VERLOT — They savored the sunset atop Mount Pilchuck after a day on the snow fields.
Little did they realize, their day’s adventure was just beginning.
Beau Ramsey detected alarm in the faces of the three hikers they encountered Saturday on the main trail. They explained how a member of their hiking party had slid roughly 50 feet into a tree well and broken his leg. They’d left him with a coat and other clothes as well as a flashlight before making their way into cellphone range to call 911.
The trio wasn’t dressed for a night on the mountain.
Ramsey and his girlfriend, AnneCherise “Annie” Jensen, were better equipped.
“It would have been a big risk to have one of them stay and wait four hours at night with the injured hiker,” Ramsey said. “It would have been heroic, but it was a better choice for us to go up.”
So that’s what they did.
With head lamps shining bright, they trekked back up the mountain to the 4,800-foot mark.
At times, Ramsey wondered if they would find the man they’d never met. Winds of 10 to 15 mph muffled his calls for help until they drew close enough to hear faint cries. Jensen spotted the injured hiker’s flashlight beam first.
The Marysville couple reached him around 8:30 p.m. The Everett man, 59, was pinned against a tree awkwardly and upright in the snowy hollow. Although he’d come prepared for outdoor conditions, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t brush off the snow that touched his exposed ankles and calves. His boots were buried in the snow.
It appeared that he had a bad break to his upper right leg and was in the early stages of hypothermia. He was wet and his body shook.
Ramsey and Jensen spent about an hour digging him out and moving him a foot or two to a bench they’d carved in the snow.
They wrapped him in a sleeping bag that they found nearby. Ramsey, 36, owner of Ramsey and Adams Construction, called it a miracle sleeping bag. It didn’t belong to him or Annie or any of the other hikers they had met. It just happened to be by that tree on that night.
They talked to the man, made him coffee and did their best to keep his body temperature up.
“He tried to be calm, but you could tell he was in a lot of pain,” Ramsey said.
Emergency dispatchers received cellphone calls from both the man’s hiking party and Ramsey and Jensen.
At Taylor’s Landing, a Snohomish County Search and Rescue helicopter crew assembled. Steve Klett and Travis Hots would share the pilot duties that night. Randy Fay served as crew chief with paramedic Tori McCormick and flight technician Richard Duncan. They launched at 10:32 p.m.
From their perch on the steep and slippery slope, Ramsey and Jensen remained in contact every half hour with the 911 dispatcher, trying to save the fading bars from the cellphone battery.
Klett had a good sense of where they’d find the injured man based on their description.
Through night-vision goggles, he spotted the party’s flashlight beams miles away.
Yet there was a problem. The sky was largely clear with the exception of a blanket of fog that moved above them.
For a half hour, the crew orbited. Finally there was a break in the cloudy mist and the medical team was lowered to the ground.
The medics figured it would take a half hour to assess the man’s condition, meet his immediate needs and get him into the litter and ready to move.
They gave him medicine to dull his pain.
Klett piloted the helicopter to a landing spot to save fuel and give them time.
Jensen and Ramsey took their cues, holding up the IV bag and helping when it was time to move the litter to a position where the patient and crew could be hoisted up.
When the helicopter hovered above, branches and pine needles blew about. Snow and ice pelted their faces, reducing their eyes to narrow slits. The roar of the helicopter made talking impossible.
And then it was quiet again.
Jensen and Ramsey looked at each other and wondered: What just happened?
They marveled at the precision and efficiency of the rescue crew before hiking down to the tree line. They hadn’t eaten and realized that they should.
They warmed their stomachs with beef stroganoff and looked up at the sky.
The northern lights were ribbons of splendor, brighter than Ramsey had ever seen.
“Just dancing bolts of green,” he said. “That night with your bare eyes, it was like the sky was alive. It was like it was in the woods with us.”
It felt almost spiritual.
“What a miracle that we were able to be in the right spot at the right time to help out someone in extreme need,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “God was for sure looking out for this hiker.”
Klett, one of the two search and rescue pilots, also was struck by the brightness of the northern lights and the important role the two hikers played in helping one of their own on a cold night on the mountain. The injured hiker reached the hospital shortly after midnight.
“It made a big difference to the patient in terms of the outcome,” he said. “I think it would have been quite a bit worse.”
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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