A highly-skilled rescue team from the mountain national parks has recovered the bodies of two men who died after falling into crevasses in two separate incidents up north.
The team pulled the body of a heli-ski guide from a crevasse on the Swanson Glacier near Atlin in northern B.C., Friday (May 6) and recovered the body of a snowmobiler south of Haines Junction, Saturday (May 7).
In yet another incident closer to home, they pulled a man who fell 30 metres into a crevasse on Mount Snow Dome at the Columbia Icefields (May 2). He was officially pronounced dead in hospital.
“Crevasses are pretty unforgiving, and if wedged in, the odds of survival are pretty slim,” said Marc Ledwidge, Parks Canada’s manager of visitor safety for the mountain national parks.
In the Snow Dome fatality, Ledwidge said the man was unroped at the time he fell into the crevasse. He was in a group of three and one of them rappelled down to try to help him.
“He was wedged tightly in the crevasse. He tried to get to him, but he couldn’t reach him completely,” said Ledwidge.
The man climbed out of the crevasse and skied out to raise the alarm, while the third person in the group remained at the site.
Jasper’s rescue specialists were called and they, in turn, asked Banff for assistance.
Ledwidge said they managed to get one rescuer into the crevasse, and after several hours, they were able to get the man out by late afternoon.
“He was barely conscious when the rescuer got in there; he was severely hypothermic and he was wedged in quite tightly,” he said.
“It was a very difficult job and it was difficult to get a rope on him, but we eventually got him out.”
The man was rushed to Jasper by ambulance, and then flown to a hospital in Edmonton by STARS air ambulance. He was officially pronounced dead in hospital.
Five of the eight rescuers were forced to spend the night on the mountain, as the helicopter could not make it back to get them due to terrible weather conditions.
With temperatures hovering around zero, they set up tents and spent the night.
“The next morning the weather was totally bad, so we left the rescue gear and skied out to the Saskatchewan Glacier,” said Ledwidge.
Then in the middle of last week, mountain park rescuers were called to help with the recovery of two bodies from crevasses in the Yukon and northwestern B.C. Four rescuers from here joined one from Kluane National Park.
The five-member team recovered the body of a man from a crevasse on the Swanson Glacier, about 65 kilometres south of Atlin. The 47-year-old heli-ski guide fell through deep snow into the crevasse on May 1.
He had reportedly stopped with another guide and four clients to take a picture of the group when the accident happened. A climber from the company tried to get to the guide, but to no avail.
On April 28, a 52-year-old man from Maple Ridge, B.C. was snowmobiling when he jumped off his snowmobile and broke through the snow and fell into a crevasse near Haines Junction.
The mountain park rescue team recovered his body May 7.
“We got those calls because of the technical rescue skills our staff have,” said Ledwidge.
