It was July of 2018, and the Grand County Sheriff’s Office had received multiple distress calls from a SPOT satellite communications device. Grand County dispatch identified the location as the north face of Lone Eagle Peak, near Monarch Lake. The sheriff’s office paged Grand County Search and Rescue (GCSAR) just before 2:00 pm and GCSAR set up a command post at Granby Airport.
Grand County generally has very little technical terrain for the team to service, but Lone Eagle Peak is an exception. “It’s our worst nightmare when we get a call there,” says mission leader Greg Foley, “because it’s an eight-mile hike each way, then potentially a vertical rock evacuation, depending on where the patient is. We’ve had many calls there, some of them involving fatalities.”
The SPOT device notifications had come in from emergency contacts as well as from the service center, so GCSAR was eventually able to get details. A 52-year-old experienced male climber had been climbing a ten-pitch route on the north face of Lone Eagle Peak with two friends when he fell. His wife told the incident command team that he had fallen and his friends suspected he might have head, back and rib injuries.
GCSAR’s incident command team, consisting of Greg Foley, Leonard Davidson and Mike Blevins, immediately began enlisting aviation resources. Greg Foley is a CSAR state coordinator as well as a mission leader for GCSAR. He requested that his colleague, CSAR state coordinator Bruce Fosdick from Douglas County SAR, put a Colorado Army National Guard helicopter on standby from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora. He also requested responders from Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG), a team known for its technical rock rescue expertise. A team of six from RMRG was dispatched to the Boulder Airport to stand by for pick-up by a Black Hawk helicopter from Buckley.
The team also requested a flyover by Flight for Life (FFL) to get eyes on the situation. After Lifeguard 1, the FFL helicopter from Denver, flew over the scene they returned to the Granby Airport to pick up a team of three GCSAR technical rescuers and fly them as close to the subject as possible. Landing zones were challenging, but FFL was able to save them about five hours of hiking by flying them to within an hour of the base of the peak. From there, they had another hour of scrambling to reach the patient.
At the same time, the command team dispatched a ground response team from GCSAR to begin hiking from Monarch Lake. They were instructed to make contact with any hikers that might have witnessed the fall on their way up. They ran into a climber running down the trail, who turned out to be one of the injured climber’s friends. They escorted him back to the command post, where he was able to describe the injuries in detail. He said the subject had been lead climbing and was ten feet above his last rock protection when he fell about 20 feet and rolled another ten to twenty feet. He hit his helmet and damaged it, and his back and ribs struck the wall. The friend belayed him down to a safe ledge, one pitch from the top, where he remained.
It was now after 7:00 pm, and FFL’s Lifeguard 1 had to leave but called in Lifeguard 2 from Frisco to stand by for further needs. In the meantime, the Black Hawk had picked up two RMRG hoist rescue technicians and was attempting to lower one to the patient. The winds were swirling and gusting up to 30 miles per hour. The Black Hawk made several aborted attempts to lower the rescue technician and was finally successful on the fourth attempt. It then lowered a litter and another rescue technician, who packaged the injured climber in the litter so he could be hoisted by cable up to the helicopter.
It was about 8:30 pm when the Black Hawk landed at Granby Airport with the patient and transferred him to the waiting FFL helicopter for transport to a Denver hospital.
The GCSAR teams that were flown in still had a long night ahead of them. Their hike back to Monarch Lake took until 1:40 am. But the teams were very fortunate that the Buckley and FFL helicopters were able to fly that evening in challenging high winds. Otherwise, it would have been a large, complex technical mission requiring RMRG to assist GCSAR in the lengthy and risky ground rescue of an injured subject with a possible broken back and/or head injury. The team estimates it would likely have taken about 24 hours to complete, including an eight-mile litter carry to Monarch Lake, putting the subject in danger of worsened injuries.
The Colorado Army National Guard pilot, Todd Stansbury, who had been flying since 1991, said it was one of the most difficult extractions he had ever performed. Dale Wang, one of the RMRG rescue technicians, commented, ““The hoist rescue was difficult for many reasons, including the location of the subject in technical terrain and the gusty winds. We were successful because of the skill of the pilots and hoist operators, and the teamwork that is a result of our regular training for these types of incidents.”
