Man survives night in crevice
Slit in forest floor almost led to 30-year-old father’s cold, dark tomb
TORONTO — It only took a few seconds, but with one misstep Seth Rowe was violently transported from a warm Ontario day into a freezing claustrophobic hell.
Wedged in the dank confines of an underground crevice, the 30-year-old was barely able to move his battered, bleeding body. Because he was wearing only a T-shirt, his extremities quickly went numb from the sudden drop in temperature.
And soon, unknown wildlife began to rustle around him in the darkness.
“I knew I had no way to defend myself,” he said.
Above him was 20 metres of slick granite walls and — worst of all — a narrow “pinch point” only a few centimetres across. It had shorn the skin off his back and chest on the way down, and made escape all but impossible.
“Ever put a ring on your finger and it won’t come off? That’s the same thing,” Rowe said Monday. “I was pretty screwed.”
The husband and father of two had been spending a Saturday exploring the caves of the Nottawasaga Bluffs Conservation Area, south of Collingwood, Ont., only a few kilometres from his home.
He was attracted by a slit in the forest floor. While he was tentatively shimmying in to take a look, a loose piece of granite gave way under his feet, sending him plummeting into the abyss.
Rowe is more accustomed to tight spots than most. He is a plumber and pipefitter who works on energy and mining projects across Canada. As a skinny guy among beefy crews, he’s usually the first to be sent into disused oil tanks and crawl spaces.
This meant he could stay calm in confined spaces, and had the strength and emergency training to stay alive as long as he could. Morbid and hopeless thoughts would have been understandable but, said Rowe, “I just shut that part of my brain off.”
But the odds of his survival were not good.
Rowe had not parked in a spot where searchers could easily work out where he might have gone. His wife, Jamie Murray, and the kids, thinking he had broken a promise to be back before evening, simply took a Father’s Day trip to the movies without him.
It was this thought of breaking a promise to his daughter — more than any — that brought him to tears in the darkness.
And, after hours of sitting soaked in sub-zero temperatures, Rowe was going into shock. He was starting to get sleepy, and if he nodded off, he almost certainly wouldn’t be waking up — and his family might never have found his tomb.
But a coyote, oddly, made the difference. As light faded outside, the trapped man spotted one of the animals gazing down at him from the crevice entrance. The sight jolted him into making one last set of calls for help.
Gilbert McInnis had come to Nottawasaga Bluffs to see the sunset, and had inadvertently taken the wrong trail to get down when he heard a faint cry of “hello” coming from a hole in the ground. “It wasn’t a loud voice … it was kind of muffled,” he later told camera crews.
The local Clearview Fire Department was first on the scene at 8:30 p.m., followed by firefighters from across Ontario summoned to deal with the uniquely complicated problem of getting a hypothermic man out of an inaccessible granite pocket deep underneath the earth.
It took an entire night of Toronto firefighters hanging upside down from harnesses to chip away by hand at the granite walls, and of first responders getting hypothermia themselves as they crouched in the narrow crevice coaching Rowe to stay awake.
In the final push after dawn, there were hours of enduring the trapped man’s screams as his bare, swollen body was yanked to freedom through jagged, painfully narrow gaps in the ice-cold rock wall.
It was a bit of a trial-and-error process, with Rowe being pulled up different paths in the rock until it was clear his body could squeeze no further.
“Every last bit of it was pain,” said Rowe. “I knew going up was going to be excruciating, and I got through it by just thinking, ‘It’s got to be done, exhale as far as you can and slowly inch your way up.’ ”
In the final few centimetres, the crevice sheared off all the scabs he had accumulated in his initial fall.
On Monday, Rowe was sore, his hands had “pins and needles” and he could only shuffle slowly around the house. But he had barely woken up before he was spending most of the day in interviews, trying to thank his rescuers as loudly and as widely as possible.
“These guys saved my life, and they had to work and work and work to do it,” he said.