Best excuse ever

Contrary to popular belief and rampant rumours Eric is not, I repeat, NOT in the doghouse for missing the ward picnic on Saturday afternoon. Any time the NASWI Search and Rescue unit is called out to recover the victim of an unfortunate climbing accident you get a free pass to miss the ward function.

I went rock climbing with two friends on Saturday afternoon and was planning on returning home in time to get to the picnic. After several hours of great climbing on Mt. Erie we were starting to work our way down the cliffs. The descent involved about 150 vertical feet of rapelling and two anchor stations. Kelby and I had been up there many times and were unfortunately a bit lax in our instructions to Justin who was the first person down. Justin got off route and missed the second anchor and continued rappelling down on the double rope. The double rope was not long enough (hence the need to two anchor stations) to reach the ground and Justin slipped off the end of the rope. Kelby and I were standing at the upper anchor when the rope went sickeningly slack and we heard the un-natural sound of shaking trees. With no immediate response from our calls to Justin, I quickly clipped in and zipped down to the second anchor. Fearing the worst we were greatly relieved to hear Justin calling back to us that he was hurt, bleeding, immobile but alive.

Justin landed on about the only spot where he had any chance of being stopped before hitting the bottom. I scrambled down and gave him a hand line while Kelby fixed a rope. Justin wrapped his arms around Kelby's shoulder and with a couple of shoves we wrangled our way up about 15 feet to a safe ledge.

Justing was bleeding from a 4-inch gash on his knee that went to the bone and had what looked like a broken ankle. Dr. Kelby gave him the once over and with no other apparent major trauma we called 911 on the cell phone requesting assistance to get him down the mountain.

As Kelby stabilized Justin, I ran down to the trail head to guide the EMS folks back to the site. EMS called in NASWI Search and Rescue for a helicopter extraction. At around 9:00 the chopper arrived on site and lowered a medic and stokes basket. By 9:30 Justin had been safely delivered to Island Hospital. X-rays and examination showed no broken bones, no apparent soft tissue injuries and no serious trauma. The nurses took their time and cleaned Justin up, put 13 staples in his knee, put a soft splint on the ankle and covered about half his body with bandages for the raspberries and road(rock)rash on his body. He even got to have the cut on his ear glued shut.

So while Justin is going to have a tough time running for a while his a very fortunate to be alive and in one (albeit slightly grated) piece. We all considered ourselves lucky\ and watched over!!

So if anyone else has got a better excuse for being late I would love to hear it. Anybody up for some climbing?!



(I didn't actually take this picture but this is where we spent most of the afternoon)