Many stories get written about backcountry rescues and the teams that pull them off — but this story is about the witnesses.
It was a beautiful, clear August morning, and Maria felt hopeful about her third attempt to hike the Ten Mile Traverse between Frisco and Breckenridge. She and her friend Barbara had started at 3:00 am from the Frisco side of the route, summiting Mount Victoria, then Peak 1.
The Ten Mile Traverse is nothing to sneeze at, even for very fit and experienced hikers and trailrunners. Spanning nearly 20 miles and crossing twelve peaks with 8000 feet of elevation gain, it includes some technical terrain and challenging route-finding between Peaks 1 and 4. Maria had tried it twice before, once stymied by a friend with a fear of heights and a second time aborting the effort on Peak 1 because she didn’t feel physically up to it. She was hoping for success this time.
On Peak 2, Maria and Barbara were overtaken by three trailrunners. They stopped to take photos and chat briefly. “Have fun!” they called as they continued ahead.
After Peak 2, Maria and Barbara ran into another pair of hikers. One of them, Leila, turned out to be the parent of a former preschool student of Maria’s. With a connection established, Maria asked if she and Barbara could follow Leila and her friend, who were more familiar with the route, and they continued as a group of four. Ahead, they could see the trailrunners on the most challenging part of the route – the “Dragon,” an intimidating knife’s edge ridge between Peaks 2 and 3.
Fortunately, there’s a route that bypasses the Dragon by descending on the Copper Mountain side of the ridge and around. As the group of four walked past the most perilous part of the ridge, they noticed the three trailrunners had split up; two of them had managed to get down from the ridge and onto the bypass route, but one of them, Allison, was perched perilously on a small ledge, about 25 vertical feet above the hikers. She was clearly panicked. All four of the hikers in Maria’s group had climbing experience and they gave her advice as she tried fruitlessly to get down from the ledge. Facing outward and visibly shaking, she tried to get her foot steady below her but it slipped. She fell, ragdolling 40 or 50 feet.
“We thought we were watching this person die,” Maria says. “She was falling fast, bouncing off rocks, careening past us. I’ll never forget her scream, but there was relief as well as horror when I heard it because it meant she was still alive.”
A lone, tiny pine tree on the steep, rocky slope below the trail slowed her fall just enough that she finally came to a stop. Maria yelled to Barbara to get her Garmin in-Reach out and call for help, then she scrambled down below the trail to get to the fallen trailrunner, grateful for the first aid class she had recently taken. She saw Allison had a compound fracture in her lower leg with a badly bleeding gaping hole. Maria knew she had to stop the bleeding. Allison’s friend took her shirt off and Maria bound the leg tightly. “I’m so sorry, but we’ve got to move your leg,” Maria told Allison as they tried to use the shirt as a tourniquet.
Leila called her husband, an EMT, for advice. He told her to put a hiking pole into the shirt and turn it to increase the constriction. The group used some KT tape to hold it in place, and within a few minutes, the bleeding stopped.
The group of seven didn’t know it yet, but this was just the beginning of a six hour ordeal that would bond them and keep them in touch long after the event.
Their attention turned to keeping Allison as comfortable as possible while they waited for help. She had come to rest in a shaded area and they didn’t think they should move her, so their next task was to try and keep her warm. They pooled all their clothing. A few more hikers and trailrunners came by and everyone stopped to check on them and offer help. Some of them donated clothing, which the group promised to get back to them. One pair of trailrunners and another pair of hikers stayed to help. Leila continued to talk with contacts in emergency services, getting advice and updates on the rescue efforts. Allison was in a lot of pain and Leila got permission to give her ibuprofen. They realized her wrist was probably also broken, and she talked of pain in her other leg.
Meanwhile, the Summit County Rescue Group was scrambling its resources. The mission coordinator on duty, Charles, had put out a page to SCRG’s volunteer responders asking any available members who were trained to fly with Flight for Life to meet at FFL’s hangar in Frisco. Charles knew that landing zones near the patient were unlikely – the group has had rescues in this area before – so he also asked one of the Summit County Sheriff’s Office special operations technicians who work with the team to begin the process of requesting a hoist through CSAR’s state coordinators.
Allison was angled diagonally across the slope and felt like she was sliding. The group discussed whether to move her; they couldn’t be certain there were no head or spine injuries. Finally, at her request, they turned her very slowly so she was parallel to the slope and put backpacks under her leg to elevate it. Allison’s boyfriend Jacob and the two hikers who had joined the group after the accident took turns standing on an angle and holding her foot very still. Others propped up the backpacks from below to keep them from slipping. Drawing on her early childhood education background, Maria rubbed Allison’s head to keep her calm. “I hope this isn’t weird,” she told her.
The morning stretched on. The group saw FFL’s Lifeguard 2 helicopter from Frisco circle, fly away, then circle and fly away again. The EMS contacts that were keeping Leila informed told her they could not find a landing zone. A curious mountain goat approached the group, and Maria and Allison wondered out loud if they should read anything into the goat’s visit. Any distraction from Allison’s fear and pain and Maria’s anxiety was a welcome one.
At about 11:00 am, two hours after the accident, Lifeguard 2 dropped a paramedic from Summit Fire & EMS on Peak 4 and he began hiking toward the patient. One of the trailrunners sprinted up to take one of his bags and lighten his load. Shortly after, two teams of technical rescuers from SCRG flew in and also began hiking. The civilian group moved out of the way with relief when the paramedic arrived but stayed on hand to help him as he assessed Allison and gave her pain medication.
Back at the FFL hangar, the command team had reached a CSAR state coordinator to start the hoist approval process with the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. The on-call state coordinators were already coordinating a hoist in Gunnison County involving an injured speed flier, but off-call coordinators quickly jumped in to help carry the additional load. They were at first concerned that the patient location was going to be difficult for a cable extraction due to the angle of the slope next to Allison. Photos taken by Lifeguard 2 and by the Summit County Sheriff’s Office drone, however, put that concern to rest. The Colorado National Guard’s High Altitude Aviation Training Site (HAATS) in Eagle County was approved to fly the mission with hoist rescue technicians from Mountain Rescue Aspen, and a Blackhawk with the call sign Talon 5 flew from Eagle Airport to pick up the rescue techs in Glenwood just after noon.
Shortly after 1:00 pm, the group watched as Talon 5 hovered above them, lowering the Mountain Rescue Aspen rescue tech on a cable. The civilian rescuers breathed a collective sigh of relief once Allison had been hoisted into the Blackhawk and flown away, headed for the Frisco ballfield to be transferred to FFL’s Lifeguard 2.
Once Allison was safely gone, SCRG rescuer Zac asked the group of civilians what they wanted to do. “Does anyone want to keep hiking?” he asked them. No one did. Two of the trailrunners opted to turn back and run to Frisco the way they had come. The others, including Maria, wanted to get down whatever way the SCRG crew chose. The SCRG rescuers assessed the route and determined they could hike up Peak 4 and descend the Wheeler Trail, or go straight down the scree field between Peaks 3 and 4. They chose the scree field. The group, now totalling nine civilians and five rescuers, lined up across the field to avoid sending rockfall down on each other, with the rescuers spread out between the civilians. SCRG member Kyle talked to the group, easing their discomfort. “You’ve all just been through something emotionally stressful,” he told them. “It may or may not have hit you yet, but we would encourage you to exchange contacts and stay in touch. You can help one another immensely by supporting each other through this shared experience; it will help you process it.” He told them they were all connected now, and Maria realized she already knew that. They began to descend together, slowly and carefully, and Maria also realized that the rescuers were there for her and the other bystanders just as much as for the patient.
Leila had called her husband, the EMT, before they started down, and he had promised to drive up the Miner’s Creek trail as far as possible and meet them. A storm was approaching but the group took their time, not risking any further injuries. The descent took about an hour and a half, including some route-finding and bushwacking, and Maria and Barbara kept their minds on the task at hand. Once they reached the top of the Miner’s Creek trail, they were surprised to find not only Leila’s husband, but many trucks, ATVs and rescuers from SCRG and SCSO waiting for them. Barbara was the first to break into tears of relief. For Maria, it wasn’t until they got back to her car at Miner’s Creek. Flooded by emotion and still imagining Allison ragdolling through the rocks, she sobbed.
The group kept in touch through a text thread, at first sharing daily updates on Allison’s recovery from Jacob, and finding more local connections between them as they talked over the next year. Leila’s son had Allison as his first grade teacher. SCRG member Kyle enrolled his son in Maria’s school the next year, and one day he came in wearing his team jacket. After some chitchat, they recognized each other. They also discovered that Barbara’s counselor volunteered with SCRG. Summit County, ever growing and changing, remains a small community at heart.
On the one-year anniversary of Allison’s accident, Jacob reported that she’d had a successful second surgery and had been cleared to begin learning to run again. Maria started to think about making another attempt on the Ten Mile Traverse before the end of the season, and this time, she decided to go alone. She left a detailed plan with her husband, packed all the essentials – including a tourniquet in her first aid kit – and set off early one September morning.
Once she passed Peak 2 and approached the Dragon, Maria felt some anxiety. Her heart raced as she picked her way cautiously around the Dragon ridge. She had flashbacks from the accident, reminding her that Allison’s accident could happen to anyone, including her. She was aware of every step, every rock. She saw a group of hikers on the ridge, looking uncomfortable, and she stopped to talk to them, advising them to take the bypass route. She was relieved when they did.
She stopped to call her husband and he listened patiently, letting her work through the emotions. Then she continued to the accident spot.
The little tree that had stopped Allison’s fall was still bent over from its trauma, but still growing too. Maria stood silently for a moment, thinking about the contradictions of the mountains – beautiful and terrible, scary and exciting, and completely impervious to those passing through. She felt grateful to have made it back to this spot. She had a sense of calm empowerment that comes with having prepared well and learned a few things about managing risks in the backcountry. She realized she wasn’t going to make it to the end of the traverse, once again – and that was OK. As she came down from Peak 5, headed for the Miner’s Creek trail, she saw the scree field they had descended after the accident and knew no camera could catch the essence of what she felt in that moment – gratitude. Gratitude for what she’d experienced, the lessons learned, the people she’d met and the mountains she had successfully traversed. Kyle had been right about the importance of taking time to process it all. With a victory yell, she headed down to her car. Maybe she’d be back to try again next summer.
This story was written with extensive input from Maria and permission from the rescue subject. Most names have been changed to protect privacy.