2 Attachment(s)
Came across an injured Canyoneer in Imlay (what would you do)
I need some armchair quarterbacking here guys. I had trouble sleeping last night based on the decision I made in a canyon yesterday. :(
So I did Orderville yesterday with some friends. 8 people in our group including two small children about 8 years old. We had a blast but didn't make the best time as you can imagine. Too many polywogs and other critters to play, took way to many pictures of us doing backflips into pools, got a late start, etc, etc, etc. No biggie though we arrived at the junction for Oderville and Virgin around 6:30PM. Again approx times, my cell was in my drybox, didn't have a watch on me, so I could be off a bit on my timeline.
Two people show up while we are inflating our floats for the Virgin and are in frantic mode, a person in their group just fell off the last rap in Imlay, leg broke, they are going to get help, how far do they need to go, who do they even talk to, yadda yadda. We give them info and they are on their way down. A couple of us head up to see if we can help. One guy in our group is a Red Cross First Responder (more on that later).
We arrive on the scene and our first responder guy takes over. Well maybe "takes over" is not the right words, but he starts asking questions and checking the person's wounds, we get her in a warm emergency blanket and we have some inflatable rafts that we were going to use to float down the narrows like this:
Attachment 46347
We blow 2 of them up and put her on one, get her out of her wetsuit, and under the emergency blanket, give her some Ibuprofin for the pain. Her boyfriend/significant other is hugging her and she is warmed, up and doing really good. Again I'm not a doctor I just play one in the bedroom. She had some shock obviously and her foot is killing her, but nothing else serious as near as I can tell. Again though, I freely admit I know nothing. Our First Reponder team member is evaluating her still. He is pushing on her leg "does it hurt here, here, can you point your toes?", etc.
So here is the prognosis. Her foot is not swollen at all under the neoprene socks. Never took them off though, that would be too painful. She feels no pain touching the top of her legs, even her ankles are fine. Very very tender underneath (pads of foot) though, but she also mentions she has a huge blister there and it could be contributing. She can point her toes up just fine, but pushing down on my buddies hand is very painful. His evaluation seems to indicate a small fracture or ankle sprain of some sort. She can't walk out of the canyon but nothing life threatening or dangerous like hemmoraging, bones poking out, or such.
I do a little discreet/casual asking the other members about what happened, not too much prodding cause they feel like shit right now, and this is not the time for them to relive this incident. Our main focus should be to survive this ordeal and think about it later. So as near as I can tell (again I didn't press far) she clipped on the wrong side of the biner block and took a 150 foot semi free fall, as fast as the rope can pull through the ring I guess. to the bottom. I've not done Imlay's last rap, but I guess it's a sketchy start and you can only have one person on the setup and she was first down. They say she was very experienced but probably fatigue just made her do a bad judgement call.
So I look over to where she fell and it is literally a miracle. There are huge 1-2 foot river rocks everywhere, but the spot where the rope drops is cleared for a 5 foot radius and there is maybe a foot of water puddle there. Not much to break a fall at all. She is lucky to be even alive. But this will factor into the decision later.
So hopefully I've described her condition enough. She looks perfectly fine except for a nasty sprained ankle basically. It's now approaching 7-7:30ish. I'm guessing the portion of her group that left will be hitting the paved section of the riverwalk by about now, if they were able to haul ass. Another 15 mins they will be able to reach the buses and call the calvary/heavy hitters in. So even factoring best response times ever, it will probably take them another half hour/45 mins to reach the end of the paved section, then another 45 mins to an hour to hike the 2 miles up this nasty, slippery, giant marble playground, carrying a heavy board/liter. So very best response time would put them an 1.5 hours and mediocre response time would put them there and 2.5 hours. And again, how long would it take 4 people to carry a super heavy cart up a well flowing river. I'm assuming 4 of them minimum? What if they had 6 responders? LOL. I'm trying to factor all the equation in my head and figure out crap I literally have zero clue about.
But my best guess is that there is no way they are going to be able to get her out of here before the sun goes down around 8:45. No way..... And it's a narrow canyon and it's already starting to get dark and chilly.
So I take a hard cold look at her. She is around 24-25ish, weighs maybe 125 pounds max. Between our two groups we have 7 more than capable guys who can carry her out of this canyon RIGHT frigging now. We have 2 inflatable rafts that we can use to float her through the easy sections. Yeah we'll go slow, but I think we can get her out of here (the paved section) in 2.5 hours, which would put us around 9:15-9:30ish, not too far in the dark and we have headlamps. Here is a random pic of the area, try to imagine spending a freezing night here.
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I take a cold hard look at the surroundings. There is water everywhere. She is laying on an inflated raft and quite comfortable at this point. But there are 3 more guys in her group that are going to be miserable. Everyone has wetsuits. But there is not an inch of ground around that doesn't have river rocks on it, there is at least an inch of water everywhere, there is a little sandbar maybe 3 feet across and 7 feet long that has water running on both sides that would probably be the only place for them to sleep. And this water is freezing cold and the 100 degrees temps aren't sticking around for long with the sun going down. The Narrows is a cold and getting colder! I'm starting to shiver just sitting there without a wetsuit. Once the sun goes down there will be no time left to make a change in plans.
So I ask our first responder guy what he thinks, he is the closest thing we have to an expert around. He says he doesn't think we should mover her under any circumstances and we should just wait for help to arrive. And we (us) will make sure to get out before the sun goes down and makes the way impossible to travel. He had not done this route before but I tell him its about 3 miles and 2 miles of that are these nasty impossible conditions that makes it very slow going. We ask her what she wants to do and she says she doesn't want to move and wants to wait for help too.
But I just can't shake the fact they we have 7 very capable guys and 2 or 3 girls who could haul her skinny ass out of there. I feel that hypothermia is a very valid concern. They have matches to start a fire, but there is zero wood around and even if they did hike and find a couple logs, I doubt they could make a fire. The place they are staying in is absolute crap and maybe we can at least find a better spot, with sand and bushes maybe to keep them out of the wind. I know these spot exist from last years trip, I just can't recall how far down the river they actually were. I'm guessing the water temp is around 55ish and pretty soon the canyon is going to get to the same temp. And most likely rescue isn't coming due to the extreme lateness in the day. So I plead my case but very clearly state it's opinion more than fact. I would not want to spend the night in that place under any circumstances. In the end they decide to stay and wait for rescue. I leave and mentally beat myself up the whole way down the Narrows. Rolling the 2 choices in my head over and over again and the pro's and con's of each. It's like a no win situation really.
So we are cold, we left all our flotation devices with them, 2 matresses and a 4 inflatable donuts, which could maybe be used for pillows or a backrest or something, who knows. But something is better than nothing. We leave her wrapped in our emergency blanket and really quite comfy I think.
We make good time down the narrows and arrive at the bottom just as two rangers are getting there. One has a huge pack on her back. We talk to them and they are very capable, I immediately got a sense of ease that they would handle the situation well. My first responder buddy gives them all the details of his analysis of the victim in a factual manner. Ranger asks for an exact location and I tell her. I don't know this for a fact but it "seems" to me that they were under the impression that the injured party were stuck at the bottom of mystery! I honestly think the previous two that went to alert gave them the wrong information in their panic. The ranger played it cool but I detected many corrections being made once I gave her this information, a sense of dismay/disappointment on her part. As you may know Mystery is maybe 1/4 mile up the river and would have made a much easier rescue than this 2 mile trek from where they were.
We then asked if we could know their plans and they said that it was too risky in the dark for the narrows, they would most likely have a medic stay the night up there with them and then rescue in the morning. But since we still had 45 mins of daylight maybe they might have a couple other options still available and she was going to research those now with her team on the radio.
We walked the last mile to the buses and passed a lot of rangers coming up on the way with all kinds of rescue equipment. Got to the parking lot at 9:00. Went to Oscars and pounded some beers/burgers with my buddies, went home. I still don't know what the fate was or how it all worked out in the end.
So anyways, I still can't wrap my head around this and would appreciate advice. Yes moving an injured person down the narrows is very dangerous, but she was very light and not really that badly injured IMO. But maybe she had more injuries that could present themselves once the shock wore off and maybe she was worse off than the twisted ankle we detected. Maybe rescue has some backdoor entrance to use and us changing her location would totally screw them up. Maybe one us slips while carrying her down and she falls and smacks her head on the boulders going down, we actually jack her up worse than she is? Maybe she gets hypothermic from us floating her so much. But::::
What if we all carried/floated her down the narrows flawlessly, got her to the rescue crews waiting and it was a happy ending? Plus we would kinda feel like "heroes" instead of "erring on the side of caution pansies"? Maybe my ego is really big thinking we could have saved her from this awful situation and it could have had disatrous consequences. Maybe they all got hypothermia and died once we left them?
:ne_nau:
