Rescue on Mount Lafayette

Twice a year my phone will ring in the middle of the night. Usually it’s winter and I’m very warm and cozy sleeping next to my girlfriend. I’ll roll over (inadvertently elbowing Janet in the process) and try to pretend that the phone isn’t ringing before finally relenting and answering the damn thing.

It’s Rick or Maury, two of my bosses at IMCS, the local climbing school in North Conway. “Fred, what are you doing?” they’ll ask. And this is an entirely redundant question because they know goddamn well what I’m doing at 11.45 on winter evening.

“Can you go on a rescue?” I sigh and close my eyes and watch as whatever I had planned for the next day flashes before me, and then I say, “Sure…. What time do you want me?”

Everybody likes to think of them self as a hero. It doesn’t take much effort for any of us to close our eyes and picture the scenario – a nasty fall, helpless rope team, and you-know-who in just the right place at just the right time to come selflessly swinging to the aid of their brother climbers. Unfortunately, organized rescues rarely follow this perfectly scripted plot.  For starters, rescues are rarely dramatic — once the call goes out, chances are the drama’s already happened. And rescues are slow. Ever carry litter down a talus slope?

Then there’s the fact that organized rescues have to be, well, organized.  And that mean you have to take orders for someone. If it’s a search, there’s a good chance you’ll spend six or twelve or eighteen hours walking around in the woods calling some stranger’s name at the top of your lungs and never come close to finding him or her. 

The truth is, I find rescues to be tedious and stressful, vaguely ego-deflating and overwhelmingly boring, all at the same time. What they really remind me of is going to a high shool dance. So this January, when my phone rang in the middle of the night, I had to take a moment before responding. And in that split second pause before I committed myself to another day of alpine tedium, Maury, with the verbal acumen of a used car salesman, made his pitch. 

“You’ll get to ride in a helicopter”, he said. 

“So what happened to this guy, anyways?” The speedometer on Bayard’s Elantra pushed passed sixty as we crested Crawford Notch and blasted towards Interstate 93. We were running a few minutes late, and who wants to be late for a helicopter ride? The guy in question was actually named Brian.  He was a college student in nearby Plymouth who’d gone for a winter hike with a few friends up Mount Lafayette in Franconia Notch that Saturday. A stong weather system was moving to the west of New Hampshire, and producing some very sporty conditions. As they moved up the mountain the winds only increased. Brian’s friends turned back, but Brian, with the wind at his back, decided to keep going and try to tag the summit. By this time, the Mount Washington Observatory was recording gusts of over 100 miles an hour.   Brian’s friends waited, but he never showed at the parking lot.