Insomnia Canyon Rescue Keeps Arizona Responders Up All Night

On Aug. 13, the Sedona (Ariz.) Fire District received a cell phone call that indicated some sort of fall injury in the West Fork of Oak Creek drainage, but due to poor cell reception, dispatchers were unable to understand the extent of the victim’s injuries.

Initial Response: Working Off a Few Details
At 1404 HRS, the Sedona Fire District dispatched Engine 551, Ambulance 541, Rescue 531 and Battalion 51. Two minutes later, the units responded via route 89A to the West Fork of Oak Creek Canyon trailhead. The rescue area includes overlapping jurisdictions of the fire district and the sheriff’s department, so the Coconino Sheriff’s Search and Rescue (SAR) unit was alerted. The first responders arrived at the trailhead at 1420 HRS.

Because the specific location and the full nature of the emergency were unknown, rescuers had to determine whether they should respond from the bottom of the canyon up–a plan that could involve swimming and ascending steep faces–or from the top down–a plan that would involve descending from the rim into the canyon.

With the Sedona Fire battalion chief (BC) initially acting as the incident commander (IC), a hasty team was sent up the canyon from the trailhead. At about a mile up the trail, the hasty team encountered three people. They were part of a seven-person party that had been canyoneering when a male member of the group lost control while rappelling and was severely injured. Unfortunately, the three people could not provide some essential details, leaving responders with vague information about what they would be facing during the rescue operation. But the people were able to tell rescuers where to find the patient and the other members of the climbing party–Insomnia Canyon, a narrow “slot canyon” with steep descents and pools of water.

One potentially problematic issue: Rescuers responding up canyon would have to ascend the fixed lines left by the canyoneering party as they came down canyon. This raised questions about the party’s equipment and their rigging. For example, the group used 9-mm polyester rope, which is common in canyoneering but different from the 11-mm and half-inch nylon line used by the firefighters and the sheriff’s SAR team. Further, rescuers would later learn that at one point before the victim’s fall, the party’s rope had slipped off a pad during a rappel and the rock’s sharp edge had cut through the rope to the core. Although the canyoneers had re-rigged the rope so that weight was not on the damaged area, the example illustrates the potential hazards rescuers could have faced if they used the party’s equipment and rigging.

Establishing Command & Devising a Plan
The hasty team relayed what information they had back to the IC at the trailhead. He decided that a bottom-up approach would be too risky for rescuers, preferring instead that rescuers descend into the canyon near the accident site.

The sheriff’s SAR team began responding to Buckhead Point, an area from where they believed they could descend into the canyon. This was the new command post. The plan was to transfer incident command to a sheriff’s department official, and fire department personnel would join the SAR team at Buckhead Point.

At about 1700 HRS, the team on the rim established a lookout to try to spot the injured person, but they could not locate him in the narrow canyon that was only shoulder-width across in some areas. They could hear some indistinct yelling coming from the canyon but could not make out what was being said.

The Sheriff’s Office called for the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) helicopter to evaluate for a possible rescue from the canyon. After arriving on scene, the DPS Bell 507 helicopter hovered high over the area, located the injured person and assessed the area for a potential short haul. The helo crew decided that due to rotor clearance problems, insufficient margin of power, and equipment limitations (they only had a 125-foot-long short haul line), a short haul rescue was not possible at that time.

Fortunately, the helo crew was able to provide rescuers with GPS coordinates for the victim in the canyon. This helped the ground rescuers enormously, as this was a large area, and it was about 1,200 feet from the canyon’s floor to rim.

The command post remained on the rim, but the haul system was set in a lower area, down on a ledge. The teams communicated via fire mutual-aid simplex.

One hazard in canyon country is the possibility of flash flood. Fortunately, the National Weather Service has an office in Belmont, so the sheriff’s office stayed in contact with people there for any warming of rainfall upstream of the rescue.

Descending into the Canyon
At about 1800 HRS, two rescuers (one who was a paramedic) began their descent into the canyon. They still did not have a precise location for the canyoneering party, so they decided to follow the same route that the canyoneers had followed. The two moved about a mile south from Buckhead Point and began their descent. One rescuer descended on a mini brake-bar rack with hyper bar, and the other descended on a Conterra Scarab. Both used a Prusik safety (a “conditional self belay”).

Unfortunately, it was beginning to get dark, and neither of the rescuers had gone down into the canyon in this area before. Further, each rescuer was loaded with a 60-lb. pack full of medical and rescue gear, along with their own support gear and extra food and water for the patient. By the time they reached the final drop of 350 feet, it was about it was about 2300 HRS. Now in the darkness of the canyon area, they operated off headlamps.

The real complicating factor: The drop was longer than their longest rope, which was 300 feet long. They had a second rope, which was 200 feet long, so they could tie the two together to reach the bottom. However, they didn’t want to drop their rope into the darkness of the canyon since the line could fall onto the patient or loosen rocks or other debris, endangering the people below. This meant that they would have to keep the rope in a bag clipped to the seat harness, paying out the rope as the rescuer descended, and then tying the 200-foot-long rope while still hanging on a rappel device connected to the 300-foot-long line. This would be a challenging operation under the best of conditions. Basically, one of the rescuers would have to rappel to nearly the end of the rope without running off the end. They would then have to lock off, tie the two ends together and do a knot-pass procedure–all in the dark.

The rescuers’ approach to this challenge: The second rescuer remained at the top of the drop, holding onto both his pack and the first rescuer’s pack to lessen the weight on the first rescuer. The first rescuer rappelled with both ropes in bags, at first descending on the 300-foot-long line while feeding it out of a bag attached to his harness. Fortunately, at about the point that the first rescuer was supposed to join the ropes and perform a knot pass, he happened to be on a narrow ledge where he could take his weight off the rope system. There he tied off short and directed the second rescuer to come down to his spot. The second rescuer rappelled with both packs hanging between his legs and attached with a sling to the belay loop of his harness.

Once the second rescuer arrived, they tied the two lines together and moved their rappel devices past the knot. They then rappelled to the bottom of the canyon, getting off rope just outside of a shallow pool.
 
Making Contact with the Victim
The two rescuers found the victim lying supine on a ledge about 10 feet wide, partially in a pool of water. He had been lying in the same spot for about 12 hours. His fellow climbers had left him where he landed because every time they tried to move him even slightly, he would scream from intense pain.

The patient was shivering and cold, but the other climbers had made a small fire to help keep him warm. They placed warmed rocks on his chest and used their wetsuits to insulate his upper back and head.

The victim’s level of consciousness was good, but the rescuers could not detect a radial or brachial pulse and were unable to determine blood pressure by auscultation. Rescuers found his pelvis to be unstable, his abdomen painful in all four quadrants, and his feet painful at the ankles. When asked about his level of pain, he said it was 20 out of a possible 10.

What Went Wrong?
The 36-year-old patient was one of a group of seven who had started about 1.5 miles up canyon, doing multiple rappels. The accident occurred on the eighth rappel.

The victim had been about halfway down when he apparently lost control of his rappel, falling about 150 feet to the bottom of the canyon. He had been rappelling on a Petzl Piranha, a descender specially designed for canyoneering. The Piranha descent device is roughly designed like a Figure 8 descender, but with three added “spurs” projecting from the descender waist and top ring. These spurs provide extra options for added friction by wrapping the rope around any of them. But by the time the climber realized that he was in trouble, he was going too fast to maneuver the rope to add friction, and was soon out of control. He did not have a personal belay, such as a Prusik, and did not have a bottom belay, although there was one person already on the bottom. He could not do anything to slow himself, first striking a ledge about 100 feet down, bouncing off that ledge and then falling another 40 feet to be bottom of the canyon.

Seeing the victim’s out-of-control descent, the other members of the party rappelled to the now-unconscious climber using some form of personal belay, such as a Prusik safety on their rope.

The group activated their SPOT emergency beacon, but the signal apparently could not make it out of the deep, narrow canyon to hit a satellite. Three of the members started down canyon to go for help, while the other three stayed with the victim.

A Long, Cold Night
Rescuers determined that they would have to wait for daylight before commencing the rescue operation. At this point, they were still hoping for a helicopter short haul, possibly after moving the patient on a litter farther down canyon. A short haul would have been faster, likely with less stress on the patient than a 700-foot rope haul up from the canyon. They had to keep patient safety in mind–as well as rescuer safety.

The paramedic initiated an IV and provided pain meds. The rescuers used their portable stoves to warm water, which they poured into ziplock bags and placed around the victim’s body where they didn’t cause more pain. They replaced the warming bags about every 20 minutes.

At one point during the night, some members of the climbing party began to shiver. They had run out of firewood to stoke the fire. One of the rescuers emptied his gear pack, rappelled to a lower point in the canyon and gathered additional firewood. He then ascended using a pair of mechanical ascenders combined with a Purcell Prusik.

Raising the Victim
At daybreak, the rescuers lowered into the canyon the litter with two litter tenders and additional medical supplies. The four rescuers placed the patient on a backboard with spinal precautions. The littler was clipped into a pre-sewn bridle that could be adjusted for orientation.

At 0500 HRS, the DPS helicopter returned. The crew again evaluated the situation, but confirmed the decision from the evening before: The patient would have to be raised to a higher point where the helo could conduct a short haul.

The haul commenced at 0748 HRS.

During the night, the rescuers at the top had constructed a 5:1 MA constructed of pulleys and Prusiks. The Flagstaff Fire Department rescue truck arrived to provide additional equipment. Rescuers rigged haul and belay lines with interlocking long-tail bowlines to go to the litter and patient.

The litter was raised with one attendant, as there was limited manpower for the haul and rescuers wanted to keep the rescue package as light as possible. They attached a tag line of 300 feet to help keep the litter off the face and prevent it from getting hung up. Once it could no longer be used, the tag line was disconnected and dropped.  

The most difficult part of the haul occurred when the litter reached the edge where the haul transitioned from a vertical to the slope. Three issues: 1) The system did not have a high-directional; 2) the litter tender could not get both feet against the face to pull the litter away from edge; and 3) the ropes were in a notch of the rock.  

As the tender was trying to maneuver the litter, the patient began to scream, possibly from pain to his pelvis. A second rescuer came down and worked as edge attendant and helped get him over the edge. The edge attendant attached himself to litter package with a lanyard and a Prusik loop.

In the end, the haul took about three hours with more than 100 haul resets.

The Helo Short Haul
Once on a steep slope, the tender and edge attendant helped the litter up the slope to a point where a helo crew could perform a short haul.

A short haul technician rappelled from the helo using a SRTE Noworries Belay Stop–a descent device manufactured in Australia and used by the Arizona DPS in their helirappel program.

The rescuers briefly attached the litter to a natural anchor so they could disconnect it from the haul line. They then placed the patient and litter inside a Bauman bag and attached to a short haul line.

Once the short haul technician was on the ground and unhooked, the helo crew lowered the short haul with capture ball (a sphere of two steel rings for master attachment point).

The patient and litter were connected to the short haul line, and with the short haul technician attached and tending to the patient, the helo crew extracted the short haul package for a three-mile flight to Slide Rock State Park. There the victim was transferred to a Native Air aeromedical helicopter, which transported him to the John C. Lincoln Level 1 Trauma Center in Phoenix. (Doctors later determined that the victim had suffered multiple fractures of the pelvis, pelvis dislocated from spine, two spinal fractures, fractures in both feet, and abdominal injuries requiring surgery.)

The helo crew returned and short-hauled out the two sling loads of equipment.

The three remaining rescuers in the canyon assisted the other members of the canyoneering party out of the canyon. This 4.5-mile hike out involved four rappels and swimming through some pools. The rescue team made it to the trailhead at about 1500 HRS. The sheriff’s office dispatched a jail van to retrieve the exhausted team.

The haul team was also exhausted. Faced with a storm moving in and the prospect of spending another night on the haul site, the DPS helo short-hauled several of the haul team out of the area. In the end, approximately 35 rescuers from northern Arizona were involved in the 30-hour operation.

Sources: Information for this report was provided by Sgt. Aaron Dick, search and rescue coordinator; Mike Getchis, Victor Walco and Dennis Gill of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office SAR technical team; and Lars Romig, firefighter/EMT/rope technician with the Sedona Fire District. Some additional details were taken from an account of the incident in the Arizona Daily Sun.

Lessons Learned/Lessons Reinforced:
This was the toughest and most challenging rescue that area responders had seen. It was successfully completed in extremely difficult terrain and required an operation that started late and extended into the next day.

The operation was successful in part because of excellent teamwork involving the Sheriff’s SAR team and the fire department. This resulted from the two groups training and working together so they could integrate personnel and equipment despite their differing backgrounds.

Some of the rescuers were physically and mentally pushed to their limits. For them to safely and effectively fulfill the mission, they had to be fit and experienced in the rugged and demanding terrain. They also had to carry with them their personal gear, along with food and liquids to support themselves and help them complete their mission.