A 67-year-old man who was buried under two metres of snow while skiing Saturday afternoon escaped Hollyburn Mountain with his life thanks to North Shore Rescue and a quintet of intrepid passersby.
Julian Stoddart was in the backcountry with his friends, toying with the idea of skiing into Tony Baker Gully when they looked down and noticed avalanche debris, scattered gear, and a lone figure frantically digging.
About 10 to 15 seconds of indecision elapsed. Later that day, the five friends would ponder what might have happened if they’d kept going but in the moment they all knew something wasn’t right, according to Stoddart.
They skied into the gully one at a time to avoid triggering a further avalanche.
Despite a language barrier, it was soon understood the man was trying to dig out his buried friend.
The man had been using his backpack to ensure snow didn’t fall into the hole he was digging.
With six sets of hands, they formed a digging conveyor belt. As they formed a trench they could hear moaning.
“We could hear him moaning the whole time,” Stoddart said. “He was obviously in a great deal of discomfort.”
They uncovered his face and freed his head.
“You couldn’t tell what way his body was oriented because all you had was a head,” Stoddart said.
With no cellphone service in the gully, Stoddart pounded the snow, eventually flagging down a ski instructor and borrowing his phone to call 911.
By the time he’d made the emergency call, he noticed he had cell service. Stoddart knew just who to call.
North Shore Rescue team leader Mike Danks was enjoying the sunshine on his brother’s deck when his phone buzzed.
“I saw that Julian was calling me,” Danks recalled. “I only have his number in my phone because he called us a couple years ago when he came across somebody with an injury in Lynn Headwaters Park.”
Stoddart laid out the situation and location.
“You can’t get better information than that,” Danks said.
Danks rallied a crew that included an emergency room nurse and a helicopter pilot. But with soot-coloured clouds crowding the sky they weren’t sure it was safe to fly, according to Danks.
“The clouds were in and out that day so we got really lucky.”
NSR volunteers scanned the area for what they call hangfires – precarious pockets of snow that can slide at a slight provocation.
“If that whole slope slid and there was a significant chunk that hadn’t slid above, it might not have been safe for our guys to go in,” Danks said.
While NSR volunteers assessed the area, the skiers huddled with the hypothermic man, sharing body heat and wrapping him in the warmest clothes they had. The skiers also melted snow and transferred the liquid into hot water bottles they placed on the man’s body.
NSR volunteers arrived on the scene a little after 2 p.m.
“This was a very sick patient that needed to get transported to a trauma centre as quickly as possible,” Danks assessed.
With the weather just clear enough, they tethered the skier to a 150-foot longline and flew out of the gully. After reconfiguring at a nearby search and rescue station, they landed the helicopter at Grand Boulevard and rushed him to Lions Gate Hospital.
The man suffered fractures to his leg and pelvis, but had no spinal injuries or internal damage, according to Danks.
“Considering what this gentlemen went through and his age it’s absolutely incredible,” he said.
The man’s survival may have hinged on the fact he was wearing a beacon, which allowed his friend to track his location with a probe.
The friend likely skied through “some pretty steep, treed terrain to get down to where the avalanche had deposited,” Stoddart noted.
Danks called the six men who dug him out: “the key to saving this guy’s life.”
When it was all over, Stoddart said he and his friends got out the stoves they’d brought with them, made some hot coffee, and talked about it all.
“Everybody was very lucky,” Stoddart concluded.
North Shore Rescue’s late team leader Tim Jones instituted avalanche training prior to the fatal Grouse Mountain slide of 1999.
