right here,” Justin replied.

  Then I could see Marc’s red coveralls, and behind him Wes and Lester. A human digging chain was working its way toward us. Monika and Tim were part of that crew digging from the bottom, shoulder to shoulder with strangers—people she had never met, people who had never seen the horses. What a great bunch, she later told me she thought as she dug. Now and again, there comes a feeling of connectedness—to one’s community, to some worthy cause. You feel as though you are a vital cog in a great turning wheel. This, thought Monika, is one such moment.

  I had some orange flagging tape left, so I put up a ribbon between two trees, across the point where the upper and lower ends of the trench would meet.

  “The race is on!” I challenged the bottom crew. They had far more diggers, so they had an unfair advantage. I didn’t care. The end was in sight.

  “Come help us dig,” I urged Justin. A feeling
of euphoria suffused the volunteers, with everyone laughing and joking. We all found new reserves of energy and dug faster. Snow was flying up, then down, up, then down, on both sides of the trench—as if so many unseen creatures were frantically digging tunnels. The job of finishing the trench had consumed seven days, with half the work done in the first five and the other half done in just two.

  At about one-thirty in the afternoon, “the tunnel to freedom”—as some in the press had come to call it—was finally completed. Cheers went up everywhere; people took off their mitts, high-fived each other and clapped. Shouts of “We got it done!” could be heard from the whole crew. I looked at Stu, and he had “Yahoo!” written all over his face.

  The tunnel to freedom.

  What I felt most powerfully was relief. The shovelling, at least, was over. But my elation was checked a little by the knowledge that we had finished only phase one of the rescue. There remained two more big hurdles: getting the horses into and through that one-kilometre-long trench, and then walking the almost thirty kilometres along the logging road. So the champagne wouldn’t be uncorked just yet.

  Marc likened it to a hockey game. “We had come back and tied up the score, which was great. But there was still overtime.”

  Dave and Stu stoked the campfire, and we all took a short break. It was two in the afternoon. We still had plenty of time to lead the horses out.

  Soon after our shared celebration and subsequent rest, the majority of the volunteers walked single-file down the finished trench to the snowmobile trail while a few of us—Dave, Stu, Gord, Matt, Leif, Lester, Marc, Monika, Tim, Justin, Carla, Carolina and I—headed back up the trench to Belle and Sundance.

  Seeing the horses for the first time, Marc thought they looked forlorn and skinny, their blankets just hanging on them. The first image that came to mind was footage from the Second World War. He remembered a camera panning across a gathering of humans and their animals, and how each bore the gaunt look of creatures who had known what it is to starve.

  Lester Blouin with Sundance, and Dave Jeck with Belle, shortly before the walk down the trench.

  “You should have seen the horses a week ago,” I told Marc. The blankets still looked far too big for them, but by the tiniest of increments and with each passing day, the horses were beginning to flesh out. For Belle and Sundance, deprived so long of sustenance, it was all about the food. These men and their machines had for many days now been bringing them grub, and the horses knew, just knew, they were safe. Not yet off the mountain, not yet out of the cold, but—for the moment, anyway—safe.

  Dave instructed everyone left save Lester and me, who would lead the horses out, to walk ahead down the trench to the logging road. Dave was worried that if the horses encountered some mishap in the trench, those behind them would be stuck.

  Belle and Sundance had their heads up and their ears pricked forward. They were two horses ready to roll. We put halters on them and removed their blankets for the trip down the narrow trench (lest the blankets get hung up on a protruding root or branch), we loaded gear onto snowmobiles, pulled strings off the remaining hay bales to be left in the high country (the polymer might have ensnared wild animals), and soon after, the two horses began their trip down the narrow passageway.

  I felt the same elation as others, but mine was tempered. I still had concerns about this next critical leg of the journey. Would the horses, generally claustrophobic creatures, follow us down a slippery, one-kilometre-long trench barely wider than their bodies and surrounded by a six-foot wall of snow—especially when turning around was not an option? I worried that some spots in the trench were too narrow and that the horses might get stuck or refuse to advance. There was one section, in particular—the section where I’d had a difficult time digging because of roots buried under the snow—where we’d had to try to find the best way around a great many trees. I had hoped to widen the trench the following day, but the walls and bottom had turned to ice. I would have needed a pick.

  Lester led the way down the trench, with the older gelding in tow. Dave followed with a shovel in case one of the horses got stuck in deep snow or entangled in exposed root. I followed with the young mare. Behind Belle was Gord, who picked up shovels that had been tucked into the trench walls. Marc and Monika snowshoed beside the trench, high above us. Marc was taking pictures, but pretty soon he could no longer keep up with the horses. They were just motoring down the trench. I had to walk really fast, sometimes almost run, to stay ahead of Belle. Sundance seemed a little stiff, likely from not having had any exercise in such a long time, and moved more slowly. That he was ahead of us worked to our advantage, for he slowed the mare’s pace.

  Lester Blouin leads Sundance through the trench.

  Dave Jeck is followed by Birgit Stutz (hidden), who leads Belle down the mountain. Behind Belle is Gordon Jeck.

  Some members of the sledders’ forum had expressed fears that the handlers could be run over if the horses panicked in the trench. I suppose that could have happened, but Lester and I were confident, experienced handlers. With horses, calm often begets calm, and Belle and Sundance never panicked. They seemed to know we were helping them, and they’d clearly had their fill of the mountaintop.

  Luckily, too, we didn’t have to deal with many obstacles on our journey down the trench. Everything went smoothly, save for one time when the gelding’s right hind foot slipped in the snow and under a root. Sundance practically sat down on his hind end. At this spot, the trench was not dug all the way to the ground. The snowy path was still quite soft—and probably only about three feet deep. Amid all the excitement and the great rush of volunteers, the quality of digging had suffered somewhat: getting it done mattered more than getting right to the bottom every step of the way. Because Lester reacted calmly and quickly to Sundance’s plight, the gelding didn’t panic. With Dave’s help, Lester managed to back the gelding up and free his hind foot. The sure-footed mare had no such trouble. The horses slid a bit going down some of the steeper sections of the trench, but both remained sensible about it all. Even the creek crossing was uneventful.

  At 2:45 p.m., the horses and a handful of volunteers emerged from the claustrophobic trench onto the wide, groomed snowmobile trail. Cheers and applause from all the other volunteers, who anxiously awaited our arrival—likely two dozen all told—greeted us. I remember seeing a sea of smiling faces and all these backpacks and snowmobiles and shovels on the side of the logging road. Belle and Sundance pricked their ears in response to the shouting.

  But the exhilaration was short-lived. Horses and rescuers had the same question: now what? This wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Would the two emaciated horses have the strength to walk the next and final leg—almost thirty kilometres of groomed trail—in one go? Would we be forced to stop at some point and create another temporary pen for the horses where they’d spend one more night?

  We allowed the horses time to rest and again blanketed the mare, who had begun shivering. The gelding seemed fine, but we put his winter blanket on one of the sleds; it would be available when needed. Dave also tied a bale of hay onto a sled for the trip down the groomed snowmobile trail. All the remaining gear—shovels, signs, the volunteers’ personal items—was packed up and loaded onto the many sleds.

  Lester and Sundance emerge from the trench onto the logging road.

  Then the majority of volunteers started the long, cold snowmobile ride down the mountain to the parking lot, ahead of the two horses and their handlers. It was shortly after 3 p.m. when Gord, leading Sundance, I, leading Belle, and Marc all started the trek down the logging road. Marc soon opted to catch a ride with Tim and Justin; he could hardly walk in his “big monkey suit” (as he calls his thick winter coveralls). Poor Justin was squeezed in between Tim and Marc on Tim’s rented snow machine.

  Monika had thought she might be part of the group leading the horses down the logging road, but the cold had begun to bite, along with the fatigue, and her warm house beckoned.

 
; “But promise you’ll call me when you get home,” she said before leaving. “I don’t care what time it is.” I promised I would.

  Dave, meanwhile, worked on logistics. He instructed Marc to call Ray when he got down to the valley to let him know that we were on our way down with the horses. Ray would need to hook up his livestock trailer and ready the stalls in his barn in case we managed to walk all the way out.

  Shovelling in the sun all day had caused Marc to sweat up on the mountain, which, because of temperature inversions, could sometimes be warmer than the valley. Now, with dusk approaching, he was dropping down into the cold valley, with the speed of the sled adding yet more bite to the wind chill. Tim was driving the sled, which had handlebars for the passenger—in this case, Marc. “This is great,” Marc told Tim as they sped down the mountain. “These handlebars are heated.”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” Tim replied.

  Marc thought of that short story by Jack London, “To Build a Fire,” in which a man—foolishly hiking across the tundra during his first winter in the far north—fights a losing battle with minus-seventy-five-degree cold. Those who have read that story, set in the early 1900s, often remember two salient details—the man’s folly in building his fire too close to a snow-laden spruce, and the great warmth that is said to come over humans just before they freeze to death:He must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk.