A snowmobile being rescued from the depths of an ancient glacier by helicopter? Just another day in the Whistler Backcountry!
The Whistler Backcountry is no place to be taken lightly, but unsurprisingly, along with the increased participation in the sport - especially in the Whistler area - combined with the amazing advancements in snowmobile design, the number of serious incidents involving sledders has increased right up alongside the increase in people out there. Although accidents will always happen, even to the best of them, it's always good to get a reminder of the seriousness of what we're actually doing out there. Just because you can go from valley bottom to the top of a glacier in 45 minutes does not make that environment any less deadly than had it taken days of physical anguish to reach it. It was just such an incident that I happen to come across yesterday and I thought it might be a good thing to share in the hopes of an early season reminded for everyone to PLEASE PLAY SAFE. This particular incident thankfully ended as well as could be hoped for but could have gone a lot worse. A lot.
The last few days have been cold and clear, which combined with the previous few days of slight but not insignificant accumulation has made for some surprisingly decent conditions in the Whistler Backcountry for those foolish or brave enough to risk the early season snowpack which is infamous for inflicting costly damage to snowmobiles. Being early in the season, and a slow start to the season at that, everyone has been taking their time heading out on the sleds in hopes of avoiding a costly crash into a rock or other early-season hazard. But after a few days of snow - something is better than nothing! - it was time to go start poking around and we headed up for a few days of exploring to check out what was doing up high.
On day two, after heading up to one of the most popular sled spots in the Whistler area and being greeted by one of the lowest snowpacks I've seen in the lower meadows - home to pretty much half of all pillow photos and video you see in snowboarding - we continued upwards and took advantage of said low snowpack (ie. good grip because of the lack of powder) to gain altitude and headed for the high alpine via a sporty hill-climb/chute called The Gauntlet. Having experienced the open crevasses of an early season glacier up here before, I let everyone in my group know that we were now on high alert and to keep a safe distance and, basically, not to fuck around for fear of being swallowed by the visible and just hidden crevasses which were everywhere up here.
by a thin layer of early season snow. Scary stuff not to be messed around with.
A few hours later, after safely riding a few sweet pow laps on a sun and wind protected aspect that has been good to us in the past, word came down from higher up the glacier that someone in another crew had driven his sled into an open crevasse! The story was that the unfortunate soul had failed to follow in his group leaders tracks - which safely navigated the open crevasse field - and plunged with his sled over 50 feet down into an open hole. He miraculously escaped completely unscarthed from what could have potentially been a fatal crash, but the sled was firmly wedged within the confines of the glacier. Lucky for him, one of the member of his group was Dom Gauthier who, amongst many other accomplishments that should be familiar to anyone with any sense of the history of snowboarding in Canada, is one of the most experienced people in the Whistler Backcountry and a true "mountain man" ... ie. exactly the person you want to be with when the shit hits the fan. By the time I arrived at the scene, Dom had already been up and down to the sled multiple times using an incredibly ingenious homemade harness and rope system anchored to another snowmobile, and had rigged up a sling to the track of the sled in anticipation of the helicopter they had just called arriving to extract the sled straight out of the crevasse via "long line".
I'll leave my rambling there as you can see the rest of what happened in the gallery above. It was by far one of the craziest things I have witnessed in the backcountry and could have gone many, much more terrible, different ways.
Think about it for a second. A helicopter. Attached to a hunk of metal wedged, who knows how firmly, in the icy grips of a glacier. Tugging on the sled in hopes of setting it free. What if the sled had decided to tug back? What if an unexpected gust of wind had decided to kick up just then? What if Whistler wasn't home to some of the most experienced mountain helicopter pilots in the world?
Huge thanks and respect to the pilots from Blackcomb Aviation and all the other operations around the area. Without these heroes there would be a lot more injured sleds and, more importantly, people who wouldn't be rescued and given another chance at life.
