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The Incident at Sandrock

This weekend the boys and I made a trip up to Sandrock and had a little excitement. We were climbing down by Mud Wall when we heard multiple sirens up at the parking lot, but since we had not heard any commotion before that we didn't think much of it. Then we started hearing someone on a loud speaker talking, but we couldn't understand it, so we figured it was just someone with a cb and a loudspeaker on their truck. Then what finally clued us in to what was going on flew overhead.

A lifesaver helicopter. Now we new something was up, so we made a beeline for the parking lot only to find, that the voices we heard on the loudspeaker were emergency personel telling everyone to move their cars because they were preparing to land a helicopter. It seems what happened was that the night before (friday night) some guy and his buddy's were drinking up there–which is a pretty popular thing to do at Sandrock–and either this guy told his friends that he was going to go sleep somewhere, or just tried to jump one of the cravasses that are just passed the campsites and didn't make it. He then wasn't found until around noon the next day. He had a pretty serious head injury and some other smaller injuries. Lucky guy. Sad thing is that his friends didn't even care that he wasn't around and had not been around since the previous night. There is some posting going on about it on the SCC message board with some first hand accounts from those that found him that you can view here.

The sad thing about incidents such as these is that he will probably be called a "climber" just because he was at sandrock, even though he wasn't climbing. It's too bad that we get lumped in with those people. I would be interested to know how many "climbing" incidents are actually involve climbers, especially at a place like sandrock. One thing that can be said is that, even though he wasn't a climber, plenty of climbers and other vistors volunteered to help pull him out of the crevasse. I have posted some pictures of the effort here.