Part Two:
SH: It is now June 7th, and Brad is here and going to tell a couple more stories and add a couple of things that we omitted before. So, Steve Michel asked me to get you to tell a story about some cougar hunters in Jaffray.
BW: Oh yes …. It’s a bit of a long story but we can call it “I hope you aren’t allergic to feathers?” Anyhow, Steve worked with us one winter in Banff on the avalanche program. We got a call late one afternoon from what in those days was the PEP taskforce folks. Basically, a request for assistance from Fernie SAR (Search And Rescue) for an ice climber who had fallen. That was the call. So, Lance was the pilot, and Steve and I took off, because it was getting late in the day and we flew down. The weather was getting worse, so I was trying to organize some logistics from the air to make use good use of time and use the radio repeaters to talk through dispatch. At any rate I was trying to find out who the Fernie SAR contact was, and what frequency we were going to be on, and what the back-up plan was essentially. Finally, just as we were about to go out of radio, we got a call and they said, “We got a hold of Fernie SAR and Parks is looking after it.”
I said, “Yes, that’s us but it doesn’t look like very good flying, and we need a bit of a back-up plan if this doesn’t work. They have to put together a bit of a ground team too, for this guy. Anyhow, we get there, and we are flying around near the coordinates that we were given and looking for a waterfall. There’s no waterfall. So eventually I manage to phone from the helicopter and get a hold of a reporting person. He said, “Oh ya, you flew right over me. We’re in the slide path to your south. It turned out we didn’t have good information, which isn’t that unusual, but it was actually a cougar hunter not an ice climber. His dog had run off chasing a cougar and didn’t come back. He made arrangements with Bighorn Helicopter in Cranbrook for he and a friend to get a lift to try to find the dog, because the dog had a GPS collar on it, that was worth some money and it hadn’t moved for several days, so he was pretty sure he’d lost the dog, but he wanted the collar back. So, he and his buddy got a ride up there, and found the dog and retrieved the collar and then their plan was to walk home. So, they started walking home along the ridge and this was a week after a really, really big atmospheric river event where the freezing level had gone to 3000 meters and there was ice right to the ridge tops. What they decided to do …. there had been a little bit of fresh snow, and they thought they’d short-cut across this avalanche path instead of staying on the ridge. And it was solid ice underneath and one guy slipped. He just started sliding out of control. The only thing that stopped him was he hit a small tree in the avalanche path. There started to be a few trees in the path and he broke one off with a shoulder and I’m not sure how many injuries he had, but he had a couple of broken ribs and dislocated shoulder. He was hurting a bit. So now the weather is getting bad, and Lance says, “Well I might have one chance to get you in there.”
Anyways, Steve and I tried a couple of times and finally we got in on the ground and so Lance calls and says I’m not coming back, because it was white. So fair enough, and now it’s starting to snow quite a bit and we get to this guy and he’s okay, he was tough and having a little trouble breathing but not in danger of dying, let’s put it that way. He was a bit cold because cougar hunters …. they seem to wear this cotton cammo, not really outdoor gear.
At any rate I had just got this brand new 800 fill down jacket and I managed very carefully without too much pain, to get it on him and then we put him in a bivy sack and started pulling him down the avalanche path which didn’t go to badly at the top. He was still in a fairly steep terrain but as we got closer to the valley, the angle eased off a bit and there were a lot more trees, so it wasn’t great going.
Now it’s nearly dark and still snowing. So, we found a nice spot and I said to Steve “We’re going to have to spend the night here. That’s all there is to that.” And we’re looking at what we had in our packs which wasn’t too much. He said, “Maybe we should carry some more stuff when we go the next time.” We had some extra clothes and a couple of bivy sacks so we would probably have been fine but anyway while he’s making the spot a little more comfortable for the patient I said “Well, I’ll scout out the route here a little bit and see what it’s going to be like from here”, because we got to a point where it goes into quite a steep canyon. I got down to the canyon which wasn’t too far away, and I see this guy walking up the creek. So, I called him.
SH: Is it dark, is it still night?
BW: Oh ya, it’s getting dark at that point it’s late dusk and we are just settling in. He was from Kootenay SAR and I said, “Are you coming to help?” and he says “Yes I’m the first guy but they’re getting a team together.” So, we’re definitely not flying. “So how far down to the truck?” “Oh, just an hour.”
Maybe we can get the patient out tonight if you’ve got some other people coming but we’re going to need a stretcher and a rope because to get into the canyon where he was, was a fairly steep eroded gully wall that was in some places vertical but in most places 40 or 50 degrees or more.
So that’s how this started to go. More SAR folks started to show up, including Kirsten Knechtel from Banff, because she was guiding at Powder Cowboy at the time. And we got the patient to the edge of where we had to do this lower, down into the canyon. There was going to be two rope lengths …. we were going to have to transfer the weight of the stretcher to the second rope. Now it’s snowing pretty hard and meanwhile a few of the cougar hunter’s friends have showed up. They’ve heard about what’s going on so they’ve come to offer their assistance, but they’re not really trained, and they’re not really dressed very well. It’s a little bit sideways because now it’s more of a volunteer SAR group thing than us being in charge. We were just there but we are organizing the rope lower. We got the first lower ready to go. Steve is up there with some of the guys from Fernie SAR. So, I said “Well I’ll go down and I’ll set up the second anchor so when you get there, you can just quickly transfer the load and keep the lower going of the stretcher.
To get down from where we were lowering him, there was a little cliff. I didn’t have very much in my pack. I think I had one 5-meter 8 mil cord or something and tied it off as a hand line and started working my way down. The rope ran out right in the steepest spot of course, so I had to down climb a little further on some really steep ground and then I got down to where there was a good tree to set up this anchor.
Meanwhile the snowflakes are now falling as big as robin’s eggs and everything is happening in the dark with headlamps. While I’m setting up the anchor, I hear this horrifying shriek and I turn my head and in the flash of the headlamp I see this figure clad in cammo, just falling sideways through the air. He just smoked by in the light of the headlamp and the falling snow. Well, it was one of the cougar hunters and he decided he’d follow me down the way I went. He got to the end of the hand line and fell off. Anyways, he lands in a heap at the bottom and some of his friends go over and dust him off.
He said “I’m okay, I’m okay” so we carried on but of course it wasn’t an hour down to where the truck was. It was really slippery and the bottom of the creek with these giant boulders that are now covered in eight or ten centimeters of wet snow. Trying to manhandle a stretcher down there in the middle of the night. I just remember looking back one time and seeing Kirsten slip off a rock and she just disappeared in a pool of water and the only thing sticking out was her hand, hanging onto the stretcher, still holding it up.
Eventually we got down, and now it’s about two in the morning or something, and they managed to get a four-wheel drive truck with chains up there, and we put the patient in that truck and then we walked the rest of the way. We got down to where the ambulance could drive to, and I knocked on the door of the ambulance and I said, “I’m with the rescue team, can I come in?” And the answer was “I hope you’re not allergic to feathers?” because the ambulance attendant had just taken a set of shears and cut up both sides of my brand new 800 fill jacket and the entire inside of the ambulance was just full of down.
SH: That’s a great story.
BW: Of course it didn’t end right there, because we’re stuck out there now. The police took us to Fernie, and we spent the night in a hotel. Lance is there, but now we’ve got the helicopter that was parked at the staging area overnight in a snow storm. And of course, it’s a big wet storm, but the storm is now more or less passed. We get to the helicopter, and it’s just coated in about a quarter inch of clear ice and then covered over with about 10 centimeters of snow because there were no covers or anything. So how are we going to deal with this? We decided we’d go up to Powder Cowboy and see if they can lend us some ladders and hot water. We eventually got there, but because the roads were so slippery one of their vans had gone off the road and a tree had fallen on the road so it was probably an hour by the time we helped get their van back on the road and cleared a trail over to the lodge ….. but they lent us some ladders and a couple of those giant tea thermoses, and we probably spent an hour and a half, just basically melting all the ice off all the surfaces of the helicopter. But it started; it wasn’t cold so at least we got it going without heaters, and off we went.
SH: Great story. So, Brad is there anything else you didn’t tell me the other day that you’d like to tell me now?
BW: I was thinking about the fact that it was so nice when I was working that it was allowed to use the backcountry cabins with your friends and family, or have your friends or in my case, my soon to be wife come out and ride along with you on a shift. I recall Donna showing up on her own at Cyclone after riding her horse in and we had a lot of other great times together riding in the backcountry. We did lots of trips and then once we had kids they came along too. We started with them in snuggly’s and backpacks and eventually they were one in the front of you on the horse and one on a pony that we’d bought, and then they both had their own ponies and they could come along.
SH: Those were great days.
BW: One story I remember, my wife Donna, and she’ll tell you this, she has a nearly 100% wrong sense of direction. If it was just random, she’d be right 50% of the time right. Anyhow, we were going into Cyclone with Katy in February. She would have been about 8 months old or something like that. We’d arranged for Chris Worobets to give us a lift up to Deception Pass and it was a nice warm spring kind of day, and the temperature was above freezing but unfortunately there was a rescue that day. Some people were ice climbing on Silk Tassel and in the warm weather a big avalanche came down and knocked them off and there was a fatality. So, we were a bit late getting going after the rescue but eventually Mike McKnight looked over at Chris because Chris didn’t really know what to do and he said “Are you going to give them a lift or not …. Get out of here.” So, he gave us a lift with the double track up to the top of Boulder Pass and we skied from there. So, I had Katy in one of those kid backpacks and Donna was carrying a little pack with some supplies. We were just about to the cabin and it was starting to get dark, now because it was around five in the afternoon, and Katy was beginning to fuss. She probably needed her diaper changed so I said “I’ll tell you what, I’ll zip ahead and I’ll get the fire going and change her diaper and we’ll be all good, and it will be warm when you get there. So take your time”, because I could go faster. So, I got there and got the fire going, and got Katy out of all of her winter stuff and got her all settled with a bottle. She was all happy there, but no Donna. Then a little bit longer and I can’t wait any longer … this is too long, where could she be? Something must have gone wrong. So, Katy has to get packed back up into all her winter stuff and back in the backpack, which she didn’t really kick about too much, and off we went. And sure enough, there’s only one trail junction when you come out of that little Jones Pass coming down to Cyclone. Instead of going over to Cyclone and Red Deer Lakes she turned right and was headed over to Baker Creek. The trail was a bit hard, but I could see there was some fresh tracks on it. Eventually, I could see where she’d fallen over three or four times where her ski poles had poked through the soft snow. I’m hollering and she calls me back and I said, “If you want to spend a night in a cabin you should actually come this way.”
I took the pack and the baby, one in front and one in back and it wasn’t too much longer that we were in the nice warm Cyclone cabin, warming up. Katy was small enough she slept in the drawer…. You know those drawers underneath? We just built a little crib in the drawer.
SH: Oh, that’s perfect. You told me you also had a dog story you wanted to tell?
BW: Well, I was lucky to work with the dog program in the avalanche field. We used to train the RCMP dogmasters and take them out on trips. Some of them thought it was the worst experience of their year, to have to go out and winter camp for a few days, but Will Devlin got a dog in Jasper when I was there, and I did a little bit of work with him tracking and looking after his dog and we had some avalanche calls. But one of the things that happened there was we sent him off by himself as a dogmaster to an avalanche accident that was near Prince George. It turned out he was one of, or probably was, the most experienced avalanche guy on the scene, but also trying to be the dogmaster so it was difficult. In the end it was a multi-day search and it turned out they had put the staging area right on top of the victim because they didn’t have a good last seen point.
Eventually the dog did indicate, and they found him. We made it sort of a policy at that point, that we would never send dogmasters on their own, even to a request for assistance callout. We’d always bring somebody with them so that we were a team, which is better anyway, for the dogmaster because he’s busy with the dog and you get a second pair of eyes that is overseeing the safety and how things work and can probe and shovel when the dog indicates. The dogs were awesome as a rescue tool. If you were uncertain if somebody was buried, you could clear a fairly big avalanche in a matter of … a very short period of time that would take forever with a probe line.
I did a lot of work with Mike Henderson (Hendo)in Banff and we went as a team quite often to different calls. We never got any live recoveries but found several victims, and I worked with all of his dogs and I also helped him look after his dogs sometimes when he wasn’t’ there.
One time we had an avalanche at Norquay in bounds. It turned out that Hendo was away and his dog was in the kennel. There was also a CARDA (Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog) available but the handler Tim Ricci had just had knee surgery. So, we get this call and it’s right on the Norquay ski hill on an open run and they say “Oh we’ve got a landing area here for your helicopter.” They want us to land right where the avalanche is. They’ve got a flat spot to land right in the gully there and I’m looking out and it looks like only half of the start zone has released. Anyhow we jumped out and Steve Holeczi was with me. Steve goes “This isn’t very safe” and I’m agreeing with him. They had a whole bunch of people probing because there was an eyewitness that saw somebody in the avalanche. But none of the probers had beacons or anything.
SH: What run are you on, on Norquay?
BW: The same run that Bob Fuhrer’s dad was killed on, and Gord Peyto was nearly killed on. I think it’s called Bruno’s Gully, lookers right of the Lone Pine…He was warden ski patrol and skiing with Gordie Peyto and they triggered an avalanche in that gully. Gordie’s tips were hanging over the fracture line. There’s some history there.
SH: When would that have been?
BW: Late ‘60s, something like that.
SH: Okay so the CARDA dog isn’t available….
BW: Well, the CARDA dog is available but the handler…so we’re trying to get Hendo’s dog so I can work the scene with his dog, because we don’t want all these probers on there with no beacons. So, we kicked them off. Steve was quite adamant that we kick them off right away and he was right. So, Tim Ricci shows up; they’ve given him a ride up on the ski doo, but I didn’t really know his dog very well but he’s there, and he’s standing there in his crutches with his leg right out of surgery. So, he says, “You can work her, she knows what she’s doing”, and I’m working his dog and she’s doing okay for me. At any rate, Tim goes “What am I doing standing here? I can’t get out of the way.” So, I said, “Yes you should get out of here”, so off he goes on the back of the skidoo and his dog is working for me for little while but then his dog looks over and goes “Where’s my master?” He’s disappearing down the gully on the back of a ski-doo so off the dog just goes zoom. So that didn’t work. But just about then Hendo’s dog got there. I think it was Atilla, and she and I were friends. She was happy to work, and I wasn’t nearly as good as a handler obviously but I was pretty certain at that point…plus the interview we had with the guy who managed to get up to the side when the avalanche went by him…that there were only two people who were nearly involved and no one was buried. So, I got to actually work a dog on an avalanche one time. Then I talked to John Thornton, the head of avalanche control and said, “You’re going to have to do some avalanche control and we’ll check it again tomorrow.” So, they bombed the other half of the start zone and they buried where we were working about three meters deep.
SH: Wow, but no one was there.
BW: No one was buried. So, there’s a little bit about the dogs. (Tape 2:55 pm – 11:57)
BW: We were talking about the talented crews that we got once we became more of a specialized Public Safety group. I remember one of the guys that was hired. Steve Holeczi was on his first or second, or one of his early times of being the rescue leader for the day. He’s at his desk and I’m also in the office and the phone rings for the Rescue Leader and he’s taking some information, and I can tell that something is going on. Then he hangs up the phone and says, “Well we’ve got a rescue on the North Face of Temple.” I’m looking at him and it’s the middle of winter and I think he’s joking. Nobody climbs the North Face of Temple in winter, and those places like the North Face of Temple, the big faces like Alberta, those are places that you fear. You go from the office and suddenly you are in the middle of a giant place.
At any rate it was true. Steve House was trying to do a first winter ascent and had taken a big lead fall and hurt himself quite badly. A snow mushroom had fallen off or something. So off we go and Steve (Holeczi) is the Rescue Leader, and we’re talking about how we are going to deal with this.
So, we fly by and looking at where they are, which is on a really steep piece of terrain in the middle of the Greenwood/Locke about two thirds of the way up. He asked me what I thought about a rescue approach and I said, “Steve, I don’t think we need to get off onto the face. We can just go in and fly him down. He’s been hanging there for 40 minutes, so we can just fly him down to the bottom and deal with him there. He’s hanging in his harness anyways and it’s only a two minute flight. It’s easier than trying to haul him up and get him in a bag. We don’t want to be stuck on the North Face in the middle of winter either.” So, Steve’s with me on that, so we’d organize on a cell phone with his partner on how it was going to go, and Steve went in and basically just clipped the rope that was hanging to Steve House onto the anchor.
SH: Can you explain that more?
BW: Well, Steve (Holeczi) is on the sling rope under the helicopter and then hooks on to the rope that goes down to Steve House who is hanging below the anchor, and then he cuts the rope so he’s not tied to the anchor anymore but just hanging below the helicopter.
So now his partner is stuck there by himself in the middle of the North Face, so I get on the rope as soon as he drops Steve House, and I go to get his partner, but I remember him holding out this anchor to me “Do you want to clip?” No, no, I’m not clipping into anything. I clipped him to me and he’s pointing at the crampons and all their gear, and I’m going “No we are getting out of here.” I think that was with Paul Malone, but anyways another bunch of great flying by great pilots.
Nice to be with a guy like Steve who is very talented and had been in big places so if we’d had to get off it would have been handy to be with him. (3:10 pm Tape 4:21)
SH: Anything else you’d like to chat about?
BW: I think we’ve put a lot on paper.
White Family at Ghost River, Spring 2024
Katy, Finn inside still, Brad, Ginny, Donna and dog Willow
End/sh
