not knowing how to help. They tried to find a vantage point to better hear the sound, but nothing they tried made any improvement. They returned to camp with the news that someone was in trouble on the glacier. The only positive information they had was that some of them were quite sure they had heard voices from two locations. The one call seemed to be a single voice while there were several in the other. This left them hoping that some assistance effort was underway.
A daughter of the injured doctor was at the camp. She would have been the fourth member of the fallen group, but she had felt ill that morning and decided not to join them. There were no family members of the two deceased climbers in the camp.
At first light the daughter started for the Big Bend highway to summon help. She ran most of the fifteen miles down the creek valley, uncomfortably aware that once she got there she might have to wait several hours for a vehicle to drive by. At that time the new Rogers Pass highway had reduced traffic on the Big Bend to almost nil. Fortunately, as she staggered out onto the road, a radio-equipped BC Forest Service truck happened along. The rescue effort began to move swiftly from then on.
The helicopter from Calgary arrived about an hour after we did. The injured doctor was moved onto a stretcher and loaded into the machine; he requested that they go directly to Calgary University Hospital where he reasoned he would have the best chance of surviving and saving his feet.
The helicopter from Calgary had brought two body bags. We placed the bodies in the bags and lashed them, one at a time, onto the skid of the little helicopter. I waited on the glacier while the bodies were taken down to a vehicle on the Big Bend road. The helicopter was refueled and returned to take me home to Golden.
The doctor recovered, but lost one foot at the ankle and most of the other except the ankle joint. We received very little information about him but there was an indication that he would be quite capable of walking again with prostheses. Judging by the way he dealt with the situation on the glacier, I expect that he was probably jogging after about a year.
At the time I found it hard to understand why there was no radio communication from the Alpine Camp to the outside world. Over the years my view has changed; the technology was certainly available at that time, but they evidently preferred to experience that pristine wilderness without the distraction of modern technology. I would not be surprised to find that there is still no radio at that camp.
Landslide on Lillooet Road
The Fraser River cuts through the heart of British Columbia from Prince George to Hope, and then through the more open Fraser Valley to tidewater near Vancouver. The walls of the upper end of the river canyon are a combination of clay and rock that is continuously sloughing into the river; this is particularly evident in the canyon between Lytton and Lillooet. The clay of that region is very water soluble and becomes almost liquid during the spring and fall rainy seasons.
In the early seventies, the road from Lytton to Lillooet was forty-two miles of winding two-lane asphalt surface with a few sections of gravel where the soil was too unstable to be paved. One of the gravel areas, known locally as the Big Slide, was about half a mile long, only one lane wide in parts, and was chiseled into a clay cliff about four hundred feet above the churning water of the river. The Big Slide was very well known by the locals. It was near the midpoint of the road between the two towns and when travellers had crossed it, they felt that the trip was as good as done.
I was working at the Lytton detachment and soon became familiar with, but a little afraid of, the road to Lillooet. There was very little traffic on that road but it was a common location for traffic crashes. Vehicles met head-on in the sharp curves or they were struck by falling rocks from the canyon walls above.
The Breathalyzer, a tool for measuring a person’s blood alcohol content, was a relatively new addition to the Mounted Police equipment at that time. There was a shortage of both instruments and trained operators due to chronic budget shortfalls for training and the sometimes questionable placement of the equipment that was available. Lytton detachment was issued a Breathalyzer because it was on the Trans-Canada Highway and had a qualified Breathalyzer operator stationed there—me. Lytton was also considered close enough to three other detachments that drinking driver suspects could be transported there for tests. Lillooet was one of the locations required to haul their impaired driving suspects to Lytton, in spite of the forty-two mile trail between the two villages.
Placement of the available Breathalyzers was also influenced by the fact that the Mounted Police had still not started to pay overtime. There was no cost involved for rolling me out of bed three or four nights a week to do the tests.
It was about one thirty in the morning when I got a call that an impaired driver had been arrested at Lillooet and the patrol was enroute to Lytton for a Breathalyzer test. I dressed and went to the Lytton police office to prepare for the test. About an hour had passed since the call came in and the patrol had not arrived. I called on the radio to check on their progress. The radio response was almost inaudible; a muffled voice advised there had been an accident. The patrol car had fallen into a hole and there were other cars in there with it. The police driver did not think he had any serious injuries, but he was concerned about his intoxicated passenger. The policeman had not been able to get to the other vehicles that he could see in the hole. From what he was able to see of the other cars, he felt there would be severe injuries or fatalities.
Radio contact was very poor but I did learn that the hole they were in was on the Lytton side of the Big Slide and that our driver thought he was nearing Lytton when it happened. He advised that he was going to try to get back up to the roadway to prevent the next vehicle from going in on top of those already there. I called for an ambulance and other detachment members to assist, and I advised the remaining policeman at Lillooet and our dispatch centre at Kamloops of what I knew. They called the highways maintenance crew to provide barricades and to close the roadway immediately; meanwhile, I drove out to find the scene.
About fourteen miles from Lytton, I came around a curve to see a flashlight waving frantically across the roadway. As I got closer in the total darkness my headlights revealed a mud-covered person with a flashlight standing by a huge crater where the roadway had been. About forty feet of the entire road was gone, including the ditch and some of the bank from the uphill side. Where there had been a two-lane paved highway, there was now a hole with vertical walls of about fifteen feet on three sides. The mud bottom of the hole sloped sharply toward the open side in the direction of the river.
The bottom of the hole was sloppy mud with a small stream running through the middle of the still slowly moving mass. The police car was standing on its front end, which was pushed into the mud nearly up to the windshield. The rear bumper was below the level of the road. The rear wheels of the police car were resting against the wall of the hole.
The mud-covered officer was badly bruised, but had no cuts or broken bones. He told me there were at least two other cars down there on the Lytton side of the hole. One was on its roof, and the other was upright with severe front end damage. Several people were badly hurt, and one was dead.
We set flares and barricades on each side of the missing section of roadway and then went into the hole to assess the situation. I walked over the edge on the downhill side of the highway and went to the area where the roadway had fallen out. The debris field from the slide had crashed into the trees below and had caused a small clearing in the forest. The entire mass was sloppy mud, just a little too thick to continue flowing down the hill toward the river. The mud in the middle of the hole was more than knee deep and almost impossible to move through; as I struggled to pull one foot free, the other would sink deeper, forcing me to move on my hands and knees. I knew then why I had not been able to recognize the policeman with the flashlight.
The ambulance arrived and we struggled to get stretchers into the hole and back out with five injured men and a dead woman. In the darkness, mud, and confusion,
