“Look,” someone said, “he moved!” Mary returned her headlamp’s beam to the boy. Indeed, he had moved.
Meanwhile, Bryan Wisher felt as if he was in a dream. It was dark. It was raining. He was running down a trail and dodging the rocks the wet soil sent rolling off the switchbacks of the Devil’s Corkscrew. His knees were on fire. Carrying a fifty-pound pack, the ranger ran seven rugged miles in sixty-five minutes.
While Bryan ran, Mary rappelled in the dark over the seventy-five-foot cliff. At the bottom, she assessed the boy’s injuries. He had blood on his head. His ankle was obviously broken. But he was alive. Mary placed him in a dry sleeping bag.
By the time Bryan arrived, Sjors had scouted a route down the terraces. He guided Bryan to the accident scene.
“Is he shivering?” Bryan asked.
“No,” Mary replied, thinking that this was a good sign.
Bryan was a park medic. He had carried a ten-pound machine that measures vital signs to the scene. He pulled two IV bags out of his shirt. (To warm the fluids, he had hiked with them next to his body.) “Someone get a rectal temperature while I start an IV,” he said, taking charge.
Sjors stuck a digital thermometer where it would obtain the most accurate core temperature. A couple of minutes later, he read aloud the digital numerals on the screen. “It says 83.6.”
“Stick it up farther,” Bryan said.
If I stick it up any farther he’ll be having it for breakfast. “I can’t Bryan,” the volunteer said. “It’s already at the hilt.”
Alarm bells were now ringing in the medic’s head. Most of us know that a normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37° C). Fewer people are aware that a core body temperature between 93 (34° C) and 97 degrees (36° C) indicates mild hypothermia. Moderate hypothermia falls into the 86 (30° C) to 93 degree (34° C) range, and a core body temp below 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30° C) puts one into severe hypothermia. If you studied the same paramedic texts studied by Ranger Wisher, you know a patient with mild or moderate hypothermia has a favorable prognosis once treated, but a patient in severe hypothermia will not be shivering, is often unconscious or in a coma, and is at risk for deadly cardiac arrhythmia. When caring for a person with a core body temp of 83.6 degrees (let’s say it’s a kid—a flaxen-haired, sleepy-eyed thirteen-year-old boy with a broken ankle, a bleeding head, and a fractured spine who lies on a cold slab of rock deep inside the Grand Canyon), you should prepare yourself for the worst. Your patient may go into cardiac arrest. Right here. Right now. Right in front of you.
Up to this point in his career, ranger Bryan Wisher had never had a patient die while in his care. Of course he had participated in many body recoveries and assisted with a few hopeless codes—people whose hearts had stopped long before rangers arrived. But to lose a patient who was alive and talking to you when you arrived, and it was a kid! That would be more than tragedy. That would forever break the sturdy heart beating inside the ranger’s chest.
To Mary, Bryan was Zen calm. She had heard the stories. A few years earlier, this park medic had braved a flash flood to save twenty-eight lives in one day. She was confident the medic was going to save the boy.
But Bryan felt a panic rising. He heard it in the higher pitch of his voice when he yelled, “Start boiling water. Now! And don’t move him unnecessarily!” (Rough movement or excessive activity can send a severely hypothermic patient’s heart into a deadly rhythm.) Bryan directed the others to heat water with backpacking stoves carried up from Phantom Ranch. He told them to pour the heated water into plastic canteens. Bryan wrapped IV tubing around the canteens of heated water, an innovative way to gently warm the fluid entering the boy’s bloodstream via the catheters the medic had inserted into the boy’s veins.
Within an hour of receiving these warm fluids, the boy began to tremble violently. “He’s shivering!” Mary said, worried.
“Good.” Bryan said. “He’s generating heat now.”
Over the next few hours, the shivering got milder and milder until it stopped completely. By sunrise the patient’s rectal temp was 90.6 degrees (32.5° C), and the rain had stopped. Thirty minutes before sunrise, a helicopter dropped off more rescue personnel on the mesa above, including a female ranger-paramedic named Tammy Keller.
As the Arizona Department of Public Safety helicopter pilot lowered the hook, Bryan looked at Sjors. It’s been nice knowing ya. To the rescuers on the ground, the pilot appeared to be performing the rescue helicopter equivalent of neurosurgery when he lowered the helicopter into the tight canyon. The side canyon was shaped like a bowl, and the spinning rotors came within twenty feet of the rock as the pilot attempted to drop the haul hook to the rescuers on the ground. Bryan and Sjors feared that the rotors were going to clip the walls, causing the helicopter to crash and then explode into a ball of flames, igniting every living thing inside the little canyon.
But the pilot lobbed the hook to the rescuers as nonchalantly as if he were casting a baited hook into a prime fishing hole. Mary let the hook touch the ground to avoid being shocked by static electricity before she grabbed it and then clipped it onto the ropes connected to the basket litter. She clipped another line to the harness worn by a ranger wearing a green flight suit. Tammy Keller was this mission’s dope on a rope. Mary was impressed. A woman was doing the short haul. She conducted a “buddy check” of Tammy’s system and then flashed the paramedic a grin. You go girl!
Bryan Wisher’s mind for physics anticipated a problem. The victim was on a slanting terrace of rock, and the helicopter was not directly above the load. Once tension was put on the cable, it would create a pendulum. Once the helicopter lifted them off the ground, Keller and the boy were going to swing into the rock wall on the other side of the canyon! Bryan jumped up to put his body between the rock and the rescue litter but felt a force pulling him down. It was Mary. She grabbed him by the shoulders and used all her 135 pounds to pull Bryan’s 200 to the ground. In an instant, the medic knew Mary was right. In fact, she may have saved his life. Putting his body between the litter and the rock wall was only going to get him killed.
Mary grabbed a short line tied to the litter and held on to it until she had to let go. Her doing this decreased the force of the pendulum’s swing so that before Keller and the boy slammed into the sandstone, all the paramedic had to do was daintily tap her feet on the rock, pushing the rescue litter back into the air just as the helicopter pulled them out of the canyon and into the rosy sky. Within a minute, they disappeared into the Grand Canyon sunrise.
There was nothing left for Bryan to do. His leadership was no longer needed. The boy was on his way to the hospital, where he would fully recover. The suspense was over. The danger was past. The ground rescuers packed up the gear and started hauling it back to the ranger station. Bryan insisted on being the last to leave the accident scene. As soon as he was alone, as soon as he was certain his coworkers couldn’t see him, the ranger sat his weary body on a sandstone boulder, dropped his head to his hands, and wept—just for a minute, maybe two.
18
DRY HEAT
Exhaust-spewing tour buses and rental cars filled the parking lot. Like sheep through chutes, tourists were herded by railing-protected paths down to the overlooks at Mather Point. It was January. Youth counselor David Line Denali had driven up from Apache County to show Cale Shaffer, his new outdoor recreation intern, the Grand Canyon for his first time. Cale followed the railings down the stone steps and out to the end of a peninsula of rock until . . . Whoa! The prosaic atmosphere at the parking lot was forgotten. This was some serious scenery. Struggling for perspective, Cale turned to his new boss and asked, “How tall is Wall Street?”
“I don’t know,” Denali said. “A thousand feet or so?” Five Wall Streets set on top of one another still wouldn’t match the depth of the Grand Canyon. It was craziness. Cale couldn’t wrap his mind ar
ound it. In his home state, there was a place the locals called the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. Now this claim embarrassed him. The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. Right.
Standing there at Mather Point, the twenty-year-old Outdoor Recreation intern had no way of knowing how intimate he would become with the mysterious terrain in front of him. A beam of sunlight highlighted Zoroaster Temple, a yellow butte to the north. (He would climb it.) The jade ribbon at the bottom of the canyon was the Colorado River. (He would raft it.) The cluster of buildings in the heart of the inner gorge was Phantom Ranch. (He would live there.) Ten miles away on the North Rim, fir and spruce grew from the snowy ground. (He would recover his first dead body there, a victim of a plane crash.) The Grand Canyon guarded many riches—hidden caves, fossilized creatures, ancient ruins, prehistoric paintings, emerald springs sustaining elfin gardens. (And here, among the park’s secret treasures, he would fall in love with more than one girl.)
* * *
Cale grew up in a small house on a small street in the small community of Madisonburg, Pennsylvania. Across the street lived an Amish family. A stone’s throw from his backyard, headstones marked the graves of seven generations of Shaffers, going further back than the one who died in 1865 from a wound he received fighting to preserve the Union. When he was younger, Cale’s dad, Ron Shaffer, raced stock cars. He named his son after Cale Yarborough, the NASCAR champion. After his son was born, instead of racing cars, Ron fixed them. Cale’s mom, Carol, was a stay-at-home mom until her son and his sister were older. Then she took a job that bored her, slicing meats at the grocery deli for minimum wage, so that her two children would have an opportunity she didn’t have—going to college.
It was a humble childhood, but it was also stable and happy. At sixteen, Cale bagged a scholarship to a youth camping trip in Grand Teton National Park. In Wyoming he saw bigger deer, bigger mountains, and bigger creeks than you can find anywhere in Pennsylvania. When he returned home, Cale posted a map of the United States on his bedroom wall. With a red Magic Marker he circled all the national parks and monuments he intended to visit—Yellowstone, Devils Tower, Glacier, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon.
Before coming to the Grand Canyon as an Outdoor Recreation intern, however, he first accepted a camp counselor and rock climbing instructor position in Kentucky. For an Outdoor Recreation major on summer break, it sounded like a dream job. But his work as a Girl Scout counselor at Camp Judy Layne induced more stress than he had anticipated. He worked sunup to midnight, rushing around camp, setting up nature games, building campfires, and resolving urgent camp issues such as bed-wetting, head lice, and homesickness.
Of all his duties, teaching hundreds of Girl Scouts how to rock climb and rappel was the most trying. Whenever the girls peered over the edge of a cliff for the first time, one tearful Scout would spread crippling trepidation throughout the entire group. It would take him an hour to convince the first girl she could do it. All these trials on his patience were forgotten as soon as he saw the smile of a pudgy girl after she did a hundred-foot rappel. Cale was a skilled lead climber, but the biggest rush for this Eagle Scout came from helping others gain confidence and enjoy the outdoors.
After completing his summer internship with the Girl Scouts of America, Cale returned to Lock Haven University. Back on campus, he experienced culture shock. Next to Pre-med majors and football players, the five-foot-five Cale felt self-conscious about his height. The angst of being short-man-on-campus was a recurring theme in his college journals, but Cale rarely wallowed in self-pity. One of his favorite rock climbing routes was called Shorty’s Revenge.
At the age of nineteen Cale concluded that all he had to do was have faith in his own intentions, shed all concerns of others’ opinions, and ignore those who didn’t see him for who he was. Only then would he find true friends.
* * *
After graduating in January 1996, Cale accepted a job as an Outdoor Recreation intern with Apache County Search and Rescue. Six months later, he and his boss, youth counselor David Line Denali, drove their team up to the Grand Canyon for what they had thought would be an easy assignment. As soon as they arrived at Mather Campground, Denali left to meet with the park rangers.
With sixteen “at-risk” youths under his supervision, Cale knew trouble came from idle hands. He kept the kids busy with setting up camp. By the time a female ranger returned with Denali three hours later, the tents were staked, the gear was unpacked, and dinner was ready. Denali got out of the ranger’s car with a stack of T-shirts in his hands and a look on his face Cale recognized immediately. The boss was freaking out.
Cale grabbed the T-shirts, inspected them, and frowned. The words “park volunteer” on the front were too small to read from a distance. Also, the hikers wouldn’t know they were not regular volunteers but search and rescue volunteers. “So,” Cale asked Denali, “how did it go?”
“Wait a minute, Cale,” Denali said as he sat down on the picnic table. “I have to get focused.” The youth counselor needed to process the last three hours. What had he gotten himself into? These rangers had a situation here. They had a major problem. And they were counting on the Apache Rescue Team (ART) to help. Denali’s team consisted of himself, two adult interns, and sixteen kids from one of the poorest regions in Arizona.
Many of the youths had been referred to him by the Apache County Juvenile Court system. Several had been abused by alcoholic parents. Many had been in trouble with the law, and a few even had done time for felonies. The juvenile probation department sent these kids to Denali, whose job was to involve them in search and rescue in order to “straighten them up.”
That was the hope, anyway. And with Cale Shaffer’s help, Denali had trained them well. These kids knew their way around a camp stove and a carabiner. Their team was now part of the Mountain Rescue Association, and they had worked an Eco-Challenge event in Utah. But they were still kids. Thus far they had only participated in mock rescues and pounded the ground on a few easy searches. My God, didn’t this district ranger woman see that? But Denali didn’t have the heart to tell the ranger that, perhaps, he and his team were in over their heads. After what he’d seen today, it was obvious she needed all the help she could get.
* * *
For the rangers it began with a knock on the door of the ranger station. Outside, the Phantom Ranch ranger met two breathless teenage girls. “There’s a boy lying face down in the trail,” the girls said. The ranger called for help, grabbed a rescue pack, and ran down the trail. The day’s high had been 116 degrees. The ranger prepared himself to treat heat stroke. When he arrived he saw the last thing he wanted to see: two bystanders performing CPR on a ten-year-old boy with a blue face and a rectal temperature of 106 degrees.
“Pour creek water on him,” the ranger-medic yelled at bystanders. Two more ranger-medics and an EMT were flown in by helicopter. Fifty-six minutes after the first ranger’s arrival, the boy was cooled, intubated, defibrillated, placed on a stretcher, carried a quarter mile, and loaded into the helicopter that flew him to the emergency clinic on the South Rim. The rescuers left behind were still catching their breath when a hiker ran up and said, “A woman has collapsed on the trail!”
The rangers ran a hard half mile up the South Kaibab Trail before they reached an unconscious woman lying in the shade. A rectal thermometer recorded her core body temperature at 105 degrees. The woman was dying of heat stroke. The rangers poured water on her and asked bystanders to fan the woman to increase the evaporative cooling. The rangers loaded the patient, a heavy woman, onto their stretcher and ran her back down the trail to the nearest spot where a helicopter could land. Immediately after dropping off the boy on the rim, the helicopter pilot returned to pick up the woman.
Within two hours after the knock on the ranger station door, park rangers had treated two patients dying of heat stroke and evacuated one of them out of the Grand Canyon. The woman’s life was saved; th
e ten-year-old boy was pronounced dead after more than an hour of advanced lifesaving measures.
An hour later, Denali sat down at a picnic table in Mather Campground and told Cale his side of the story. That afternoon, the Corridor district ranger, a woman in her early thirties with a strong Tennessee accent, picked him up in her Jeep Cherokee. She brought him to her cluttered office on the second floor of a rustic ranger station, where she gave Denali the T-shirts and the Park Service radio frequencies. The district ranger briefed him on the recent rash of trail fatalities. Four hikers had already died this year, and three of those deaths had been heat related. The first heat stroke fatality of the summer, on June 6, involved a fifteen-year-old Boy Scout. (Grand Canyon rangers would respond to 482 rescue missions in 1996. By Thanksgiving, eight hikers would die of heat illness or cardiac arrest. To date, the summer of 1996 is still, by a far margin, the deadliest hiking season in the park’s history.)
The ranger outlined to Denali the role she wanted his team to play. She called it PSAR, or preventive search and rescue. His team would hang out near the top of the most popular park trails and warn all hikers of the hazards. His team would also respond to minor emergencies on the trail so that the rangers could focus on the critical cases. She apologized. There wasn’t much time to orient his team, but she had managed to assign a ranger to help out for a few hours tomorrow morning. Then they would be on their own.
Denali was about to ask the district ranger to define “minor emergency” when their conversation was interrupted by an urgent call. A boy: unconscious and unresponsive at the bottom of the canyon near Phantom Ranch. Denali listened and watched. It sounded as though the kid wasn’t going to survive. More calls came in. A dumpster was on fire in Mather Campground. At the entrance gate a park visitor was refusing to pay his entrance fee. Outside the ranger office, sirens wailed and helicopters buzzed. The district ranger coached another female ranger—a tall, lanky blond who was coordinating the multiple rescue operations over the phone and a radio. When the dispatcher reported that a woman had collapsed on the South Kaibab Trail, the district ranger (me) turned to the other female ranger (Mary) and asked, “So, do you still think it’s busier at Yosemite?”
Ranger Confidential Page 14
