The gift of life, and the lesson of death.

If you are the AMS or my mother, stop reading this.

I should be dead right now. In the least I should still be battling for my life in an ICU. Instead, I somehow walked away with a dislocated shoulder and some lacerations on my limbs. It’s been a month since the fall, and I still struggle to comprehend how lucky I was. I am not a religious or superstitious man (I study math and physics), but I do believe that fate was giving me a second chance and a lesson that day. I wish to extend this blessing onto you guys, so you can learn from the mistake and hopefully never be in my situation. To that end, let me explain what happened.

To begin with some context, I live and breathe long hikes and scrambles. I basically started my outdoor life scrambling with my dad as a kid, and have always been excited when the terrain becomes tricky. The act of scrambling has never fazed me, nor has anything bad ever happened. I’ve always heard stories of people hurting themselves or dying while scrambling, but for some reason I’ve never thought that the same can happen to me. For me it was kind of the same attitude as driving; we all know that people die on the road every day, but we still get in cars without ever thinking about it.

The trip was a traverse from Tenquille lake to the Phelix hut, and the route looked incredible. The scene, the lack of civilization, and the ambition of the route, all made me anticipate this trip more than anything else. The group is composed of the trip leader Sam Viavant, me, Parham Zarei, Tom Curran, and Cassandra Elphinstone. With three days to complete the traverse, we set off on Saturday with high spirits. However, we didn’t cover as much distance as we had hoped to on the first day. So, we decided that Sam and I were going to separate from the group and charge ahead to complete an extra-long day, while the rest headed for the car parked halfway on the traverse.

The photo we took when splitting the group. Sam and I started charging ahead after this selfie was taken.

With limited information of the route, we made a couple navigational mistakes that led to unnecessary gains and losses of altitude. This extra effort somewhat annoyed us. Having to stretch on our already gruellingly long day (projected to be around 14 hours), we were both eager to avoid any upcoming ascent. So, when we were faced with the choice between easy terrain or following the ridgeline, we didn’t even hesitate. I have yet to let a ridgeline stop me in my life, and this one is going to be no exception.

Brown Molar mountain, a peak that we unintentially gained due to navigational error.

As soon as we started on the ridge line, we realized that this might be more difficult than we anticipated. The first part was a large piece of granite, with cracks running across as holds. This part, while manageable, was a low class 5 climb. Note that we weren’t carrying any alpine climbing equipment other than rock helmets and ice axes, so we were essentially free soloing at this moment. A fall here would mean dropping for hundreds of meters, and most likely death. Despite the low chance of a rock fall, I decided to put my helmet on due to the challenging terrain. We made it across without any problem, though being quite slow. The next pitch was slightly easier, but the rock was a little more scattered and some rocks were moving. Having had experience with this kind of situation, I continued on while carefully testing each of my holds. I went up the pitch no problem, and now it’s time to descend.

The ridge we were trying to cross. Looks a lot safer than it truly is.

The first couple of moves were ok, a little tricky but I managed. While testing each of my holds, I had to skip a couple of rocks that weren’t solid. Finding one that I thought was solid with my left hand, I held on to it while shifting my right. No problem, hand holds seem solid, time to switch my foot. It was at this moment when I felt the rock in my left hand giving out, and just pulled out like a jenga brick. As the rock moved, the entire wall became unstable, and all the sudden I had nothing to hold onto, and the fall began.

(I had no grasp of time after this moment due to the adrenaline rush, so what I thought was ten minutes could easily have been an hour long, and vice versa. Take the measurement of time with a grain of salt.)

I couldn’t see the bottom from the top, so I thought the fall was about to send me to the base of this mountain. Knowing that, I immediately thought that I was dead. I’ve had plenty of experience falling while rock climbing before, but this felt different. There was a sense of desperation in the first few moments of the fall. I tried reaching out with my left arm, grabbing onto a rock, but it just fell with the rest. After that attempt failed, the desperation left, and there followed a strange sense of peacefulness. I was falling backward, unable to see what’s about to come, I just waited. So many thoughts went through my head in the few seconds of my fall. My first thought was that this is it, this is the mountaineering accident that takes me out. I’ve long joked of this scenario with my closest friends, but it is now coming true. Then I thought about the fact that my mom just lost her grandmother, and what this must do to her when she finds out that her only son is dead as well. But I wasn’t worried, I was just relaxed. The seconds felt longer than they were. I was waiting for the impact, for something that breaks me in half, or my head to hit a rock. There was no panic, no stress, just calm and acceptance.

Here are some estimated states: I fell down somewhere between 15 to 20 meters. Bounced off the walls a couple times, and there is evidence of impact on my helmet and pack.

By some miracle, as I bounced my body rotated to face the way that I was falling, and the next impact was on my pack. The impact slowed me down enough for my brain to kick into auto pilot, and I somehow arrested myself, stumbled up and ran towards a safe spot. The next thing I remembered was standing next to a boulder, my backpack a couple meters behind me (I have no recollection of dropping it), and Sam yelling at me to stay where I am. Immediately I felt something wrong with my left arm, something was horribly out of place. I looked up and down my body, trying to find something broken, believing that there’s no way that my body made it out in one piece. Sam came up and tried to help me with my left arm, and as he was trying to diagnose the issue, my shoulder just slid back into place by itself. I must’ve been on such an obscene amount of adrenaline at that moment, as there was no pain through my shoulder whatsoever. Looking down, there was a deep laceration on my knee, the white stuff beneath exposed, and blood seeping out. That can wait, because I was still looking for more serious injuries. After testing out all my limbs, and checking my chest and abdomen, I realized that I might be fine after all.

The lower section of the pitch where I fell down. This picture was taken approximately where I landed. Note that the place where I fell from is not visible in this image.

After packing up my knee and a quick rest, we started assessing our next move. We realized that the best option was to backtrack and meet up with the other group, so Sam went ahead and shuttled my pack to a safer location while I waited in a slightly more sheltered location. On the way out, we had to descend some steep slopes on snow. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to self-arrest if I fell, this was probably the scariest part of the whole thing. The fact that I was still a bit shaken didn’t help either. Eventually, we made it out to a stable location.

Sam and I standing at the stable location. The slope is very steep, but there is cover from the wind and the wall was relatively solid to lean against.

We spent the night at a very nice meadow. Flowers were blooming everywhere, and mountains stood in the background. Cassandra administered first aid on my injuries, demonstrating some of the finest backcountry first aid skills I’ve seen. On the hike out, everyone volunteered to take my weight, preventing further injuries to my shoulder. At the Whistler health care centre, the X ray showed that I didn’t break any of my bones, officially putting an end to this ordeal.

The campsite we stayed at.

After reviewing the incident, I pinned down on the critical causes that led to the incident. The first being my confidence in scrambling. Up until this point I have yet to realize that part of the skill is the ability to call off a challenge. Sometimes it simply isn’t about technical skill, it’s about luck. To me learning when to call quit was more difficult than pushing on, and I guess this would be the hard lesson that I eventually have to learn. Then there was also our frustration due to the earlier errors. Navigational errors in the backcountry are almost inevitable when traveling through unmarked terrain, even with the help of GPS or other navigational methods. Sometimes you simply cannot see over the terrain, or the contour map just isn’t detailed enough. When we arrived at the summit before the ridge, I was hoping to move faster to catch up on the lost progress. However, sacrificing safety for some relative minor gain in time just seems like a stupid thing to do in hindsight. The lesson here is to not let frustration get in the way of good judgment and be more conservative when you don’t want to be. Moreover, there was the misjudgment of terrain. For much of our trip, we were traveling on loose snow or scree. A couple kilometers before the ridgeline, the      ground turned granite and became relatively more secure, which gave us a massive boost in confidence towards scrambling. However, rocks are rocks, rocks break and rocks fall. I definitely had too much misplaced trust in the integrity of the route. If the rock remained unstable throughout, I might not have felt comfortable going through the region without a rope. This taught me to evaluate rocks as what they are in the future. Just because they got better, doesn’t mean it’s a concrete wall at the climbing gym.

It’s been a month since this happened, so I’ve had a little time to put some thoughts into it. I questioned whether the fall really had the potential to be life threatening, or perhaps I am just overreacting to this whole thing. But either way, the momentary thought of inevitable death has totally changed my perspective on risk management. Perhaps what happened was a good thing, this fall might have saved me from more serious injuries in the future. Also, having prevented head injuries, I will never hesitate to put on a helmet again. This experience didn’t turn me away from the mountains, in fact I want to head back out there as soon as my body allows me to.

If you have any questions about what happened, or want to learn more, feel free to contact me.