The hiker will be ok. From the Greenfield, MA Recorder.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Life-saving mountain rescue: Six local men pull stranded hiker out of White Mountains
By JEREMY DIRAC, Recorder Staff
TURNERS FALLS — Beware of lending Greenfield native James Hall your coat.
A friend let Hall borrow his $400 coat for a backpacking trip in the White Mountains of New Hampshire this weekend. Hall came back Sunday with the coat in shreds.
But you might say it went to a good cause. It helped save a man’s life.
On Saturday, within seconds of finding a Connecticut man with his leg broken in two places and suffering from hypothermia near the summit of Lafayette Mountain, six men quickly started peeling off their warm layers, in 6-degree weather amidst 50 mile-per-hour winds, to cover him.
In winds so harsh that you needed goggles to keep the dust out of your eyes, Jonathan Hall took off all his upper layers but the thin shirt underneath.
Hall was the first to see Jerry Wagner lying near the summit of Lafayette Mountain. Wagner’s snow-cleats had gotten stuck in a crack in a rock, causing his leg to break. Hall said Wagner pulled himself 10 yards uphill to get to a spot on the trail where he hoped he would be seen.
Six members of Grace Church in Turners Falls, three brothers, James, Jonathan and Jesse Hall, along with their friends Matthew Howe, Seay Minor and Kenneth Millotte, who were camping together in the Presidential Range, covered the man so they could barely see his face. They put six hot pads on him, three hats and two coats.
Wagner had been there for an hour when the six found him. He called 911 at 1:20 p.m., assistant pastor at Grace Church, Matthew Howe said.
“At the hospital (they) were saying there’s no way he would have survived,” Millotte said. Rescue workers told Millotte it probably would have taken too long — eight hours — to get to Wagner.
Fortunately for Wagner, he got a fairly qualified group of people to rescue him. Two of the six, Minor and Jonathan Hall, have EMT training. They constructed a splint for Wagner’s leg. James Hall has training being a first responder in outdoor wilderness.
“I’ll tell you, it was no mistake that we were where we were, when,” Minor said.
Using Hall’s friend’s coat as a sled, the six dragged the 195-pound man for 4½ hours in a painfully slow process that they called “the Jerry Pull.”
“It had a little cadence, one-two-three, then pull,” Jesse Hall said. Hall was one of the musclemen of the group, some of which came from his exercises at boot camp. “It took awhile to get a rhythm.”
The Jerry Pull consisted of two men grabbing his arms and one grabbing his legs and dragging. Each drag could only be done for so long because your fingers have only so much strength and you’re using them to pull Wagner along by his coat sleeves, Minor said.
Carrying him wasn’t feasible for the six, firstly because of Wagner’s weight, secondly because the ice and rocks aren’t easy to navigate even if you’re not carrying someone.
Minor said that it was a bit scary pulling Wagner because they were afraid of stepping on him with their crampons, sharp boot attachments made for hiking on ice, which could start him bleeding.
As they pulled him, Jonathan and Jesse Hall kept headbutting each other. Pulling Wagner along the trail sent snow from tree branches over Wagner’s body, which they wiped off periodically.
Wagner stayed quiet throughout the ordeal, calling all six of them “Jesse,” after a relative, Minor said.
They ended up dragging Wagner nearly halfway down the mountain when a rescue crew of about a dozen people arrived to take Wagner the rest of the way.
That night, instead of going back to camp, the six stayed in a hotel, making a special visit to the hot tub.
Jesse Hall told the others that he found muscles aching that he never knew existed.
On Sunday, the six retrieved their packs from the top of Mount Lafayette. They also paid a visit to Wagner, who had frostbite at the tips of his fingers and a titanium rod implanted into his leg.
At about 6:30 Sunday evening, the six returned to Grace Church to drop off their goods and found family and friends greeting them with a banner and pizza.
As of Sunday evening, James Hall’s friend was still unaware of the condition of his coat.
