Climbers flown to safety after avalanche sweeps summit ambitions

Two climbers survived a size two avalanche on Mount Woolley during an extremely busy week for the local rescue community. On July 20 Jasper dispatchers received a call just before noon with the distress call that two mountaineers had been injured after being caught in an avalanche while attempting to climb 3,405 metre Mount Woolley, located in the Sunwapta River Valley in the Winston Churchill Range of Jasper National Park. The party was carrying a radio and reached rescuers on the Parks Canada radio frequency.

“Both were alive, conscious and needed evacuation,” said Rupert Wedgwood, public safety specialist for Jasper National Park. The climbers had been swept downhill by a slab avalanche while attempting to ascend a snow-filled gully leading to the mountain’s summit ridge. One 46-year-old male suffered a fractured ankle and lacerations to his chest after the other climber, a 39-year-old male, tumbled down the slope and crashed into his friend with his crampons. The 39-year-old had head trauma, a broken elbow and was experiencing difficulty breathing, according to Wedgwood. “He seemed to be concussed,” Wedgwood said.

A third, female member of the party, had decided to back down from the climb after an earlier avalanche rumbled down a different gully. She was perched on a nearby rock ledge “in no imminent danger.” But the position of the two injured mountaineers was precarious. Serac danger, avalanche hazard and rock fall danger were still present when rescuers reached the party via helicopter, a machine obtained from partnering technicians in Revelstoke. The injured men were also surrounded by crevasses and the glacier’s nearby bergschrund was threatening, too.

“Our solution was to put on our avalanche gear but not unclip from the line,” Wedgwood said. Long lining into the rescue site from beneath the helicopter, rescuers secured the climbers to the line, one at a time, and transported them to a nearby staging area. Once there, they administered basic first aid and packaged the victims for transport to an awaiting ambulance on the Icefields Parkway.

Just as the team was finishing up, however, another call came over the radio, this time signalling a code red incident taking place near the Mount Edith Cavell Meadows trail. Dispatchers relayed the message that a 10-year-old boy was playing on the large moraine boulders when one of the rocks rolled on top of him. He was reportedly bleeding profusely and had two broken legs. “Given the age of the subject we really needed to get there quickly,” Wedgwood said.

A second helicopter was deployed—this time from Hinton—and after being fitted with the requisite rescue gear flew quickly to the accident site. One hour after the call came in, medical technicians were on-site with the child, who along with his family was visiting Jasper from Chile. The child, whose injuries were significant, was soon flown to an awaiting STARS air ambulance at the Parks Canada compound. “Those moraines are unstable,” Wedgwood said. “Having children under close supervision in unfamiliar environments is never a bad idea.”

The climbers on Mount Woolley were experienced in the mountains but made a couple of errors in judgement as the day got away from them. For one, there was no freeze the night before, making the 25-30 mm of precipitation which had fallen in the previous days more susceptible to avalanches. Secondly, the group got away late in the morning after arriving at their bivouac site at 2 a.m. “By the time they were in the couloir that’s really the time you want to be reaching the summit,” Wedgwood said. “Their timing was off.” Wedgwood reiterated the hazards of having high risk tolerance and big ambitions. “They had a lot of experience but they were on a bit of a mission,” he said. “They wanted to get this peak and there was a bit of summit fever going on.”