A MOUNTAIN OF TROUBLE
A backpacking trip turns disastrous, and a boy must make a heartrending decision: should he leave his severely injured father to look for help?
On a remote climb, a young boy goes in search of aid – not knowing if his severely injured dad will survive.
THE FRANK CHURCH–RIVER OF NO RETURN WILDERNESS is the broadest sprawl of untamed landscape in the contiguous United States, covering almost one million hectares of central Idaho. Among the area’s most spectacular attractions is the Bighorn Crags, a jagged phalanx of 3000-metre peaks set amid glittering alpine lakes. Near one of those pools, just after dawn on a cloudless summer day, 13-year-old Charlie Finlayson crouches inside his tent, getting ready for a long hike. He stows a water bottle and some snacks in his day pack, along with a sleeping bag, in case he has to bivouac.
He leaves another water bottle for his father, David, fills the cooking pot to the brim with water from the creek and also sets out a week’s supply of energy bars. Then he takes a GPS reading of the campsite.
He turns to David, who lies pale and gaunt in a bloodstained bedroll, his forehead marked with a purple gash, his jaw clenched in pain, his leg bandaged. “I’d better get moving,” Charlie tells him.
“Good luck, kiddo,” David says quietly. “Just take it slow and steady.”
Outside the tent, Charlie pauses and mumbles a prayer. “I’m not coming back without a helicopter,” he calls over his shoulder as he sets off.
AT 52, DAVID FINLAYSON had already explored many of the world’s wild spaces, bagging major summits in Alaska, Europe and South America. David, a respected defence attorney, had split up with Charlie’s mum shortly after Charlie was born. The boy lived with his mother in a suburb of Boise, Idaho, but spent most summers with his father. Although Charlie was as calm and contemplative as his dad was voluble and restless – David called him ‘ the Zen master’ and ‘Good-Time Charlie’ – both were passionate about nature. When Charlie reached seventh grade, David introduced him to rock climbing.
By the time they set out for the Bighorn Crags in August 2015, Charlie was ready to take on complex climbs. They crammed their packs with enough supplies to last two weeks. After driving six hours from Boise, they hiked for two days to reach Ship Island Lake, a 2-km-long jewel shadowed by a gallery of pinnacles. In their first week, they did two long climbs.
Their next ascent began on a Monday morning. Around noon, David was inching his way across a granite spire 250 m above the valley floor, searching for a line of cracks that would lead them to the top. Charlie stood on a ledge a dozen metres to the right, lashed to a tree for safety as he fed rope to his dad. Reaching up, David dislodged a small stone, which tumbled off into the void. In the next moment, he heard a sharp crack from above as something larger broke loose. He barely had time to scream before everything went black.
When Charlie saw his father sailing through the air alongside the massive boulder that had struck him, he yanked on the rope. An instant later, an automatic braking device arrested the fall. “Dad!” he called. “Are you OK?” There was no answer.
Charlie’s destination is the trailhead, 19 km away, where a couple of volunteers live in a cabin equipped with a two- way radio, which he hopes they’ll use to call for help for his dad. The path rises gently at first, but he knows it will grow steeper, reaching 2865 m before plunging into a valley and
climbing again. It will branch off into poorly marked side trails, which can lead a traveller astray. Grizzly bears and mountain lions frequent the surrounding woods; as he walks, Charlie blows his emergency whistle to ward them off.
After a kilometre, the route meets a trail to another lake. Following David’s instructions, Charlie takes the detour, calling out to anyone who might be camped there. After a few hundred metres, he stops to calculate the odds: it’s a weekday, when visitors are sparse. If he continues and encounters no-one, he’ll have thrown away an hour. He mutters a profanity and hurries back to the main trail.
DAVID HUNG 12 M below his son, hidden from Charlie’s view. A minute passed before he managed to call out, “Charlie, are you there?” “I’m here! Are you hurt?” Beneath David’s dented helmet, his head was throbbing from a concussion. His left arm and foot were shattered; the shinbone protruded through the skin and blood was dripping onto the rocks below. A vertebra in his upper back was fractured. The pain came from so many places that it nearly knocked him out again.
“I think I’ve broken some bones,” he shouted.
“What do I do? What do I do?” Charlie sounded frantic.
“Can you lower me about six metres? There’s a ledge there.”
Charlie let the rope play out slowly. When David reached the ledge, he yelled for his son to lower his climbing pack, which held a first-aid kit. But Charlie was still anchored to a large pine tree, and the pack kept getting stuck in the branches. After readjusting the anchor, Charlie managed to land the pack perfectly.
With his right hand, David slathered his leg wound with antibiotic cream, covered it with gauze compresses and began wrapping it in athletic tape. He felt detached from his own body, as if it belonged to someone else, but he didn’t want Charlie to have to see the jutting bone. Once it was covered up, he called for the boy to abseil down and join him, shouting instructions
all the way. When Charlie arrived, the two of them added more tape and tightened it as best they could.
“Tell me it’s going to be OK,” Charlie pleaded, struggling to control his fear.
“It’s going to be OK,” David told him, trying to believe it. “But we need to get off this mountain.” He proposed a plan: Charlie would lower David half a rope length at a time, then lower himself to the same level, set a new anchor and begin again.
Although the pulley system enabled the 41- kg child to bear the weight of an 86-kg man, the process proved agonising for both of them. David was dizzy and nauseated, and whenever his left side touched the cliff face, the pain was almost unendurable. With each pitch, he had to hammer a piton one-handed into the rock, and Charlie had to untangle 50 m of rope and thread it through the anchor. As the hours passed, David fought to remain conscious. “If I pass out,” he said, “don’t stick around. Hike back up the trail as fast as you can.”
“You won’t pass out,” Charlie assured his father, and himself. “We’re going to make it.”
Charlie’s hike grows more strenuous as the trail climbs towards the pass. As his heart rate rises, so does his anxiety level. Images flit through his mind: Dad writhing in agony; Dad’s eyes rolling back in his head. He focuses instead on the rhythm of his footsteps. Around the 5-km mark, he thinks he hears voices. He gives a blast on the whistle and shouts, “Hello! Can you help me?” Someone yells back, “Sure!”
Sprinting up the switchbacks, the boy encounters two tall, stubble-faced men on their way down – Jon Craig and his 19-year-old son, Jonathan. Choking back tears, Charlie describes his father’s plight to the pair. He shows them the campsite marker on his GPS.
The Craigs debate whether to turn around and accompany Charlie or forge on to find his father. “Please go to him,” Charlie says, insistent but calm.
“There are three groups camping by Airplane Lake in the next valley,” Jon tells Charlie, circling the location
on his map. “They can help you get where you need to be.” The two men disappear down the trail.
After cresting the pass, Charlie takes the side route towards the lake. His heart sinks as he realises that none of the groups are there anymore.
IT WAS NEARLY DUSK when the excruciating abseiling and belaying finally delivered David and Charlie to the base of the cliff, and the temperature had dropped to a few degrees above freezing. In his shorts and light Gore-Tex jacket, David was shaking with cold and exhaustion. “That’s enough for today,” he said. “You’ll have to go get our sleeping bags so we don’t freeze to death.”
Their gear was in their tent, more than 1.5 km down a steep slope covered with scree and boulders. Charlie took off running. He grabbed the sleeping bags and stuffed a backpack with warm clothes and energy bars. Realising they would need water, too, he used his filter pump to fill several bottles from the lake. By the time he found his way back through the boulder field, night had fallen.
David saw a pinpoint of light – his son’s headlamp – floating towards him through the blackness.
“Good-Time Charlie!” he exclaimed through chattering teeth. After helping David into long pants and a down parka, Charlie zipped him into a sleeping bag. He propped the injured leg on a rock to slow the bleeding. He made sure his father ate some dinner. Then he crawled into his own bag.
Worried that David would die if he fell asleep, Charlie kept the conversation going; they talked about past travels, the constellations overhead, the accident. Eventually Charlie allowed himself to catnap, checking on his father each time he awoke.
David, however, was in too much pain to drift off. He tried to distract himself by counting breaths. But breathing hurt, so he counted stars.
There was a chance he’d survive, he thought. There was also a good chance he wouldn’t. And then what would happen to his son?
He kept counting.
On the trail, Charlie hears more voices off in the distance. He blows his whistle and calls out, and the voices answer. Following the sound, Charlie gropes his way through the pines to a different pond, a kilometre away. There, he stumbles upon a married couple, their three kids and a family friend, Mike Burt. Hearing the urgency in Charlie’s voice, Mike, a former Marine, offers to run the demanding 14 km to the volunteers’ cabin, where he hopes to call in medical aid for David. Charlie follows him to make sure help is indeed coming.
WHEN THE SUN ROSE on their camp, Charlie was relieved to see that his father was awake and alert. But the kilometre-wide cordon of boulders, many as big as cars, was a far less welcome sight. The pair huddled in their sleeping bags for an hour or two, until the chill lifted. “Let’s go, Dad,” Charlie said. “This could take some time.”
After wrapping more tape around the blood-soaked bandage on David’s leg, they started down the slope. David dragged himself through the obstacle course bit by bit, leaving a trail of red. When he couldn’t manoeuver between the rocks, he hauled himself over them, crawling up one side and sliding down the other. Sometimes he lost control, landing on one of his shattered limbs and blacking out briefly from the pain. He woke each time with Charlie’s tense face looming over him. “I’m fine,” David would
say, attempting to smile. The boy ran ahead periodically, scouting for the least torturous path, then trotted back to offer guidance. “Just another foot,” he coaxed. “Just a few inches.”
They reached their campsite at around 4pm. David plunged his leg into the lake to clean it, and Charlie – unfazed by the gore – covered it with a new dressing.
Towards evening, Charlie cooked dinner on the propane stove. He wolfed down his portions of pepper steak and chicken teriyaki, but his father was too nauseated to eat more than a few bites.
“Charlie,” David said, “you’re going to have to go look for help in the morning.”
Picturing himself separated from his father by vast tracts of wilderness, Charlie burst into tears. “What if I never see you again?” he wailed.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” David said. “We don’t have a choice.”
That night, Charlie slept with his arms around his dad. David stared out through the tent’s mesh window, counting the stars.
Just after dawn, Charlie lifted his pack onto his back and headed off on the trail towards the volunteers’ cabin 19 km away, hell-bent on bringing back a helicopter that would carry his father to safety.
Sometime that evening, David Finlayson awakes in traction. He is at Saint Alphonsus Hospital in Boise, where doctors immobilise his arm and leg and stabilise his spine with a brace. Over the coming months, he will undergo several major surgeries and will eventually be able to climb again. But on this night, through the morphine glow, he tries to remember his rescue.
He recalls the Craigs arriving at his campsite. When they told him they’d just spoken with Charlie, he forgot his pain; he wanted to get up and dance. A young ranger named Rachel (dispatched after Mike reached the volunteers’ cabin) showed up soon after. She kept David company until he was strapped into a harness and lifted by a cable into a hovering helicopter.
The next day, Charlie arrives at David’s bedside. Through the tangle of ropes that are IV drips, father and son hug. Good-Time Charlie, the Zen master, had kept his promise. He brought back a helicopter.
“Charlie’s as strong as anyone I know,” says his father. “People say, ‘ You must be so proud of him.’ They have no idea.”