Shattered Air: A True Account of Catastrophe and Courage on Yosemite's Half Dome

by Bob Madgic

  On the summit, it took Jackson a few minutes in the blackness to locate the group huddled around the two victims. His sudden appearance, seemingly from out of nowhere, surprised everyone. A greatly relieved Crozier assumed he was a ranger and immediately began reporting on the injured. But Jackson stopped her, explaining he was in park maintenance and there to help only with logistics.

  When Campbell reached the summit, Jackson shouted to him. This time, the arrival of a uniformed ranger gave everyone a huge psychological boost. Crozier briefed Campbell on the victims, once again believing that, finally, she would be able to hand off the care of Weiner and Rice to someone else. Campbell quickly assessed the pair, checking mainly for any loss of vital functions and signs of trauma. He administered oxygen to Weiner, who appeared to be in worse shape. Then he told Crozier to carry on while he established a makeshift helicopter pad for a possible air evacuation.

  Campbell: “I concluded right away that some good stuff happened this night in terms of how the emergency was handled. Linda was able to provide accurate information on the injured and a sense of stability about the situation. I felt I could leave her in charge and go set up the landing pad. The best care for the two victims was to get them off the mountain as quickly as possible.”

  Campbell radioed his report to the dispatch center in the Valley. Experience told him that an air evacuation was still a long shot, given the moonlight’s small window of opportunity and the unpredictable sky. There were only two other options, neither of them good: A ground evacuation by Horner and his team, or an air evacuation at dawn. Next, Campbell radioed the Yosemite Medical Clinic to say the victims would need to be brought there as soon as possible after the rescue. One was in very bad shape, he reported, with labored breathing and compromised vital signs.

  After Campbell gave Crozier a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, he set out with Jackson to find a suitable LZ.

  Crozier took Rice’s and Weiner’s blood pressure. She couldn’t get a reading for either of them, which indicated their conditions were very precarious. The stethoscope told her that Rice’s breathing was okay but that there still was gurgling in Weiner’s lungs, an early symptom of deadly pulmonary edema.

  A calmer Rice again wanted to move now that help was in sight. Crozier said no. Esteban urged Rice to trust her judgment and told him he would be okay if he could just hold on a bit longer.

  As seconds ticked away, the helpers entered a suspended state, as if they were holding their breath underwater while waiting to surface. It was a race between the descent of the moon and the arrival of a helicopter. With each passing minute, an evacuation this night became more unlikely.

  CLU COT TER SCANNED the western horizon, trying to estimate how long it would be before the moon disappeared. To him, it looked like there was less than two hours of moonlight left. Something had to happen soon.

  He peered into the darkness. All of a sudden, a speck of light appeared far off in the distance. He fastened his gaze on the light—it was getting bigger. An aircraft was entering the Valley! He shouted the news. A resounding cheer erupted on the summit, all eyes now focused on the light coming toward them. The speck grew brighter and brighter as the helicopter’s searchlight swept back and forth to illuminate the ground.

  As the copter drew closer, the whop-whop-whop sound of rotor blades became louder, amplified by the granite walls. Surely everyone in Yosemite Valley heard the noise, but for those on the summit, the roar of the rotors seemed to lift a mountain of weight off their backs.

  It was just after midnight when Major landed his aircraft in Ahwahnee Meadow, only a few hundred feet from Yosemite Village and the famed Ahwahnee Hotel, where bedded guests no doubt wondered what was happening.

  Campbell and Jackson had located a mainly level site on a high part of Half Dome that was separated by a saddle from where the victims lay almost three hundred feet away. They hastily removed rocks and swept away small gravel and any other matter that the copter’s downdraft might kick up.

  Campbell returned to the group of rescuers to gather flashlights. Six of the hikers returned with him to the landing zone. Campbell arranged the flashlights in a circle on the ground around the LZ to outline the area where the helicopter should land. The others positioned themselves far back from the circle while Campbell got ready to guide the copter in, using his two flashlights as a mark to direct Major in his approach.

  Down in the Valley, Reilly quickly briefed Major. Time was crucial. If Major landed on the summit and the moonlight vanished, he and his crew might be stuck up there overnight. Gary Colliver, a ranger and park medic, joined Major and Bryant for the ascent. Newman remained on the Valley floor; her skills would come into play when the crew and victims returned.

  Major stayed tightly focused on his mission. Flying up to Half Dome and landing on top in the dark would be hazardous, but if there was some moonlight and few obstacles, he considered it an acceptable risk. The greater challenge would be taking off from the summit and dropping down into the Valley with trees all around. His concentration had to remain razor-sharp. True to his code, Major didn’t want any information about the victims. In his view, “a pilot can’t be influenced by such factors—they may cause him to make a bad judgment, such as trying to go too quickly.”

  In a roar of the engine and twirling rotors, the helicopter lifted off from Ahwahnee Meadow at 12:35 A.M. Major would have to fly forward in a spiraling, circular course, rather than climbing straight up, to make the most efficient use of the craft’s horsepower at that altitude. Such a course would also provide needed visibility. Those on board couldn’t see the mountain they were ascending— a “very eerie experience,” in Colliver’s words—as they departed the Valley and passed through a dark zone devoid of any reference points.

  After about a ten-minute climb and nearly a mile of elevation gain, there it was, the summit of the Dome, a circle of flashlights off in the distance. Following Campbell’s guidance, Major maneuvered his machine over the LZ for a “pinnacle approach,” or one from directly above. Then he gently brought it down. When the craft got near the ground, Bryant jumped off wearing his communications headset with a cord long enough for him to remain safely away from the spinning rotors. Although Major was concerned about landing on an uncertain surface, he hovered only briefly as Bryant directed him to move the aircraft a few feet or inches this way or that for the most level spot. Major placed the landing skids lightly on the rock, barely “feeling” them settle, and shut the engine down.

  Major: “This type of helicopter likes to be either solidly on the ground or sufficiently airborne, and not in between. The in-between part—that is, close to but not on the ground—can set up a sympathetic vibration or ground resonance that can destroy the aircraft, literally shake it apart, so we obviously tended to avoid that flight regime.”

  Bryant scuttled over to where the injured lay. After Crozier’s thorough report, he concluded there was little more to be done medically on the summit.

  Bryant: “There was just no time to waste. At that point, I thought it was fifty–fifty at best that we would get both patients off the rock that night. If the moon disappeared, the rescue was probably off until daylight. The priority was to move as quickly as possible to get one— and, if we were lucky, both—patients to the Valley.”

  Given the amount of floor space a patient strapped in a gurney required, the helicopter could only take one patient at a time.

  If only one of the victims could be evacuated tonight, Bryant asked Crozier, who should it be?

  Weiner, she answered.

  Jackson, Brian Cage, Steve White, and Bryant lifted Weiner onto a stretcher and moved him to the helicopter. Meanwhile, Colliver checked Brian Jordan’s body in the cave and determined that nothing more could be done. The body would remain there for the night.

  Once Weiner was strapped in the helicopter, Colliver, with no medical issues to attend to, climbed aboard for the flight down. Bryant stayed behind.

  Rangers in t
he Valley had positioned park vehicles, their red and blue lights flashing, as a beacon for Major. One vehicle’s headlights faced Ahwahnee Meadow to illuminate the landing zone. Spotlights shone on the highest pine trees nearby to help Major avoid them.

  Major fired up the helicopter, lifted off, and flew away from the summit. Past Half Dome’s edge, he began the one-mile descent, which he would have to execute very deliberately, especially on this first flight. The only available light came from a sliver of moon, which reflected off the high granite, and from the vehicle beams and other lights far down on the Valley floor.

  Colliver: “On the summit, the moonlight illuminated the granite and the nearby ridges, and my eyes were adjusted to the light. However, what lay beyond Half Dome looked like a black hole. When we dropped into this void, with no horizons or reference features other than an occasional floating point of light on the Valley floor, it produced for me a sudden sensation of blindness, disorientation, a loss of breath, and fear for what might be out there in the pitch darkness. It was only when we got close enough to the Valley floor to see light reflected off the ground or nearby objects, and could get a sense of relative motion, that I felt safe and could breathe normally again.”

  Unnerved by the descent, Colliver prayed that Major had a better sense of the surroundings than he did. In fact, Major considered the flight down quite normal and manageable. He had flown hundreds of more demanding and dangerous missions, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he had little difficulty charting the route. Plus, as Major said later, “Yosemite officials had the landing zone lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  After a rightward-spiraling descent and keeping the helicopter centered over the illuminated target, Major brought his craft down in Ahwahnee Meadow at 1:07 A.M. Weiner was immediately transferred to a waiting ambulance and brought to the clinic. Although park physician Bill Bowie was in charge, Newman took over Weiner’s care. She connected him to a cardiac monitor and inserted an IV and Foley catheter, or tube in his penis, to collect urine. This helped alleviate his urinary tract blockage.

  Back on the summit, Crozier again reviewed Rice’s and Este-ban’s injuries with Bryant. Only then did she and Bryant realize they knew each other from her EMT class. Bryant’s knowledge, experience, and calming influence finally brought Crozier the relief she desperately needed. At last, someone else was in charge—she could give her mind and body a rest.

  As the rescue activities buzzed around him, Esteban, watching in silence, felt a flood of emotions and thoughts. He was tremendously relieved that Rice and Weiner had survived the many hours on Half Dome, and were now in good hands. Still, big uncertainties remained. Would they live? And if they did, what future impact would their injuries have? Would his buddy Rice be crippled for life? Thankfully, his own fate didn’t depend on an air evacuation. His wounds were primarily mental—anguish over what had transpired, psychological fragility, not to mention complete exhaustion. He had been thrashed by lightning, been deprived of sleep, and was emotionally spent from bolstering Rice’s and Weiner’s spirits across several hours. Over and over he replayed the day’s decisions in his mind: Why did this happen and why did we challenge the gods? What if we had done this instead of that? He couldn’t stop dwelling on his leaving Frith on the ledge. What about Friths loved ones, and those of the Jordan kid?

  But one fact superseded all this and took center stage in his awareness: He was alive! Outwardly Esteban appeared to others to be shell-shocked. Inwardly he was screaming with joy that he’d escaped his companions’ fate. He wanted to jump up and kiss the sky! At that instant, he felt more in touch with life than ever before—far more than he had while racing up the cables with Rice, which seemed like eons ago, and experiencing the rush of living on the razor’s edge. Esteban wanted to freeze this moment so he would never forget what it felt like to cheat death and get another chance.

  AT 1:15 A.M., Major launched the helicopter a second time, intent on flying to and from Half Dome as fast as possible. Over the Dome and now familiar with the landing zone, he circled it, landed with little delay, and kept the copter’s engine running. Bryant was attending to Rice on a nearby stretcher. Though Rice seemed reasonably stable, Bryant knew the often hidden health risks from lightning strikes. He also believed that if the rescue had to be aborted, Rice’s condition would only deteriorate, and Bryant didn’t look forward to spending the night with him on the rock. He was very thankful that the highly skilled Major was the pilot this night.

  Before Bryant and Jackson placed Rice in the helicopter, Steve White told him to enjoy the ride because he would never get another one quite like it. This comment seemed to boost Rice’s spirits. With Rice and Bryant on board, Major took off and, his route now clearly established, descended more rapidly than before. The copter set down in Ahwahnee Meadow at 1:25 A.M. Except for the Foley catheter, Newman tended Rice the same as she had Weiner.

  At 1:30 A.M., only twelve minutes of moonlight remained, barely enough time for one last pickup. Esteban waited nervously, thinking how cruel it would be to have survived lightning strikes only to perish in a helicopter crash. Major didn’t waste any time: He took off again, flew up to the summit, and waited as Esteban, who didn’t need a stretcher, was hoisted aboard. Campbell joined him. Just as Major lifted off from Half Dome, the moon was disappearing behind the ridgeline. Campbell later said the flight down was like “dropping into a black envelope, one of the most frightening experiences in my life.”

  Now Major had to rely strictly on the lights on the Valley floor for direction and orientation. He completed this third and final journey without mishap. The rescue was over.

  With two patients strapped in gurneys and limited space, Weiner and Rice would need to be taken in separate helicopters to the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, which had a major trauma center. During the rescue, Yosemite authorities had summoned a second helicopter from CALSTAR, an air ambulance service at St. Rose Hospital in Hayward. Major refilled the copter’s tanks from the U.S. Navy’s fuel trailer and, at about 3:20 A.M., he, Bryant, Newman, and Weiner, who had been strapped into a gurney with an IV and cardiac monitor in place, departed for Memorial Hospital in Modesto. They passed the CALSTAR helicopter on its way in to retrieve Rice.

  The emergency staff at Memorial Hospital examined Weiner while the helicopter refueled for the flight to Sacramento. They determined that he wasn’t in any immediate danger. Major had “houred out,” so he was done for the night. With a new pilot and Newman and Bryant still on board, the copter departed for UC Davis Medical Center. By that time, CALSTAR was en route to the same hospital with Rice.

  Medi-Flight had done its job. Now the fates of Weiner and Rice rested with doctors in Sacramento.

  FOOTNOTE

  *In 1985, the National Park Service had five divisions in Yosemite: protection, resource management, maintenance, interpretation/education, and administration. Only personnel in the protection and interpretation/education divisions were referred to as rangers. Protection rangers were generally responsible for fee collections, law enforcement, emergencies, and search and rescue operations, while interpretation/education rangers handled public information activities.

  *One high-profile case dates to 1966, when Charles Frizzell, a thirty-one-year-old scientist at the Bay Area’s Livermore Radiation Laboratory seemingly vanished in Yosemite. Frizzell was last seen on June 4 hiking down from Olmsted Point. In those Cold War years, government authorities feared he had been killed or kidnapped, or that he had defected to China. Park rangers searched Tenaya Canyon in vain for more than a week. Some of Frizzell’s co-workers joined the hunt, a contingent that later evolved into the Bay Area Mountain Rescue Unit. The mystery wasn’t solved until spring 1971, when a hiker found Frizzell’s credit card and a skull in Tenaya Canyon. Later that summer, another hiker stumbled upon some bones on a narrow, tree-lined ledge. Ranger Butch Farabee returned to the site with him and discovered more than a hundred human bones, presumably Frizzell�
�s, and shreds of a backpack several feet up in a nearby oak tree. Farabee suspects that Frizzell put his pack up there as a signal for help; that perhaps he had fallen to the ledge and broken bones below his waist. At the request of Frizzell’s widow, Farabee buried the remains in Tenaya Canyon.

  *In 1968, a group of eight physicians founded the American College of Emergency Physicians. In 1979, the American Board of Medical Specialties and the American Medical Association recognized emergency medicine as the twenty-third medical specialty. So board-certified emergency medical care has only been available for about thirty years.

  *The improvement in night vision goggles spurred on by the first Gulf war in the early

  9

  RECOVERY

  Never more, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.—John Muir

  Weiner and Rice both arrived by helicopter at the UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento in the early-morning hours on Sunday. After Weiner gave the authorities his parents’ phone number in New Hampshire, he was sedated and his world went black again. Rice, too, was sedated.

  A slew of IVs delivered morphine, sedatives, vasopressors (medications that raise blood pressure), saline, and other fluids to the two men. Dr. Howard Klein, a plastic surgeon, was the attending physician.

  Dr. Klein reported that massive electrical charges had shot though each of the hikers, entering at the hips and exiting at the feet. The basic injury was to microscopic blood vessels: As they clotted, tissue began to die. The sudden jolt of electrical current through the legs had also severely damaged both muscles and nerves in their lower bodies, causing leg muscles to swell. That blocked the transmission of nerve impulses and blood to their lower legs—a condition called compartment syndrome. It can produce necrosis (tissue death) of all structures in the legs and necessitate their amputation. Dr. Klein was concerned that the burn wounds would progress, which, in the case of electrical injuries, they often do.