Lost & Found: Reports from the Field (cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2002

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Lost & Found: Reports from the Field (cont.)

5. JOINT TASK FORCE
"Back in the early 1970s, hikers in Yosemite found a skull of a guy who'd disappeared in '66. He'd worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and there was a theory that he'd been killed because he had top nuclear secrets. After the skull was discovered, his wife said, 'If you find anything more, please bury it there.' Several months later, a hiker found a knuckle. He was a hippie, and this was when drugs were rampant in Yosemite. He took me to the knuckle, and we soon uncovered about half the bones. We buried what we could, made a small stone cross, and then went down to the river to clean up. The hippie pulled out a bag of weed and asked, 'Do you mind if I toke up?' I was a ranger and a former highway patrolman, but this guy had just helped me bury bones. So I said, 'Today's a freebie. But if I see you smoking tomorrow, I'm gonna take you to jail.' He said OK, and lit up." —BUTCH FARABEE, RETIRED YOSEMITE CLIMBING RANGER

6. DRAG RACE
"Cave rescues don't happen that often, but when they do, the logistics are daunting. Radios don't work, so you have to send notes on paper with runners; helicopters are meaningless; hypothermia is always a concern; and routes are often too narrow to get a stretcher in. In 1995, I was part of a rescue in Lechuguilla, a cave that drops 1,567 feet below the New Mexico desert. One of the dozen people in the cave slipped and broke a rib 800 feet down. There were several rope climbs between him and the exit; he attempted the longest—150 feet—but got stranded halfway up in intense pain, unable to go up or go down. When I lowered him back down to the pit he was like an inert sack of potatoes, too weak to do anything, so another rescuer and I formed a new plan. He assembled a team at the top of the pit where they'd be needed, while I left to get backup equipment. A few hours later we were back at the cave with full battle regalia. We used hundreds of feet of rope, made pulleys to set up a mechanical advantage system to lift his jury-rigged litter—basically a glorified drag chute of thick polyethylene that wrapped around him—and set anchors at the top of the 150-foot drop and at three other, smaller drops. Fatigue was the toughest factor. People got hungry, they wanted to sleep, they needed Ziploc bags to shit in and bottles to pee in. From the time we got him off the first rope till we got him out took 17 hours." —ART FORTINI, NATIONAL CAVE RESCUE COMMISSION

7. NO BATTERIES REQUIRED
On May 17, 1960, one hour after summiting Mount McKinley, John Day, Pete Schoening, and Jim and Lou Whittaker took a savage 400-foot tumble down the icy West Buttress. The fall snapped one of Day's ankles and shredded the ligaments of the other, and Schoening suffered a bad concussion. Jim Whittaker found Schoening dazed and missing a glove, dangling over a 3,000-foot cliff. They were 17,200 feet up McKinley, in temperatures approaching zero degrees.

Ten days later, with Day's toes going black and their precarious position preventing the more than 65 rescuers on the mountain from reaching them, local heli pilot Link Luckett managed to fly his two-seat Hiller up to 17,200 feet—after jettisoning the battery and removing the right-side door. When he landed on the buttress, he yelled to the Whittakers, "Don't put John in yet! I wanna see if I can take off without crashing. I'll be back." He kept his word, but with Day on board the chopper barely generated enough lift to propel it to the edge of the glacier. "They disappeared over the ice, and we thought they might have crashed," recalls Jim. "But they didn't." A few hours later, Luckett came back and retrieved Schoening. The Whittakers descended 2,000 feet to the rescuers' base camp on their own.

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