Climbers rescued from mountain ordeal

Three climbers are recovering today after being plucked from Canada’s highest mountain where they were trapped for three days by a ferocious blizzard.

The climbers from Vancouver, British Colombia, are in hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, suffering from frostbite after they were rescued by helicopter after three days trapped on Mount Logan, 25 miles east of the Alaskan border in the Yukon Territory.

“It’s like you’re sticking your head out a car window going 65 miles an hour while someone is throwing rice at you,” said Don Jardine, one of the climbers.

Jardine, 51, Alex Snigurowicz, 45, and Erik Bjarnson, 41, were plucked from the 18,000-foot level of the 19,500-foot peak by rescuers from Alaska working with Canadian parks officials.

“This is what movies are made out of,” said Tim Jones, a Vancouver climber who helped co-ordinate the rescue effort. “This is a classic situation of experienced climbers getting themselves into trouble and fellow climbers coming to their rescue.”

The three climbers, members of the North Shore Search and Rescue team of North Vancouver, were participating in an eight-member expedition to celebrate the group’s 40th anniversary. They set out May 4.

About a week into the expedition, the first storm crashed down on the group on King’s Col, stranding the climbers for five days. Each morning they dug their tents out of deep snow and shivered in temperatures as cold as minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 32 degrees Celsius), waiting for an opportunity to continue their trek, Jardine said.

When the sun came out again, the party resumed the climb. Eventually, they reached 18,000 feet.

At a plateau called Prospector’s Col, temperatures dropped again, but the climbers trudged onward. However, the trip began to take its toll on the three men, especially Snigurowicz, and they decided to turn around on Tuesday night.

“We figured it wasn’t worth pushing it,” Jardine said.

The men began their descent on Wednesday under sunny skies as the other five expedition members continued on. Before long, the wind kicked up again, so the trio camped out at Prospector’s Col, hoping for better conditions in the morning.

But the weather only worsened: “The wind actually lifted the tent floor with me on it,” Jardine said.

The 17-stone firefighter was no match and the winds eventually flipped the tent over with Jardine in it. The wind flung the tent off the mountain after Jardine ran out with his sleeping bag. Also blown away were shovels and a stove.

By Friday morning, the three men were suffering from hypothermia and Jardine could no longer feel his toes. Snigurowicz became confused and passed out a couple of times.

“At one point, Alex asked for a can of Pepsi or something like that,” Jardine said. “We said OK, we’ll have a helicopter fly it right up.”

Whenever they could, the men kept in touch by radio with the other members of the expedition. On Friday morning, the other members of the party were able to reach Jones by satellite phone and Jones then initiated a rescue effort.

Late Friday night, a helicopter arrived as the climbers hunkered down in a tent that had been left for them by two descending climbers.

One at a time, the helicopter lowered the ailing climbers in a cage dangling from the chopper to a lower part of the mountain. From there, they were evacuated early yesterday in a HH-60 Pavehawk helicopter sent by the Alaska National Guard. A transport plane took them to Anchorage.

At the Guard’s Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Anchorage, Sgt. Kenneth Bellamy said he feared for the men’s lives when he first joined the effort to find the climbers on Friday.

“People were afraid one, maybe more of them, were deceased,” he said. “When I came in today and saw all three had made it, that was a nice surprise for me.”