Finally, Chief Mountaineering Ranger Roger Robinson made the difficult decision to send up a team of expert climbers to bring the patient down to Dr. Howard Donner at Fourteen Medical. And if the weather cleared, a Chinook helicopter would fly in to rescue the climber from the mountain and take him to a hospital in Anchorage. They climbed up to 17,200 feet in record time, packed the patient into a litter, and painstakingly lowered him along Denali's West Buttress ridgeline between 16,000 and 17,000 feet to the fixed ropes at the top of the Headwall. By the time they reached camp, the rescue had taken on a momentum of its own, as climbers from all over camp joined in the march across the high plateau to where the National Park Service tents stand as the boundary. Donner was in his medical tent readying intravenous fluids, while Ranger Robinson was communicating with the Army Chinook, hoping the clouds would lift for a brief moment to allow them clearance to fly into camp and land.
Rescuers carry the patient to the waiting helicopter.
If the Chinook were to land, there would be only a brief window of opportunity before the clouds closed back in. The patient was in stable condition, but he needed to get off the mountain to get closer medical attention to the possible fractures to his ribs. We heard the Chinook minutes before we could see it, framed in a bank of light clouds as snow fell. It's a massive helicopter, and as it approached it filled the sky with its insect-like shape. We had built a landing zone made of bright red body bags to provide visual guidance to the pilot attempting to land in a sea of white.