‘I ASSUMED HE WAS DEAD’: A DICEY RESCUE ON THE SIDE OF A SKI HILL
Ski patrol members to be honoured for delicate handling of an Ottawa man
Matt Clarke, 42, retained his sense of humour after splitting his head open on a rock while skiing at Vorlage on March 29, 2015.
He would need it. It took 140 staples to seal the wound, which nearly went from ear to ear. “They pulled the skin so tight, I looked like Joan Rivers.”
And he would need it, too, for the more serious news: four vertebrae either fractured or shattered, a crack in his skull, a bone chip threatening a major artery. In plain language, a broken neck, a damaged back — taken together, injuries that could have left him dead or paralyzed, staring at the Wakefield sky.
Instead, he was rescued by a little-recognized group of volunteers, the Canadian Ski Patrol, nine of whom came to his aid that spring day. The crew is to be honoured with an award Friday during a national conference in Ottawa.
Clarke, his girlfriend Lecia Simpson, 39, and ski patrol leader Scott Dowser, 54, sat down Thursday to retell the remarkable story of how a collection of well-trained volunteers went about the delicate task of getting a 6-foot-6, 250-pound man — bleeding wildly from his head — out of a ditch and down a steep hill, without adding to his injuries.
“I realize now that, if not for the people who had volunteered all those hours, honed their skills with all that training, I wouldn’t have a boyfriend at all today, or he’d be paralyzed,” Simpson said.
An experienced skier, Clarke was gliding down Birch Valley when, possibly due to an icedup binding, he lost a ski near the edge of the run and began heading straight into the forest. Wham! He flew headfirst into a large rock.
None the wiser, Simpson had skied ahead and was returning on the chairlift. About 200 metres up from the bottom, she looked below and saw the ghastly sight: Clarke was lying face down in a ditch, bleeding profusely from his head, unresponsive to her cries. “I assumed he was dead.”
Dowser, meanwhile, was having lunch at the bottom of the hill when he heard the call on the radio: “Patrollers to Birch Valley.” He said he could tell from the tone of the voice this was not a case of frostbite or a sprained finger.
Patrollers began to assemble by snowmobile or on skis.
“It was a little bit of a scary situation,” said Dowser, a ski patroller for 14 years. Adding to the visual drama, Clarke had crawled about five metres back toward the hill, leaving a sizable trail of blood in the snow.
“I know, myself, I had to step back for a second and say, ‘Let’s get this under control.’ ”
The first step was controlling the bleeding, which was difficult with the available bandage equipment.
Secondly, they had to figure out how to gingerly move a man lying face down, with probable spinal damage, off a steep hill, without multiple “rolling.”
After taking a deep breath, Dowser, a federal public servant who wears a black cowboy hat, said they decided to slip a flatboard under Clarke’s stomach.
With many hands helping, he was lifted onto the ski hill, then gently rolled onto a special vacuum mattress. Better than a stiff plank, the pad inflates to take on the shape of the body. Clarke was then put on a toboggan and slowly taken to a waiting ambulance. In all, 90 minutes had passed. Clarke went to a Hull hospital, then the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital, where he underwent surgery to install a metal plate in his neck, a process that also involved a bone graft from his pelvis.
The surgeons, said Clarke, were astonished to learn he had been transported down a ski hill without aggravating the damage.
He left hospital a week later, wore a neck brace until June, and was mowing the lawn by August. On New Year’s Day this year, another milestone: he and Simpson were back at Vorlage, skiing again for the first time, down the same run.
Was he nervous? “Extremely,” Clarke said.
Simpson, meanwhile, has decided to join the ski patrol, whose members number 330 in the Gatineau zone and 800 in Ontario. She is embarking on about 60 hours of training, much of it medical, including CPR, first aid, and operating a portable defibrillator.
Clarke, too, has returned to thank the patrollers and retell his cautionary tale, if only to underline the sense of purpose. “It’s a debt I feel I’ll never be able to repay.”
(The nine honoured: Len Fornelli, Nancy Binnie, Dowser, Will Piper, Jeff Menzies, Kama Szereszweski, Boris Smaryanakis, Jackie Stephens and Kinga Golebiowski.)