What started out as a perfect day for skiing the east face of Teewinot Mountain in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, turned into a harrowing close call for Teton County, Wyoming, Building Inspector Jesse Stover. On June 4, with a weather forecast for sunny skies and rapid warming, Stover departed Lupine Meadows with friends Aaron Japel and Derek Stal and started bushwhacking. Soon they put on their skis and skinned to the top of the Apex, where the treeline ends. Three other skiers had departed the trailhead, and above the Apex they’d put in a bootpack. Stover’s group followed this track to the Worshipper and the Idol—two prominent rock formations halfway up the east face.

"Chundery, frozen solid chunks littered the slope,” said Stover. “But it was smooth out on the face, so we stopped to put crampons on.”

The trio continued cramponing up the east face, making good time. Below the Narrows, a constriction on the face approximately 1,100 feet below the summit, the track they were following moved left. Stover and his party, familiar with their objective, continued to climb straight up. At the Narrows, the three men paused to discuss their situation. Stover was standing on the edge of a runnel—a trough carved by the numerous wet avalanches that had run down the face in the previous few days—that he described as being four to six feet deep. The group’s altitude read 11,200 feet on their altimeter.

“There were some high, wispy clouds, which was sweet. It was buying us some time, keeping the snow solid,” said Stover. “We had this last 1,000 feet to go, but we were still going to make the summit easily.”

Stover was kneeling against the 40-degree face, with his crampons, his ice axe and his Whippet—a pick that attaches to the head of a ski pole, allowing a user to arrest a fall—in the snow.

“I think my crampons balled up a little bit as we were standing there, because the first step I took, my feet slipped,” he said. “I instantly dug in for self arrest, but my ice axe and Whippet cut through the snow like butter. They just didn’t arrest me.”

Stover slipped into the runnel. As he did, he flipped onto his back, with his crampons below him. “I took off like a rocket,” he says. “I immediately got out of control.”

A rock protruded from the bottom of the runnel below him. “I skidded over that, and the heel of my left crampon dug in.”

As it did, his leg snapped backward. Stover knew instantly that he’d broken his left tibula and fibula.

He described the runnel as being “like a water slide.” As he accelerated down the frozen trough, he continued to try to flip over, “because I thought I still could self-arrest. But the crampon on my left leg kept catching,” he said. “Derek and Aaron said when I got into the middle of the runnel I slowed down so much they thought I would stop. I was hanging onto the head of the ice axe, but there was still enough flowing snow around me that I couldn’t get purchase. And I couldn’t get flipped over on my belly, because my crampon kept catching."

Stover knew that the runnel ended in a 150- to 200-foot, low-angle cliff. If he fell over that, he would not survive. Thus incentivized, he fought to self-arrest “the entire time.”

The force of the effort ripped his right arm back and dislocated his right shoulder. His 2,000-foot fall down the runnel took three to four minutes. “I was airborne several times, cartwheeling—I landed on my feet, then landed on my head. If I hadn’t had a helmet on, I’d be dead,” he recalls.

The fall ripped Stover’s gloves off his hands and pulled his shirt halfway up his back. He sleeves were yanked up to his elbows. As he cartwheeled down the runnel, the snow and ice abraded his exposed skin. At one point, blood splattered across his glasses. He finally came to a stop some 50 feet above the cliff. He was sitting on his butt, facing downhill, his ice axe still in his right hand, with the heel of his right boot below him. His right crampon had been ripped off at some point during the descent.

“My left leg was across my body, stuck in the wall of the runnel at a ninety degree angle,” he recalls. “My ankle was pointed up ninety degrees. I could see blood, and could tell my leg was severely mangled.”

He also knew he was lucky to have stopped before the cliff. “Another 50 feet and I would have been dead,” Stover said.

The other party, meanwhile, had already begun their descent.

“One of them yelled to me if I was alright. I yelled, ‘I think my leg’s broken, my shoulder’s dislocated, and I’m having a hard time holding on and not falling over the cliff.’”

The man who had yelled down to Stover was Erik Whitehouse. Whitehouse “took his skis off, put his crampons back on and ran down to me,” said Stover.

When he reached Stover, Whitehouse, an EMT, took over as the first responder. “He kept a very cool head,” said Stover. “He was real good about directing people and getting me stabilized.”

Whitehouse communicated to Stover’s partners to stay where they were. The face was beginning to warm up, and the runnel was a suboptimal place to be. Whitehouse was soon joined by another member of his group, Erik Wirth. The pair chiseled out a flat spot with an adze and shovel and then got Stover in as much of a position of comfort as they could. The two men splinted Stover’s leg. Ten minutes later, they were joined by Japel and Stal.

Though the group managed to get Stover partially stabilized, Whitehouse could see the blood coming out of the top of Stover’s boot. When Whitehouse saw the blood, he said to Stover, “We’re going to have to take your boot off.” The four men worked for approximately an hour to stop the bleeding, at which point the decision was made to tourniquet the leg. The process “hurt a lot,” said Stover, who knew that his condition was beginning to deteriorate. “My sense of time at that point was highly altered. I was having a hard time breathing, my pulse was elevated, and I was having a hard time maintaining consciousness. I could feel myself bleeding out.”

Whitehouse’s party made contact with Teton County Search and Rescue and the Jenny Lake Rangers via cell phone. In a short amount of time, rescuers made a reconnaissance flight to locate the party. They then returned to the valley floor to rig for a short haul. Meanwhile, two rangers ascended to the party from the parking lot in just an hour and a half. When the two rangers reached the scene, they took over as incident commanders, further stabilizing Stover and preparing for a helicopter evacuation.

“They couldn’t get a pulse in my foot; they couldn’t get one in either arm,” said Stover. “They were only getting a thready pulse from my neck. I was going down.”

Meanwhile, two “spotters” had been inserted above the party, in a safety zone below the Worshipper and the Idol where they could see a wet slide coming down the runnel. The rangers quickly picked up Stover and transported him out of the avalanche’s path. The incident heightened the sense of urgency for the group. Minutes later, the helicopter was back. Stover was evacuated to Jenny Lake and a waiting ambulance, and then quickly driven to St. John's Hospital.

Stover is currently recuperating in the Intensive Care Unit. The sections of his body that were exposed during the fall, including his hands, his back and the left side of his face, are deeply abraded. He has a dislocated right shoulder, a blown ACL on his right leg, and a tib/fib fracture. Three inches of his tibula remain somewhere on the mountain. But he is alive, and the prognosis for keeping his left leg is good.

When asked what he might have done differently on the mountain, Stover paused to think. “Maybe we should have kept moving through that section,” he reflected. “Maybe I should have had anti-snow plates on my crampons. But it really felt like nothing even happened. It was such a non-event, such a little slip. The snow I was standing on for that 10-foot little section… it was like Styrofoam. Two feet to either side and it would have been different, but where I was [my axe and Whippet] just sliced through the snow.”

He's certain of one other thing: his incredible fortune that Erik Whitehouse was on Teewinot that day. “He saved my life,” said Stover.



Source: Teton OuterLocal
http://teton.outerlocal.com/skiing/close-call-on-teewinots-east-face-outpost