"The fact that she was able to walk under her own power down the mountain was huge," said Rutherford. That included a two-hour hike down, which, it turns out, the injured climber was able to do on her own. The operation at the cave itself took about 45 minutes, said Rutherford, but rescuers were at the mountain for about five hours, well into Friday morning. "While they were climbing up, there's a bit of a scramble and a climb up some rock, and I don't know if a footing broke away or she slipped, but she fell and had a concussion and she was cut and chipped teeth, so she wasn't capable of doing that climb after that," said Rutherford. One of the women had a concussion and some minor injuries. It was dark and still snowing, the temperature just below freezing.Īt the cave, two climbers were at the bottom of a 20-metre vertical pitch and rescuers had to rig some ropes so one of them could repel into the cave with harnesses to pull the pair out. It was midnight by the time rescuers reached the base of the mountain, and then the "fast and fittest" hiked through about 20 centimetres of snow to the cave entrance. "It's rough terrain and very, very tough to move someone." "The rescue last year took a long, long time after we got the subject out of the cave, because we had to do a stretcher carry all the way down the mountain," Rutherford recalled in an interview Friday. This time, about 60 people from various rescue organizations spread out along the route to the cave to help the injured caver down. Cave Rescue, began putting together a rescue plan.Ī year earlier, when a rock fell on a caver at the same spot, there were about 50 people to help get the injured man off the mountain and that still didn't feel like enough for the arduous task of carrying him down to safety, he said. One member of the group managed to climb out of the cave to use their satellite phone to call for help and that's when Rutherford, the local co-ordinator for B.C. When Bob Rutherford received a call about an injured caver trapped on a remote mountain in northern British Columbia, he planned for the worst.Ī group of three cavers were at a spot ominously named Fang Cave, about 120 kilometres northeast of Prince George, on Thursday when one of them fell, tumbling into another spelunker below and suffering a concussion.
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